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Loading... Gently Sinking (1969)by Alan Hunter
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  alanteder | Jun 30, 2023 |  no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesGeorge Gently (16)
When a dilapidated cargo ship sinks, killing the illegal immigrants packed in below decks, the man responsible goes free, but not for long. Two weeks later hi is found dead in bed with a knife in his back. Human trafficker Thomas Blackburn lived and died in the heart of London's West Indian community and, when the attitude of the local murder squad Chief Superintendent is deemed likely to aggravate race relations, George Gently is called in to oversee the case. But as tempers flare within the community, fuelling the fires of racial conflict, time is not on his side . . . No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction 1900- 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.63)
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Wikipedia in English
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Review of the Constable Kindle eBook edition (2012) of the Cassell Crime hardcover original (1969).
This one didn't leave much of an impression except for Gently treating the West Indian immigrant witnesses respectfully, in contrast to the racism of some of the other police authorities. I didn't catch any great descriptive passages or dialogue so am at a loss to post any interesting excerpts. The background had a depressing aspect as it involved the drowning of illegal immigrants from Jamaica who were put to sea in an unworthy vessel run by a gang of human traffickers. One of the traffickers is murdered in London and the suspects are plentiful as many local community members had relatives on board the doomed vessel. As usual Gently is called in to sort out a difficult case, and the centre of the investigation becomes a Calypso Club run by an influential family in the community.
The other item of note was the unfortunate original 1969 title of the book as Gentle Coloured, which has been changed in later reprints to Gently Sinking as if to make it a companion piece to the earlier boating related novel Gently Floating (Gently #11 - 1963). Even the Sinking title has an ugly association to it though, given the mass tragedy in the background.
See cover at https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/...
The dust cover of the unfortunately titled original UK hardcover published by Cassell Crime in 1969. Image sourced from Goodreads.
So this wasn't the most impressive Gently to my mind, but I still admire the series and author Alan Hunter for his attempts to refresh his styles and locales with each additional novel. I think his George Gently is quite as great a series detective as Simenon's Inspector Maigret, even if Simenon's 75 Maigret novels outdo Hunter's 46 Gentlys.
Trivia and Link
Gently Sinking was not adapted for the Inspector George Gently TV series (2007-2017). Very few of the TV episodes are based on the original books and the characters are quite different e.g. Sgt Bacchus does not appear in the books. The timeline for the TV series takes place in the 1960s only. (