Superintendent Ralph Flensing Books in Order

The Superintendent Ralph Flensing books form a short series, but they show a late, very sharp version of John Wainwright. There are only two novels here, Their Evil Ways and The Ride, yet they carry many of the things he did best, a senior policeman under pressure, a case that grows nastier the longer you look at it, and a strong sense that social appearances are almost always misleading.

Flensing works at a high enough level to see the larger shape of a case, but these books never drift into abstraction. Wainwright keeps them close to human weakness, shame, denial, and the institutional habits that make bad policing easier than good policing. In The Ride, for example, the murder case leads toward a carefully staged trap and a confession that alters the whole picture. That is typical of the series. The answer matters, but so does the route taken to get there.

These are not comfort reads.

The mood is lean and bruising. Wainwright is interested in people on the edge of respectability, people already judged by class, sexuality, or reputation, and in the police officers who have to navigate both truth and prejudice. Flensing himself feels like part of that moral pressure cooker, not a detached genius but a senior working detective trying to keep the job honest when the job does not always help.

Because the series is so compact, it also reads well as a concentrated sample of Wainwright's later style. There is less padding, less digression, and a stronger sense of tension held over the whole book. The writing stays plain and direct, and the cases hit hard.

If you want Wainwright at his grimmer and more socially alert, Flensing is worth your time. The series is brief, but it leaves a strong impression.