Gideon's Fire
by J. J. Marric
Summary
Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard runs the CID the way a harbourmaster runs a port: everything moves through him, nothing waits politely for anything else, and Marric's novels, of which this is the seventh, invented the rhythm that police procedurals have used ever since, the desk as the centre of a dozen simultaneous cases that take turns at the reader's attention.
The fire of the title is the anchor case: an arsonist is burning South London tenements, and the book opens with a constable watching a fourth floor window bloom into flame, a family dying inside, and Gideon absorbing the arithmetic that makes arson the CID's most hated crime, the murderer who does not choose his victims. The hunt for the firebug, escalating block by block, runs beside the week's other traffic: a fraud unravelling, a murderer of women working the suburbs, internal Yard politics, a subordinate's crisis handled with Gideon's particular blunt decency, and, at home, a teenage son's girlfriend pregnant and two families negotiating the aftermath, because Marric's innovation was to keep the copper attached to his kitchen.
The pleasure is administrative: watching a competent, tired, honest man allocate attention, delegate, misjudge, correct, and hold the whole grid steady, London itself as the patient, and the arson case closing with the particular grimness of a crime whose motive turns out smaller than its victims.
Around two hundred and twenty pages.
Best for readers who want the police procedural at its point of origin, the multi case week that CID novels and cop shows have been running on credit ever since.
Historical Context & Significance
Gideon's Fire won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1962, and the byline was a small joke on the prize: J. J. Marric was John Creasey, among the most prolific crime writers who ever lived, some six hundred books under twenty eight names, and the Marric identity was where he did his most respected work, the Gideon series inventing much of the modern procedural's furniture, the multi strand caseload above all, and feeding directly into television and the genre's police turn.
Creasey was also the field's great institution builder: founder of Britain's Crime Writers' Association, whose dagger for debut novels is awarded in his memory, and an energetic transatlantic ambassador; the Edgar was the American establishment saluting all of it through one book.
Creasey was writing the Gideon novels up to his death in 1973, and they continued after it, and George Gideon, filmed by John Ford and serialised on British television, stands with Maigret among the durable commanders of the form.