Crime reviewer and then Nelson librarian Alyson Baker welcomed the first Dan Delaney thriller The Death Ray Debacle in October 2016. ‘Dan,’ she wrote, ‘is a delightful protagonist.’ She found this rookie detective human and humble, not sure if he is left-leaning or right-leaning, just wanting to not muck up his first assignment, in short ‘totally plausible’. She reviewed all seven outings, but by the end thought the now 79-year-old ex-detective and counterespionage agent patronising towards his ultra-Catholic wife.
For me Dan began life as a device. I needed a device to get this amateur scientist from Auckland to Wellington in 1935. The scientist Victor Penny was real, he had been attacked in Takapuna by ‘foreign agents’, the newspapers of the day reported, intent on stealing his blueprints for lasers and radar. After the attack the government moved him under armed guard to Somes Island in Wellington Harbour to continue his experiments. This is where I encountered him during research for a non-fiction book on the history of the island, which also featured Nazis incarcerated there during the war. I finished the book with a desire to know more about Penny and the Nazis. Dan Delaney came into life as the connecting thread.
It was going to be a dangerous job, but I did not want my protagonist to have any of the often-absurd levels of physical or mental skills of many fictional detectives. I wanted an ordinary but keen Kiwi bloke who was not bad at footy and no extraordinary shakes in the brain department, but with good reaction times and physical resourcefulness. A good regional loose forward.
Before writing about Somes Island I had spent 18 months with the New Zealand Police writing their services history, which was how they improved their pay and conditions without being allowed to form a trade union. Travelling around the country I met many good keen blokes, and often they were Catholic. Having grown up Catholic, I went for what I knew with my variations on a teenager plucked out of a rookie parade by the Commissioner of Police because he was able to recite from memory a recently released memorandum. The constable was made an acting detective. I gave him a popular Catholic name and Dan Delaney was born.
Victor Penny was sacked by wartime Prime Minister Peter Fraser. I used to socialise around the Wellington theatrical and night-time scene with Fraser’s granddaughter and this triggered the second Dan Delaney outing The Plot to Kill Peter Fraser. Dan was handy again as the link man around the dodgy post-war Wellington nightlife, Dan taking direction from the real-life Commissioner of Police Cummings, famous for getting the Commonwealth’s first fingerprint conviction for murder. I had got to know as a journalist many of the refugees from war-torn Europe and drew on this for Dan to return from being a prisoner-of-war under the Italians and Germans to winkle out ex-Nazis hiding among the locals and plotting Fraser’s demise.
Casting about for a third Delaney instalment, I thought the Dalmatians and bodgies I grew up amongst in West Auckland a lively subject. Dan now would be 10 years older and lonely from the traumatic loss of his wife and in need of company. Dan is out of the police and drifting when his now retired police boss drags him into investigating communists and fascists up to no good among the Dalmatian community. One of the new young female police recruits who hails from the Dalmatian community clashes with Dan, but the outcome is positive.
By now it seemed a good notion to have a Delaney story every decade. The mid-sixties were my student protest time in Wellington, with friends falling foul of the gung-ho nascent intelligence service. Dan reluctantly leaves behind his Dalmatian/Croatian wife and two young daughters to help an old wartime friend caught in a murder at a protest party. Even more reluctantly Dan must cooperate with extreme elements in the police and intelligence community to thwart an attempt to torch Parliament.
Following my journalistic assignment in Israel, Dan in the mid-1970s is as reluctant as his stroppy younger daughter to be on holiday in Israel for his wife’s religious and his older daughter’s professional interests. An old enemy from his Nazi-catching days puts Dan and his family in extreme danger from a plan to blow up inner Jerusalem. Dan must face down old phobias with his disaffected younger daughter if they and this sacred city are to survive.
I loved the Bible lands and working as a young journalist in Sydney, the scene of Dan’s 1980s story as his wife’s family wines are being promoted there at a time of protests at a visiting nuclear warship. One of their daughters is at the sharp end of the protests and the other is a detective like her father before her trying to keep alive another New Zealand prime minister, David Lange, there on a secret visit to meet his Australian counterpart, Bob Hawke.
In his final outing Dan is a grumpy fellow traveller with his wife around Catholic and Protestant Ireland as a troubled peace has broken out in the mid-1990s. One daughter is an academic studying their ancestral roots in Ireland, the other chasing the violent news. Dan discovers he has close ties with a former British intelligence colleague aiming to terminate him and any claims to his Northern Irish inheritance.
All seven Dan Delaney stories have been redesigned for the global e-book market, as the accompanying image indicates, to reflect their depiction as thrillers, not the mysteries they were originally tagged as. Dan is resigned to my fiddling, his only concern his lingering Catholic guilt about how he has sometimes acted towards his wife. His consolation is that the family are as one now wherever they fetch up, due to his wife’s forgiving nature and trained responses to physical danger, with the considerable assistance of both his brainy daughter and his physically resourceful daughter, never more on life-saving show than in the Sydney and Israel adventures. Dan is not ready to turn his toes up, but probably it should be the turn of his daughters to tell a few stories. Fair dos.
Whatever happens, Dan remains capable of responding to danger and challenges in ways I can only dream of.