has abstract
| - Inspector Bill Mercer is a detective created by the British crime and mystery writer Michael Gilbert. He is the leading character in the 1972 novel The Body of a Girl, a somewhat hardboiled police procedural, and appears later in at least three short stories. On the first page of the novel, "Detective Inspector William Mercer received... confirmation of his promotion to chief inspector and his appointment in charge of the CID at Stoneferry on Thames, which is one of the larger upriver stations of Q Division of the Metropolitan Police." Gilbert goes on to say that "He was a man in his late twenties or early thirties, with a lot of dark hair, worn rather long,, and a thick, sensual face. His appearance was not improved by a puckered white scar which started at the cheekbone and gathered up the corner of the left eye so that it seemed permanently half closed. He had thick shoulders, a barrel of a chest, and legs disproportionately long for such a body". In the novel, mention is made of the many girls he has known and discarded over the years, and he carries out a smooth seduction of a beautiful young girl in the course of his investigation. But in the three short stories, which take place over an extended period of time, he is living with, and apparently faithful to, a beautiful Pakistani girl named Shallini whom he had brought back from his time in Bahrain. At the stories' conclusion, he is planning a trip to Pakistan with her at the Treasury's expense. As Gilbert later described him in an introduction to a 1997 collection of stories: "He once shared with Hazlerigg the rank of Chief Inspector, but this is about the only thing that he did share. While Hazlerigg plays the game according to the rules, Mercer is prepared to bend any rule that gets in the way of his single-minded pursuit of his objective.... He was going to get his revenge for that scar, whatever the cost. (en)
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