Joyce Porter was an English crime fiction author. She was born in Marple, Cheshire. In Macclesfield she attended the High School for Girls, then King's College London. served in the Women's Royal Air Force from 1949 to 1963. An intensive course in Russian qualified her for intelligence work for the WRAF. She left the service determined to pursue a full-time career in writing, having written three detective novels already. Joyce Porter lived the last years of her life in a pretty thatched cottage on Sand Street in Longbridge Deverill, a village in Wiltshire. She is interred in the churchyard of St Peter and St Paul. Porter created the characters of Eddie Brown, Constance Ethel Morrison Burke, and Wilfred Dover.
Characters
In DCI Wilfred Dover and his assistant Sergeant MacGregor, she created a template later used successfully, especially by Reginald Hill, in straight 'whodunnits', but Porter's novels, while intricately plotted, were always played for laughs. Dover was obese, lazy, unhygienic and bordering on corrupt. MacGregor was keen, clean and ferociously ambitious. However, on the rare occasions he was able to put aside plate, pint-glass and cigarettes long enough to concentrate, Dover usually saw the answer first. The most intricate plots in Dover 1, Dover 2 and "Dover goes to Pott" have twists to satisfy the most insistent "whodunnit" fan, although few will remember the legislature that proves decisive in Dover 2. Despite their light-hearted nature, Porter allowed the books to reflect topical themes: "Dover & the unkindest cut of all" transplants the "Society for Cutting Up Men" from the US to an Essex seaside resort. "Dover beats the band" features a far-right movement at the time that the National Front were gaining prominence in the UK. In many respects Dover 2 presages Alan Bleasdale's "No Surrender". It is set in a small town in Lancashire, riven by sectarianism, but the comparisons to "the troubles" are obvious. Dover and McGregor find the sectarian feuding absurd, from their perspective as Londoners, and annoying, insofar as it prevents them achieving an answer. The Honourable Constance Ethel Morrison-Burke is an upper-class spinster who, armed only with pluck, a deep-rooted hatred of men and her family's enormous financial resources, sallies forth to fight crime with the aid of her devoted 'friend'. The 'Hon Con' books are even less like straight 'who-dunnits' than the 'Dovers' because while Dover is an experienced copper who has, it becomes clear, a good brain, the 'Hon Con' is an amateur bungler of below-average intelligence. Therefore, her solving each case must be achieved entirely by a happy coincidence.
