As a teenager hooked on crime fiction, I soon discovered the pleasures of the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. After following the career of Lord Peter Wimsey to its rather anti-climactic end in Gaudy Night, I sought out other authors whose books, like Sayers’, appeared in the famous yellow jackets of Victor Gollancz. Amongst them was W.J. Burley, whose debut novel, A Taste of Power, I borrowed from the library shortly after its publication. Those yellow jackets – like the late lamented logo of the Collins Crime Club – seemed to me to offer a promise of quality and I remember enjoying the first appearance of Henry Pym, zoologist and amateur sleuth.

After that, I lost sight of Burley’s work for a number of years, and it was not until the late 1980s that I returned to it. By then, he was a well-established novelist, whose books about Detective Superintendent Charles Wycliffe had achieved a considerable following. In the meantime I had discovered for myself the beauties of Cornwall and I relished Burley’s ability to evoke the county’s personality with obvious affection. A few years later, television discovered Wycliffe and I became a regular and enthusiastic viewer of the programmes.

For a few years Burley and I shared a publisher. This was at the time when the TV series had taken off and I recall finding, on a trip around the bookshops with the rep, that the buyers had stocked up with infinitely more copies of Burley’s latest paperback than of mine. I learned that I had something else in common with Burley, in that we both studied at Balliol College (as Lord Peter had). In a review of Balliol’s many crime writers, I touched on Burley’s criminal career, noting that ‘the Master of Balliol in Roger de Wimsey’s student days was John Wyclif. Historians now doubt the old legends that Wyclif was both the cause of the Peasants’ Revolt and the first person to translate the Bible into English. But perhaps his ghost might find some slight consolation in his giving his name to a telly detective.’

Burley was for a good many years a member of the Crime Writers Association, and yet he seems to have taken little or no part in its activities. In fact, I have never heard another crime writer mention being acquainted with him. Nor was he active in the wider ‘crime fiction community’, although I did attend a panel of which he was a member at London’s World Mystery Convention, the Bouchercon, in 1990 – without managing to get the chance to say hello. Unusually for a prolific writer with a career spanning more than thirty years, he appears to have had no interest in the short story form. He was a novelist, no more, no less, determined to refine his own craft in his own way. I suspect he was a self-contained man who scorned fashion and PR, and preferred to let his fiction speak for itself.

My impression is that he had a taste for order and method that even Hercule Poirot would have approved. He compiled ‘plot books’, mapping out his stories (and literally mapping out the locales in many cases). He not only noted in books that he collected for his personal library the date of acquisition, but added his signature. You can tell, perhaps, that he spent many years as a schoolteacher.

A conspicuous feature of his books is that most of them are quite short. The trend nowadays is for novels to become longer and longer – sometimes to the detriment of the story – but Burley seldom needed much more than 180 pages to tell his tale. His prose is characteristically taut, and the books display an economy of style reminiscent of Simenon, whom he much admired. Many readers will, I suspect, find it a relief to turn from weighty blockbusters to novels as concise as Burley’s.

Throughout his career, Burley remained mindful of his duty to entertain. Exuberant high spirits are on display in Henry Pym’s second outing, Death in Willow Pattern. Published six years after the Beatles had their first number one, this book is a worthy late flowering of the classical detective story, set in and around Peel Place, a stately home in Cornish mining country. Peel’s occupants are a wealthy family afflicted by ‘bad blood’ and there is also a streak of Oriental mystery which plays a part in the resolution of the plot. Pym enjoys a good relationship with the local cop, Superintendent Judd, and tests the patience of his long-suffering secretary Susan with teasingly enigmatic remarks in the Holmesian tradition.

Like many of Burley’s books, the story revolves around a tightly-knit collection of characters. He said in 1991 that he liked to explore ‘the tensions which arise within small groups of people who live or work together in close proximity – the family in a country house, the partners in a family business, the people living in a village street or town square.’ An air of claustrophobic menace distinguishes much of his work.

Burley followed a well-trodden path in beginning his career with an amateur detective, only to abandon Pym (to marriage to Susan, one surmises) for a policeman. There is a limit to the number of baffling murder cases with which a zoologist – however well-connected - can credibly become involved. And whilst Wycliffe, over time, encountered more than his fair share of murder mysteries, somehow it is easier to suspend disbelief where a professional cop is involved.

Like many novelists, though, Burley was not content to write only about his series character. Publishers prefer their authors to stick to the tried and tested – not least, because this is what most readers seem to want – although most writers find it difficult to resist the urge to vary their diet. Once can almost hear Livia Gollancz gritting her teeth as the cover of Charles and Elizabeth proclaimed that Burley ‘again proves his versatility – this time with a distinctly Gothic novel of suspense.’

Burley even went so far off-message as to write a science fiction novel, The Sixth Day. This title is hard to find – a dust-jacketed first edition in fine condition might be a good addition to a pension fund - and I have not read it. Whether or not author and publisher were satisfied with it, this venture into other realms had no successors.

Sensibly, Burley took the old adage about ‘writing what you know’ to heart. Cornwall and Devon, zoology, teaching – one stand-alone novel is simply entitled The Schoolteacher- are recurrent elements in his fictions. His Cornwall, in particular, is much more than the idyllic spot familiar from tourist brochures, and all the more to be relished for that. Often the topography is slightly skewed, so as to avoid the risk of accidental defamation – a sensible approach which in no way diminishes the loving portrayal of the area.

Burley described his aim with Wycliffe as having been this: ‘I wanted him to be diligent but compassionate, earnest but with a wry sense of humour, and sufficiently idiosyncratic to be interesting.’ In the TV series, Jack Shepherd, a fine actor, gave an idiosyncratic spin of his own to the character and helped to lift the series above routine Sunday-evening fare. As always, the TV episodes offered a different kind of satisfaction to the books, but I imagine that Burley was relatively content with the translation of his work to the small screen.

Undoubtedly, it is for the creation of Wycliffe that Burley will be remembered. But like many writers, he was acutely self-critical and evidently torn between the desire to keep his main series going and a yearning not to be strait-jacketed by the demands of formula. Writing in 1980, he said: ‘I have never felt very happy with my books – they seemed rather too derivative, following an established pattern.’ He plainly regarded Charles and Elizabeth as a fresh direction, but he later concentrated on Wycliffe, and with increasing commercial success.

In the course of preparing this appreciation, I have been glad of the chance to acquaint myself with some of his less familiar work. And I hope that anyone who enjoys Wycliffe will be tempted by this splendid web-site also to take time to seek out other books by this interesting and consistently under-estimated crime novelist.

© Martin Edwards

About Martin Edwards