The Edinburgh Detective

Review: The splendid cover photograph of Edinburgh in the 1890s gives a slightly false impression, but it’s the only wrong thing about this excellent book. McLevy, an Irishman with no love for the English, entered the city’s police force in 1830 and became a detective three years later, and wrote these memoirs in the 1850s. Quintin Jardine, who has written a foreword to this new edition, observes: ‘McLevy was clearly a one-off, a character who would have trouble fitting into a modern police force, yet whose perception and knowledge of his streets and his subjects would have made him too valuable to be excluded from it.’ This welcome new edition of his writings shows us the city into which Arthur Conan Doyle would be born in 1859 - but that’s a bonus. McLevy: The Edinburgh Detective is a cracking good read.

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 217, 2000]