GONE TO GROUND by John Harvey

Heinemann, £12.99

YOU’VE MADE IT AS A CRIME writer when the jackets of your novels proclaim your name in huge colourful capitals, while the titles of the books lurk modestly below. John Harvey has now reached that status, but there remains a mystery. Why has it taken so long? I know of no other crime writer who writes so well, has attracted such unanimously positive reviews, and been so respected by his fellow writers – yet failed to become the household name and bestselling author that he deserved to be.

Harvey has now further proof of the esteem in which he’s held. The Crime Writers’ Association has given him its most coveted award, the Cartier Diamond Dagger, for “sustained excellence” in the genre. He is chuffed. “The really nice thing about it is that it isn’t based on one particular work,” he says. “It’s people who are aware of your work over a period of time. And when those people are other writers, it means a lot.”

Harvey spent 12 years as a teacher before turning to writing Westerns and pulp fiction, under pseudonyms. “I had this double life. I was making a living writing those kind of books, and at the same time I was writing poetry and I founded a small press, Slow Dancer.” His transition to superior crime novels came in his late forties. “In my early pulp days I wrote excruciatingly bad pseudo-Chandler mid-Atlantic novels. But it didn’t work for me. I thought, I can’t do this. Fortunately, at the time, there was a healthy market for Westerns. Then that dried up.”

Harvey returned to crime writing because of Elmore Leonard. “I had written a television series about the probation service, set and filmed in Nottingham, with several story-lines, a bit like Hill Street Blues, and I thought maybe I could write a crime novel like that. Round about that time I’d been reading Elmore Leonard books , and two things struck me – the delight you get as a reader, and the presumed delight that he has in writing them. You get a sense almost of joy from his characters. That’s what made me think, I’d like to try to do that, and somehow combine that use of dialogue and lightness of touch with the multi-strand police procedural. Elmore Leonard got me back into crime writing.”

The result was Charlie Resnick, a detective inspector in the Nottingham force, with Polish roots, a passion for jazz (shared by Harvey) and a muddled emotional life. All the right ingredients were present. Why, then, were sales rather disappointing? “The answer’s absolutely straightforward. My publishers. They didn’t spend a lot of money on marketing and didn’t push sales.” He stopped after ten Resnicks, as he’d always planned. Also: “I had moved away from Nottingham, and I didn’t feel at one with the place any more. To some extent the novels depended on my being there, hearing the voices, getting on the buses. I didn’t want to start being repetitive. And sales were not great.”

Things have changed. After a gap that included the birth of his daughter Molly, the first in the Frank Elder trilogy was published in 2004. “I wrote Flesh and Blood without a contract. It was a very conscious effort to do something a bit different, which a publisher would want to sell.” The strategy worked.

Elder, retired from the Notting-hamshire Police, lives an isolated existence in Cornwall, troubled by guilt and by his deep but difficult ties with his teenage daughter. Occasionally he’s persuaded back to help his former cronies crack an intransigent case. “With the Elder trilogy, my sales have quadrupled. It’s not that my novels have suddenly got better or that I’m writing more reader-friendly books. Partly, it’s that the Frank Elder novels are bigger and longer. Publishers want that. It’s also made a difference that the publishers can market them as thrillers, and not just police procedurals. Random House had a serious sales plan, a serious marketing plan; they’ve pushed the books hard, they’ve got them into the shops.”

The three Elder novels were, in terms of sales, public recognition and financial reward, the most successful of his writing career – which makes his decision to end the winning formula strange, and risky.

“The core of the novels is his relationship with his daughter. That is why I didn’t want to do another one. I’d taken it as far as I could. To go on with Elder would have become repetitive.” His latest novel, Gone to Ground, introduces two new characters, DI Will Grayson and DS Helen Walker. Their inquiries into the brutal killing of a homosexual academic lead them – and the victim’s interfering journalist sister – to a corrupt businessman and the making of an obscure film noir of the 1950s. It is typical Harvey: thoughtful, well written, full of believable characters and satisfying twists.

Then follows another one-off – with Charlie Resnick prominent – and a crime novel set in Soho in the Fifties and Sixties. “For me, it’s a good time to get the Diamond Dagger. It will act as a fillip, to make me try harder. You either rest on your laurels and wait for retirement to tap you on the shoulder, or you think: ‘Now what can I do?’ ”

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Peer plaudits

John Harvey is . . . one of the best.

- Michael Connelly

If he gets any better, the rest of us may have to kill him.

- Reginald Hill

Reading John Harvey is like settling under the wheel of a masterfully-engineered classic car . . . this is crime fiction at its best.

- George Pelecanos

Gripping and heartbreaking in equal measure.

- Mark Billingham

He reminds me of Graham Greene . . . clean and simple.

- Elmore Leonard

Much like Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke, John Harvey has far transcended his genre.

- Jim Harrison

A bloody good writer who understands clean, spare and beautiful prose.

- Mo Hayder

Mr Harvey creates characters of astonishing psychological diversity.

- The New York Times Review of Books

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