Thirty years before the events in Close Quarters, and before going to London, he had attended a preparatory school of which he now remembers little except that the masters had seemed much happier than the boys. In the short storyModus Operandi we are told that he came to London from Norfolk at the age of 17, which would place his year of birth at 1890. He began by "pounding a beat in Whitechapel." 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, just after the war, he has a "heavy, Cromwellian face". And in his last appearance in a novel he is:
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.
Also in Close Quarters we are told that of his many policeman-like qualities the chief one was "Concentration. Tireless, relentless, implacable concentration.... And yet something more than that. Selective concentration." In Modus Operandi we are told that "his chief asset is that he looks so honest that no one ever attempts to bribe him" and that he has a "shrewd ability to see around corners, which came from his father, who was a poacher." And he has, of course, "a rigid sense of right and wrong."
Appearances by Hazlerigg
In novels
Close Quarters — introduction of Chief Inspector Hazlerigg. He first appears on page 74 of the 251-page American edition
They Never Looked Inside — he first appears on page 12 of a 191-page British reprint and is still a Chief Inspector
The Doors Open — he first appears on page 79 of the 287-page American edition and is still a Chief Inspector
Smallbone Deceased — he first appears on page 42 of a 192-page British reprint and is still a Chief Inspector
The Man Who Hated Banks — seven stories, including one told in the first person; plus a role in a Henry Bohun story and a mention in another Bohun story
