Ryan Wilkins

THE DANGEROUS STRANGER . . . Between the covers

This is the latest outing for British CriFi’s most unlikely partnership – Wilkins and Wilkins. Detective Inspector Ryan, of that kin is scruffy and, to be blunt, dresses and talks like a chav (remember them?) His partner Ray is Nigerian – London, handsome, public school educated, urbane and, before he was paired with Ryan, a rising star of Thames Valley police. They are based on Oxford. The book begins, however, in London, where an ageing criminal, known, as Dogs, is hunted down by a violent former associate called Head Hunter, and forced to take on another job.

An emergency call sends the Ws out to a budget hotel, now housing asylum seekers. An angry mob of locals, incensed by the recent murder of a local girl by an apparent immigrant, is laying siege to the property and, amid the chaos, a young African man is murdered while trying to escape the hotel. What this has to do with the events in London remains to be seen. To add to the already fraught relationship between Ryan and Ray, the Superintendent attaches a young Detective Constable, William Huber to the Ws team. He is unlikely to gel with Ryan, as William is a ‘posh boy’, enthusiastic, earnest and plummy of voice. The Ws have home lives that seem different, but neither resembles any kind of utopia. Ray is, as they say, ‘happily’ married, but life with wife Diane and their twin sons is frequently fractious. She is a professional woman, and is determined that Ray do more than his hair share of parenting, in spite of his unpredictable working hours. Ryan lives alone in a seedy rented flat, while his four year old son is brought up by his sister. He tries to be a good dad but, again, his job and what it sucks out of him, make him an imperfect father.

As the case progresses, it transpires that the man killed in the hotel protest may have been a wealthy and well connected French citizen but, clearly some things simply do not add up. The case takes a grim turn when a twelve year-old boy who attended the riot with his father is found to have concealed a knife and an empty canister under his bed. Hidden with them is his mobile ‘phone, on which is a video of the burning man. The two big questions are: what was the Frenchman doing in the asylum hotel, and what became of the migrant for whom he was mistaken? Further grit is thrown into than less than well-oiled mechanism of the investigative team by the arrival of a prominent French police officer to “help” with enquiries. As the story progresses, Simon Mason leaks clues into the narrative, a drop or two at a team, as to the connection between Oxford and the world of Dogs and Head Hunter.

Mason endows Dogs with a noirish quality as if he had just walked in from the streets of one of Derek Raymond’s ‘Factory’ novels.

“Really, he was only happy in London. Old Rotherhithe, those shabby, mean places of his youth.He was shabby and mean himself and always would be, thank God. All his life he’d lived in the weeds; he resented it and loved it, they were his weeds. It was the way he was made.”

Ray has his demons, but on Ryan’s back is the terrifying specter of his abusive father, now a broken man in an ex-offender’s institution.

“He thought of the person his father had become, a pathetic figure, shrunk and feeble, sick-looking, an animal that needs putting down.But buried very deep in Ryan, like a disgusting secret, was something he didn’t understand and couldn’t bear to think about: he was still frightened of this person.”

The joy of crime fiction is that its best writers make us believe in the improbable. Mason presents us with Ryan Wilkins, in his scuffed trainers and awful trackies, forever twitching with facial tics caused by God knows what family history. He is off the social scale in terms of lifestyle. His clapped-out Peugeot is always on the cusp of breakdown, and how he maintains the trust of his little son is little short of miraculous. And yet, and yet. He has instincts and insights that his more ‘civilised’ partner Ray can only dream of. I don’t want this series to end but, going forward, could Ryan ever mature into a seasoned institutional copper. What would he be like aged 50? Thankfully, that is a conundrum to which I will not have to provide a solution. The Dangerous Stranger is an absolute peach of a crime novel, and will be be published by Quercus on 12th February.

For my thoughts on previous Ryan Wilkins mysteries, click this link.

March 10, 2026 0

LOST AND NEVER FOUND . . . Between the covers

If the tags “Oxford”, “Murder” and “Detective” have you salivating about the prospect of real ale in ancient pubs, choirs rehearsing madrigals in college chapels, and the sleuth nursing a glass of single malt while he listens to Mozart on his stereo system, then you should look away now. Simon Mason (left) brings us an Oxford that is very real, and very now. The homeless shiver on their cardboard sleeping mats in deserted graveyards, and the most startling contrast is the sight of Range Rovers and high-end Volvos cruising into car washes manned by numerous illegal immigrants from God-knows-where, all controlled by criminals, probably embedded within the Albanian mafia.

Against this background, meet Detective Inspector Ryan Wilkins, and his partner DI Ray Wilkins (no relation to Ryan or the late footballer). Ray is from a wealthy Nigerian family, happily married, photogenic and a rising star in the police hierarchy, while Ryan is – to put it bluntly – what some people might call a Chav. His idea of workwear is silver shell-suit bottoms, baseball cap and knock-off Nike hoodie. He is working hard to revive his career after being suspended. His former girlfriend died of a drug overdose, while his son – Ryan junior, – is largely looked after by Wilkins’s sister.

I missed the first novel in the series, but enjoyed the second, The Broken Afternoon, which I reviewed in December last year. Now the unlikely partners are faced with a new mystery. A formerly wealthy heiress, who has frittered away most of her privilege on drugs and a hedonistic lifestyle, has gone missing. Her Rolls Royce is found abandoned after colliding with the gates of the station car park. The tabloids, who have a huge library of back copy on Zoey Fanshawe, sniff a sensation, and they are not wrong. When Ryan finds her body, brutally strangled in an empty Oxford property owned by her former husband, the world and his wife are leaning on him to find the killer.

The concept underpinning this series is the contrast between Ray and Ryan, and that Ryan – the anarchic slob – is the one with the real detective’s brain. He is also unlucky in love. His current girlfriend, ostensibly a flourishing florist, has a dark past. We meet an officer who seems to be everyone’s favourite copper, the charismatic Assistant Chief Constable, Chester Lynch. There isn’t a contemporary box she doesn’t tick. Female?√ Black?√ Media friendly?√ Wears leather and designer shades?√ So far, her career trajectory has not been impeded by awkward bastards like Ryan Wilkins, who has a habit of asking difficult questions. This is all about to change.

While Ray seems mesmerised by Lynch (who has just offered him a serious promotion) Ryan is immune to the hype, and suspects she is a player in the murky back-story of the late Zoe Fanshawe. The plot of Lost and Never Found is beautifully crafted, and the description of the underbelly of Oxford life – the homeless camping in the graveyards of its ancient churches, and the women plying their trade in the derelict garages of its bleak outer suburbs – is a salutary contrast to the “Dreaming Spires” trope. Another part of the spell that Simon Mason casts is the difference between what Ray and Ryan face when they go home at night. Ray is met by his eminently sensible and forbearing wife Diane, while Ryan faces only the wrath of his sister, and the fact that Ryan junior has fallen asleep yet again without a bed-time story from his dad. This book will be published by Riverrun on 18th January.

January 12, 2024 0

In Simon Mason’s A Killing In November we met Oxford DI Ryan Wilkins, and the book ended with his dismissal from the force for disciplinary reasons. In this book he is still in Oxford, but working as a security guard/general dogsbody at a van hire firm. His former partner, also named Wilkins, but Ray of that ilk, is now heading up the team that was once Ryan’s responsibility, and it is they who are tasked with investigating the abduction of a little girl from her nursery school.

Ryan and Ray are very different. Ryan is a single dad with a little boy, and somewhat rough round the edges. He was brought up on a caravan site and he is no matinee idol:

“He looked at himself in the mirror. Narrow face, grease-smear of scar tissue, big bony nose, all as familiar to him as his own smell.”

As a copper he was unorthodox, irreverent to his superiors, but with a real nose for the mean streets and those who walk them. Ray Wilkins is university educated – Balliol, no less – a smooth dresser, good looking and at ease in press conferences; his partner Diane is pregnant with twins.

The search for four year-old Poppy Clarke is urgent, driven as much by the clamours of the media as the tearful anguish of Poppy’s mother. Ray is painfully aware of the adage about “the first forty eight hours”, but clues are scant, and he has exhausted the other convention of “close family member”

Ryan, meanwhile, has a mystery of his own to solve. Investigating a suspicious noise in the compound at Van Central, he discovers a man he had last heard of doing five years for burglary in HMP Grendon. Mick Dick is big, black, and sometimes violent, but he is down on his luck, and was trying to get into a transit van just to find somewhere to sleep out of the pouring rain. Ryan sends him on his way. The next day Ryan hears on the local news that there has been a hit and run case near North Hinksey where a body has been found at the side of the road. It is that of Michael Dick.

When the body of Poppy Clarke is found in a shallow grave in nearby woodland, the nature of the investigation changes. The urgency is replaced by a grim determination to find the killer. Time is now removed from the equation. Ryan has been doing his own nosing about into the death of Mick Dick, and finds he had been in contact with another former prison inmate called Sean Cobb. Cobb, however, is a very different kind of criminal from Mick Dick, and when Ryan tells Ray, Cobb becomes very definitely a person of interest in the hunt for Poppy Clarke’s killer. Ryan has also received a ‘phone call from his former boss, DCI Wallace, offering Ryan a carrot in the shape of a possible reinstatement.

We also meet Tom Fothergill, the millionaire boss of a company that produces high end pushchairs and prams. As part of his charitable work, he has helped ex-cons like Dick and Cobb, but how is he involved in the abduction and death of Poppy Clark?

One of the promotional blurbs for this novel declares:

“Mason has reformulated Inspector Morse for the 2020s”

I am sorry, but that is not how I see this book. Yes, it is set in and around Oxford, but apart from The Broken Afternoon being every bit as good a read as, say, The Silence of Nicholas Quinn or The Remorseful Day, that’s where the resemblance ends. Mason’s book, while perhaps not being Noir in a Derek Raymond or Ted Lewis way, is full of dark undertones, bleak litter strewn public spaces, and the very real capacity for the police to get things badly, badly wrong. Simon Mason (right) has created coppers who certainly don’t spend melancholy evenings gazing into pints of real ale and then sit home alone listening to Mozart while sipping a decent single malt.

The killer of Poppy Clark is eventually ‘unmasked’, but perhaps that cliche is inappropriate, as he has been hiding in plain sight all along. The more squeamish male readers may want to skip the section towards the end set in the hospital maternity unit. It is superbly written, but graphic: I went through that experience with three of my four sons, but on the fourth occasion the ‘phone call came too late – or perhaps I drove to the hospital too slowly.

This is a very, very good book and, while Wilkins and Wilkins are chalk and cheese to Morse and Lewis, I can recommend The Broken Afternoon to anyone who enjoys a good atmospheric and convincing English police procedural. It is published by Riverrun/Quercus and will be out in all formats on 2nd February 2023.