Dover: The Collected Short Stories

Scotland Yard detective Wilf Dover is not your usual hero. He distinctly resembles a sloth and is despised by the rest of the department. He is gross, flatulent, lazy, dishonest, sexist, racist, pinches other people's ideas and property, and spends most of his time in bed crouched over a beer he has not bought himself. He doesn't believe in thinking, the traditional tool of the ratio centric detective, considering it to be too much work. His creator, Joyce Porter, while writing in a comic vein, takes the stuffing out of the ever-righteous hero-image detective. While reading one of her novels, it's doubtful if, upon hearing weird noises downstairs at night, one would ever call 911.

Arriving on the scene of the murder in "Dover Pulls a show more Rabbit" the first thing Dover does is to step on the corpse in his haste to reach the bathroom. Then he insists on having the fireplace lit, and the fingerprint powder wiped off the table near his chair because-it makes the tabletop look dirty. He proceeds to browbeat witnesses and harass the poor local inspector and humiliate his own sergeant. Amazingly, to everyone's consternation, he almost instantly solves the crime, and all because he had to go to the lavatory. show less