The Man Who Went Up in Smoke by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard 1966)

Martin Beck inspected his fellow passengers gloomily. His expedition had been a failure. There was nothing to indicate that Ari Boeck had not been telling the truth.

Inwardly he cursed the strange impulse that had made him take on this pointless assignment. The possibilities of his solving the case became more and more remote. He was alone and without an idea in his head. And if, on the other hand, he had had any ideas, he would have lacked resources to implement them.

The worst of it was that, deep down within himself, he knew that he had not been guided by any kind of impulse at all. It was just his policeman's soul—or whatever it might be called—that had started to function. It was the same instinct that made Kollberg sacrifice his time off—a kind of occupational disease that forced him to take on all assignments and do his best to solve them.

A Darker Domain by Val McDermid (2008)

It had been a few years since Karen had last taken the single-track road to Newton of Wemyss. But it was obvious that the hamlet had undergone the same transformation as its sister villages on the main road. Commuters had fallen ravenous upon all four of the Wemyss villages, seeing rustic possibilities in what had been grim little miners' rows. One-bedroom hovels had been knocked through to make lavish cottages, back yards transformed by conservatories that poured light into gloomy living-kitchens. Villages that had shrivelled and died following the Michael pit disaster in '67 and the closures that followed the 1984 strike had found a new incarnation as dormitories whose entire idea of community was a pub quiz night. In the village shops you could buy a scented candle but not a pint of milk. The only way you could tell there had ever been a mining community was the scale model of pit winding gear that straddled the point where the private steam railway had once crossed the main road laden with open trucks of coal bound for the railhead at Thornton Junction. Now, the whitewashed miners' rows looked like an architect's deliberate choice of what a vernacular village ought to look like. Their history had been overwhelmed by a designer present.

The Distant Echo by Val McDermid (St Martin's Minotaur 2003)

And they were off. Like wizards casting combative spells at each other, Sigmund and Davey threw song titles, lyrics and guitar riffs back and forth in the ritual dance of an argument they'd been having for the past six or seven years. It didn't matter that, these days, the music rattling the windows of their student rooms was more likely to come from the Clash, the Jam or the Skids. Even their nicknames spoke of their early passions. From the very first afternoon they'd congregated in Alex's bedroom after school to listen to his purchase of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, it had been inevitable that the charismatic Sigmund would be Ziggy, the leper messiah, for eternity. And the others would have to settle for being the Spiders. Alex became Gilly, in spite of his protestations that it was a jessie nickname for someone who aspired to the burly build of a rugby player. But there was no arguing with the accident of his surname. And none of them had a moment's doubt about the appropriateness of christening the fourth member of their quartet Weird. Because Tom Mackie was weird, make no mistake about it. The tallest in their year, his long gangling limbs even looked like a mutation, matching a personality that delighted in being perverse.

That left Davey, loyal to the cause of the Floyd, steadfastly refusing to accept any nickname from the Bowie canon. For a while, he'd been known halfheatedly as Pink, but from the first time they'd all heard "Shine on, You Crazy Diamond" there had been no further debate: Davey was a crazy diamond, right enough, flashing fire in unpredictable directions, edgy and uncomfortable out of the right setting. Diamond soon became Mondo, and Mondo Davey Kerr had remained through the remaining year of high school and on to university.