Adam Dalgliesh is the son of a Norfolk parson, a poet and unlikely policeman. He was already a Commander in 1977, his fictional career having skipped low-level crime to allow him to emerge as a fully-formed figure of authority, handpicked for the sensitive homicide case where discretion was vital. They stay alive in the imagination as someone we would like to meet again because they are intrinsically curious and honourable – qualities which are ultimately more interesting than villainy. They are the voice of our conscience, because they are always aspiring to justice, even when doubting it. Like all heroes, particularly investigators, they have to infuriate. They have to be insistent followers of red herrings; they have to be foolish as well as wise, and have sufficient weaknesses to make them credible while remaining consistent.
How to make a character emerge again and again in a crucial role without boring the reader to death is an enormous challenge, which many authors in the genre fail. So how do these two Queens of Crime keep their awkward heroes fresh?Judging from their new novels, there is one, crucial secret.

Both authors like their central men, and remain vividly interested in them, which is infectious all by itself. They continue to write about them as if they had only just met them in a new reunion on the page.Another secret to the characters’ longevity is that, however mistaken they have been, neither loses dignity, although they risk it all the time. The later half of the 20th century, and the present day, favours nobility with flaws. We no longer wish to venerate without having something to criticise The virtues of the crime-solving hero must reflect the era. He need not be fashionable, but he cannot be laughable and lasting. Which is why the achievements of P D James and Ruth Rendell are so extraordinary.

Where the hero is also a policeman, his heroic qualifications can only be those his current generation accept. It ends with a hallucinatory journey towards Cork city, along roads thronged with famine victims. It’s a nightmare scenario, vividly imagined.Birch shows a singular grasp of the strangeness of the past, along with its ordinariness. Holding the two in a kind of equilibrium is one of the novel’s strongest achievements. With the 20th-century story, a wheel comes full circle, and a tardy resolution is effected. Only a couple of infelicities mar this book: a girl child would not be called a “gossun”, which comes from the Irish for a young boy; and Eliza, in the throes of a fever, would not have snatches of “The Gartan Mother’s Lullaby” running through her head.

This song was written by Joseph Campbell, who was not born until 1879.With its imaginative density and elegance of style, The Naming of Eliza Quinn is a polished and engrossing novel about the power of the past. That past leaves a residue of provocations, “like the marks of the famine coming through the landscape”.Patricia Craig’s biography of Brian Moore is published by Bloomsbury. The narrative then slips back in time: to 1900 first of all, and then further, to the years of potato-crop failure and consequent devastation, and to the origins of bad blood between two families, the Veseys – Beatrice’s ancestors – and the Quinns.
In 1900, Beatrice’s Granma Lizzie makes an appearance as a self-willed and flirtatious girl of 17, whose father’s embargo on the man of her choice has repercussions. We are reminded of the power of folk beliefs in localities only imperfectly imbued with a spirit of Catholicism. As Eliza goes about her alleviating business, forces are massing beyond anyone’s control, with which small local hostilities and resentments get intertwined.Eliza’s story unfolds through the worst years of the famine, when fever finished off a good many who survived the ravages of hunger.