Cop Shows

For me it all started with Dixon of Dock Green. I love cop shows. Z Cars, Inspector Frost, my special favourite Morse. I have watched Morse until I can recite pieces of it, a dubious talent, I realize. When I am having a bad day I reread the Rebus books. Now I have discovered a new talent, well, new to me.Mari Hannah. Boy, can this writer plot. The fun for me is that it's set in the North East of England and I am so prejudiced about the place but I don't think it would matter to anybody who loves crime stories.
Half the fun for me reading this kind of thing is that the whole thing is as mysterious to me as a film. I could never write crime.
The cops in these shows are always Mavericks and we love a Maverick best of all. The kind of person who doesn't fit in, or is smarter than the rest. I still love Rebus best with his faults and his failings but I love Frost, I'm reading Frost at Christmas and there he is the scruffy little man and all the characters I knew first from television and I haven't read any of the other Frost books yet. Oh joy.  Also Wycliffe, which again I watched on television first and I loved those but I can relive them again.
I suppose in a way all stories are cop stories, the goodies and the baddies, the goodies winning usually in some unobvious way and the baddies getting their deserts and a whole load of wonderful characters we want to see again and again so thank you, Helen, my friend who lives in Consett for mentioning Mari Hannah to me. For the first time I'm in on the ground floor here because she doesn't seem to have a huge backlist. Usually I am at least fifteen years later than everybody else in getting to these things. I'll be able to lie on my sofa and listen to the rain pattering on to the patio and go off into a world where Kate Daniels is looking out for us here in the north. Happy days.