Inspector Steine Books in Order

Inspector Steine is a radio comedy drama set in 1950s Brighton, and it knows exactly how absurd that combination can be. On one level it is a crime series, with murders, scams, missing people, and criminal plots. On another, it is a seaside farce about a police force that is nowhere near as competent as it believes.

The central joke is built into the title character. Inspector Steine thinks very well of himself. He is self-satisfied, ceremonial, and touchingly certain that he has already dealt with Brighton’s criminal problem once and for all. He believes the town is more or less safe, respectable, and under control. The audience, and everyone around him, can see that this is nonsense.

That gap between appearance and reality drives everything. Sergeant Brunswick is the long-suffering colleague forever trying to keep investigations on track, often with more confidence than skill. Constable Twitten is young, keen, and much brighter than anybody finds convenient. He is the one who notices patterns, joins dots, and suspects that crime is alive and well. Hovering over them all is Mrs Groynes, the station charlady, who also happens to be the criminal mastermind the police are somehow failing to catch.

Everyone is in the wrong story except Twitten.

The setting does a lot of the work. This is Brighton as a world of ghost trains, theatres, boarding houses, piers, holiday glamour, small-time hoods, and endless opportunities for somebody to put on the wrong costume and make things worse. The cases often begin with a neat mystery, but the fun is in how quickly they turn sideways. Undercover operations wobble. Steine follows the wrong lead with perfect confidence. Mrs Groynes keeps business moving. Twitten tries, with mixed success, to get anyone to listen.

Because it is radio, voice matters as much as plot. The series lives on timing, tone, and the comic pleasure of hearing a full cast bounce off one another. It affectionately sends up detective fiction, but it is not just parody. The mysteries are real mysteries, the period atmosphere is carefully built, and the characters become funnier because the show takes their motives seriously, even when their behaviour is ridiculous.

The series also matters because it became the seedbed for Truss’s later Constable Twitten novels, starting with A Shot in the Dark. If you listen to Inspector Steine first, you can hear the world those books grew from: the seaside setting, the class comedy, the criminal undercurrents, and especially the comic triangle between Steine, Twitten, and Mrs Groynes. It is a wonderfully odd little universe, half cozy mystery, half well-mannered chaos.