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Joyce Porter (28 March 1924 – 9 December 1990)[1] 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.[2]
Joyce Porter lived the last years of her life in a thatched cottage in Longbridge Deverill, a village in Wiltshire.[3] She is interred in the churchyard of St Peter and St Paul.[4]
Porter created the characters of Eddie Brown, Constance Ethel Morrison-Burke, and Wilfred Dover.[2]
In DCI Wilfred Dover and his assistant Sergeant MacGregor, she created a template later used successfully, especially by Reginald Hill, in straight 'whodunnits'[citation needed], but Porter's novels, while intricately plotted, were always played for laughs. But despite their light-hearted nature, Porter allowed the books to reflect topical themes. Dover is obese, lazy, unhygienic and bordering on corrupt. MacGregor is keen, clean and ferociously ambitious. However, on the rare occasions he is able to put aside plate, pint-glass and cigarettes long enough to concentrate, Dover usually sees the answer first.
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 companion Miss Jones. (In The Fine Art of Murder, editors Ed Gorman et al. describe Morrison-Burke as "the first clearly lesbian detective in fiction."[5]) The 'Hon Con' books were 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 of each case had to be achieved entirely by a happy coincidence.
Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover
Eddie Brown, The World's Most Reluctant Spy
Constance Ethel Morrison Burke
A number of the Inspector Dover books have been adapted for BBC Radio 4 by Paul Mendelson and star Kenneth Cranham as Dover.[6]
And a new story by Paul Mendelson based on the characters
