Nicholas Rhea is one of six pseudonyms under which British author Peter Walker has written 130 books in the last 40 years. He started his career in law enforcement in 1956 when he joined the North Yorkshire force as a beat bobby in Whitby. Three years later he moved to the region's Police Headquarters at Northallerton before being posted to Oswaldkirk, became an instructor at the police training school in 1967, and was eventually promoted to sergeant, inspector, and finally Press and Public Relations Officer.
He began to write seriously after his first short story was published in the Police Review and most of his novels are, not surprisingly, police procedurals of one kind or another. He says he wrote 13 rejected manuscripts before he hit his first success, Carnaby and the Hijackers, soon followed by the humorous Constable series (35 in all), featuring Constable Nick, who starts out as a newcomer to the village of Aidensfield in his first outing, Constable on the Hill. Nick became the basis for Heartbeat, a long-running TV series produced originally in the UK by Yorkshire Television, and later ITV, with 350 episodes from 1992 until the show was canceled in September of 2010.
The second novel in the series, 1980's Constable on the Prowl, was reissued in a Black Dagger edition and chosen by Accent Press to launch their series of Heartbeat editions of the early Constable titles. The book takes place almost entirely on night duty, not the Constable's favorite part of the job. It follows along as Nick gets to know his colleagues PC Alf Ventress and Sergeant Blaketon better and responds to various incidents, from poaching to burglary, and the occasional puzzler like Claude Jeremiah Greengrass, seen escaping down a ladder from a lady's bedroom sans trousers and shirt who also pleads innocent to poaching a deer, despite being seen emerging from the forest carrying a set of antlers.
The characterizations take front stage over plot, such as Nick's initial observations of the huge, grizzle-haired constable Alf Ventress, whose
uneventful career had not given him reason to be polite or smart, and his uniform was never tidy. It always needed pressing, his boots were for ever in need of a polish, while his shoulders and upper tunic were constantly covered with a combination of dandruff and cigarette ash. He chain smoked when he was not eating and the other lads tended to leave him alone. It was not policy to interrupt him, because he had something of a reputation for being short-tempered. No one had actually seen him angry, but it was the way he looked at trouble-makers through heavy eyebrows - it made them shrivel with anticipation of a display of anger, yet he never erupted. For all these reasons he was nicknamed Vesuvius, the name arising from the fact that he was always covered in ash and likely to erupt at any time.
Author Rhea/Walker's philosolphy behind the books is fairly simple, too: "They're written in the first person, so they look like they're real stories. I was determined not to have a glamorous detective solving crimes. I wanted an ordinary copper on the beat - PC Nick Rhea - coping with whatever life threw at him." Not only are they written in first person, but Walker used the Constable's name (Nick Rhea) as the author, meaning they read like story-grade police reports, an interesting concept, making you wonder how much of his adventures are imagined and how many are from Walker's own experiences.
Note that today's FFB feature is being hosted by Richard Robinson over at the Broken Bullhorn. Patti Abbott will return next week.
Comments