Inspector Hazlerigg

(CC) Photo: Jerry Bauer
Michael Gilbert on the back cover of Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, 1982

Inspector Hazlerigg is a police detective created by the British mystery writer Michael Gilbert who appears in six books published between 1947 and 1958, in both novels and numerous short stories. In his first appearance, in the Golden Age mystery novel Close Quarters, Hazlerigg is a Chief Inspector at New Scotland Yard in London. By the final novel in the series, Fear to Tread, he has become a Chief Superintendent. Thirty years earlier he had attended a preparatory school of which he now remembers little except that the masters had seemed much happier than the boys. The first time we see him in Close Quarters he is "a thick square man with a brick-red face" and unmarried. A few pages further, after he raises an imaginary gun to his shoulder and fires it, a character thinks that he looks like "a jolly red-faced farmer out for a day's sport". Besides smoking an occasional pipe or Indian cheroot, he has "a heavy jowl and shrewd grey eyes". We are told that he is a mountaineer, with a "fair head for heights". Sitting in his office in Scotland Yard several years later, he was:

unmistakably a policeman, although he could also have been a farmer. He was thick set and had a red-brown face and grizzled hair.... Perhaps the only remarkable thing about him was his eyes. They were that shallow grey which, like the grey of the North Sea, can change without warning from friendliness to bleak wrath.

Appearances by Hazlerigg

In novels

• Close Quarters (1947) — introduction of Inspector Hazlerigg. He first appears on page 74 of the 251-page American edition
• They Never Looked Inside (1947) [U.S. He Didn't Mind Danger (1948)]
• The Doors Open (1949)
• Smallbone Deceased (1950)
• Death Has Deep Roots (1951)
• Death in Captivity (1952)
• Fear to Tread (1953) — important but short role for Chief Superintendent Hazlerigg—he does not appear until page 154 of the 223-page British edition

In collections of short stories

• Stay of Execution (1971)
• Amateur in Violence (1973)
• Anything for a Quiet Life (1990)
• The Man Who Hated Banks (1997)
• The Mathematics of Murder: A Fearne & Bracknell Collection (2000)
• The Curious Conspiracy (2002)
• Even Murderers Take Holidays and Other Mysteries (2007)
• A Pity about the Girl and Other Stories (2008)

See also

• Crime fiction/Catalog of prominent writers