A Great Deliverance introduces the main character, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, eight Earl of Asherton no less, who has been paired off by his superiors with Barbara Havers, a bitter working-class sergeant who lives in Bayswater with her aging parents. No two people could have been more different than Lynley and Havers. To make matters worse, Havers is prejudiced against Lynley. However, they will have to work on their differences and progressively learn to respect each other and discover that their complementarities can work wonders in an investigation.

Along with Havers and Lynley, we learn to know other characters who gravitate around Lynley: his best friend, forensic scientist Simon Allcourt St-James, who just married Deborah Cotter, Lynley's ex-fiancée. Lynley is still in love with her and will have to juggle feelings of jealousy and regret with the demands of the ongoing investigation. Fortunately for him, Helen Clyde, his closest female friend, helps him through his sentimental miseries...

The case that the two Scotland Yard detectives have to solve imperatively (both of their positions are at stake) is the following: Father Hart, priest of a small Yorkshire parish, has discovered the beheaded body of William Teys, murdered along with his dog in his own barn. Roberta Teys, William's overweight daughter, was sitting next to the body in her best dress and is apparently traumatised, suffering from what the doctors will diagnose as "elective mutism".

Soon, Lynley and Havers will discover that all the people they meet seem to have something to hide. The web of mysteries and secrets they must untangle is thicker than they expected and they soon consider several suspects, including Richard, William's nephew, who is also the main beneficiary of his will. They will have to ask themselves many questions, like why Tessa, Roberta's mother, and Gillian, her sister, both ran off one after the other years ago and where are they now? Or who is the newborn who was found dead at the local abbey? And of greater concern to Lynley: why does he fancy seeing Deborah on the moor when she's supposed to be honeymooning in Venice? Could he be losing his mind?

A Great Deliverance got me hooked to the Lynley/ Havers mysteries. It is really the one to start with, if you want to follow the saga of the main protagonists. It has all the making of a mystery masterpiece: the English countryside desolate settings (an atmosphere recalling Wuthering Heights), the good whodunit (and here also a "whydunit") and a dozen of interesting characters. Unravelling the numerous threads of a story that keeps you guessing until the end is really a pleasure...

A Great Deliverance has been adapted for television by the BBC, in a production starring Nathaniel Parker and Sharon Small. The advantage of miniseries over films is that they can afford being faithful to the book they're adapted from. Three hours allow the development to be slow enough to reflect the novel with exactitude. I wouldn't have pictured the characters quite this way (this Havers is charming compared to the original!), but the actors do a good job impersonating them. The settings render the atmosphere perfectly.

Diana Rigg (Emma Peel from The Avengers) presents a very useful introduction; all the information she reveals about Elizabeth George and her writings can be gathered from George's web site. Rigg identifies George's mysteries as cozy mysteries, that she thus defines: a murder is taking place in a small community, a few suspects are involved and a hero-detective solves it all in the end. However, a rapid research taught me that cozies were primarily murder mysteries solved by old spinsters (Agatha Christie's Miss Marple's are cozies). I don't know how the definition became enlarged enough to encompass George's books but looking elsewhere on the web (mysteryguide.com) I noticed that A Great Deliverance was classified rather as a "Classic Whodunit". It is difficult sometimes to fit a novel into a genre, but when it comes to subgenres, it becomes quite impossible (really, authors exaggerate: they should stick to the limits of a genre and never cross borders ;)). I found interesting however to learn about the existence of cozies since I had no idea before how the mystery genre was itself subdivided....

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© Discussing Books, 10/10/2002