Jack's Return Home by Ted Lewis (Michael Joseph Books 1970)

Thursday

The rain rained.

It hadn't stopped since King's Cross. Inside the train it was close, the kind of closeness that makes your fingernails dirty even when all you're doing is sitting there looking out of the blurring windows. Watching the dirty backs of houses scudding along under the half-light clouds. Just sitting and looking and not even fidgeting.

I was the only one in the compartment. My slip-ons were off. My feet were up. Penthouse was dead. I'd killed the Standard twice. I had three nails left. Doncaster was forty minutes off.

“I looked along the black mohair to my socks. I flexed a toe. The toenail made a sharp ridge in the wool. I'd have to cut them when I got in. I might be doing a lot of footwork over the weekend.

I wondered if I'd have time to get some fags from the buffet at Doncaster before my connexion left.

If it was open at five to five on a Thursday after“noon in mid-October.

I lit up anyway.

It was funny that Frank never smoked. Most barmen do. In between doing things. Even one drag to make it seem as if they're having a break. But Frank never touched them. Not even a Woody just to see what it was like when we were kids down Jackson Street. He'd never wanted to know.

He didn't drink scotch either.

I picked up the flask from off the Standard and unscrewed the cap and took a pull. The train rocked and a bit of scotch went on my shirt, a biggish spot, just below the collar.

But not as much as had been down the front of the shirt Frank had been wearing when they'd found him. Not nearly so much.

They hadn't even bothered to be careful; they hadn't even bothered to be clever.

The Man Who Lost His Wife by Julian Symons (Penguin Crime 1970)

'Think it's a bore,' Bunce repeated, and laughed in what might have been a meaningful manner. He turned to the sports page in the paper, as though reading an account of the previous day's play would provide some final answer to his questions. Gilbert closed his eyes and saw the cheek he had kissed at parting, wonderfully smooth. Why had she not kissed him on the mouth, did she now find him repulsive? Such ideas were alien to him. He was startled when Bunce said emphatically, 'Sex.'

One of the batsmen had been bowled, his middle stump knocked out of the ground. 'What?'

'That's why you get a kick from it.' He tapped the paper. 'You use the ball, see, and you try to get rid of the stump. See what it says here, Herman uprooted the middle stump and that's what just happened now, right?

'Yes, but -'

'Boy, that bowler's uprooted his middle stump all right, it's a castration symbol, see? And those pads the batter wears, he's protecting his stump with them. He wants to hit that ball, get the damn' thing away from him to the boundary, the limit. Get that ball away, he's saying, I don't want it near my stump. You read what Melanie Klein says about bat and ball games?'

'I can't say I have.'

'They symbolize a fear of sex, keep it hidden, that's the thing, destroy it if you can. And the white clothes, what do they mean but purity? It's a hell of a funny game.' The players went into the pavilion. 'That's it then, glad to have seen it.'

'They'' be coming out again. This is the tea interval.'

'I guess I've seen enough.' With cricket satisfactorily explained Bunce rose to his feet.

Murder at the Savoy by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Harper Perennial 1970)

Lennart Kollberg didn't know which way to turn.

The job he'd been assigned seemed both repugnant and pointless. It never occurred to him, however, that it would turn out to be complicated.

He would call on a couple of people, talk to them, and that's all there would be to it

A little before ten o'clock he left the South police station in Västberga, where all was quiet and peaceful, largely because of the shortage of personnel There was no shortage of work, however, for all varieties of crime flourished better than ever in the fertile topsoil provided by the welfare state.

The reasons for this were cloaked in mystery - at least for those who had the responsibility of governing and for the experts who had the delicate task of trying to make the society function smoothly.

Behind its spectacular topographical facade and under its polished, semi-fashionable surface, Stockholm had become an asphalt jungle, where drug addiction and sexual perversion ran more rampant than ever. Unscrupulous profiteers could make enormous profits quite legally on pornography of the sleaziest kind. Professional criminals became not only more numerous but also better organized. An impoverished proletariat was also being created, especially among the elderly. Inflation had given rise to one of the highest costs of living in the world, and the latest surveys showed that many pensioners had to live on dog and cat food in order to make ends meet.

The fact that juvenile delinquency and alcoholism (which had always been a problem) continued to increase surprised no one but those with responsible positions in the Civil Service and at Cabinet level.

A Clubbable Woman by Reginald Hill (Collins Crime Club 1970)

Superintendent Andrew Dalziel was a big man. When he took his jacket off and dropped it over the back of a chair it was like a Bedouin pitching camp. He had a big head, greying now; big eyes, short-sighted, but losing nothing of their penetrating force behind a pair of solidframed spectacles; and he blew his big nose into a khaki handkerchief a foot-and-a-half square. He had been a vicious lock forward in his time, which had been a time before speed and dexterity were placed higher in the list of a pack's qualities than sheer indestructibility. The same order of priorities had brought him to his present office. He was a man not difficult to mock. But it was dangerous sport. And perhaps therefore all the more tempting to a Detective-Sergeant who was twenty years younger, had a degree in social sciences and read works of criminology.

Dalziel sank over his chair and scratched himself vigorously between the legs. Not absent-mindedly - nothing he did was mannerism - but with conscious sensuousness. Like scratching a dog to keep it happy, a constable had once said within range of Dalziel's very sharp hearing. He had liked the simile and therefore ignored it.