The critical reputation of Mark Ellis’ Frank Merlin novels has been growing so strongly that I leaped at the chance to review the sixth in the series so far, Death of an Officer. What I was confronted with was a gripping police procedural involving the solving of two apparently unrelated murders: that of a respected gynaecologist battered to death with a statue in his bedroom and that of a stranger beaten to death and dumped on a bomb-site.
Police procedural stories on page and screen are ten a penny. What makes Death of an Officer stand head and shoulders above the vast majority of them? The setting, clearly. Mark Ellis presents us with an immaculately constructed England (mostly London) in the post-Blitz era, with its black-outs, rationing and scarcity of petrol. The perfect noir background. The rebuilding of the city has not yet begun – there are still bomb-sites convenient for the concealment of corpses. But society is not in a similar state of destruction. There are parties of all sorts still available to those with the money. We may be pre-Windrush as we are post-Blitz but the wider Empire is represented, in this case by Dr Dev Sinha whose battered body provides the initial case.
The men and women tasked with solving these puzzles are all part of the Scotland Yard team led by Detective Chief Inspector Frank Merlin. As with the setting, Mark Ellis presents us with a meticulously researched and absolutely convincing command structure. Merlin answers to Assistant Commissioner Gatehouse who himself answers to the Deputy Commissioner who is in the pocket of Merlin’s chief rival: an intriguing spice of Police corruption. The tension within this structure adds to the suspense generated when the investigations lead via the upper echelons of English and Scottish society to London’s lethal underworld where rival gangs generate every vice and escalating violence.
Merlin himself is brilliantly drawn, absolutely convincing as a character of his time and situation.
He is also a likeable protagonist who engages our sympathy and interest right from the start. Recently remarried and the father of a young son, he struggles to balance home life with professional requirements, aided only by the neatly observed fact that everything tends to close down at the weekend. A potent element of classic thriller business is added by Merlin’s gun-totin’ American friend working at the London U.S. Embassy, whose involvement becomes more vital when the corpse on the bomb site turns out to be Major Andrew Corrigan, a highly regarded American officer.
As the steady and relentless Merlin leads his team looking into the two murders, absolutely nothing to begin with could possibly link an Indian doctor whose one vice seems to be bridge and an American officer who has caught the eye of General Eisenhower himself. But as the investigation into each death widens, so other less reputable characters appear – the owner of a scrapyard who has threatened Dr Sinha, accusing him of inappropriate behaviour with his daughter; the highly unsuitable circles Corrigan appears to have moved in.
And, at last, after almost unbearable tension and unexpected explosions of violence, the link appears – despite their reputation and standing, both had much that they wished at all costs to keep hidden.
Death of an Officer is a pitch-perfect example of a police procedural with gripping noir overtones. If Mark Ellis had not already established himself as one of our most outstanding practitioners of the art, this outstanding novel would certainly have cemented his enviable reputation.

Death of an Officer is published by Headline.