Leslie Thomas

The core of the plot is the romantic triangle formed by the protagonist, a conscripted soldier named Private Brigg, a worldly professional soldier named Sergeant Driscoll, and Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of the Regimental Sergeant Major. The location is a British army base in Singapore during the Malayan Emergency.

When D. C. Dangerous Davies, not held in high regard by his superiors, is assigned to find a notorious criminal kingpin, he uncovers the details of 15-year-old cold case.

A disrespected but decent detective unravels a cold case about a missing seventeen year old girl while trying to deal with the breakup of his marriage.

Some British soldiers in Singapore are more concerned with finding sex than finding Communists.

An anthology of short plays shown on BBC Television between 1965 and 1973, used in part at least as a training ground for new writers, on account of its short length, and which therefore attracted many writers who later became well known.

"Dangerous" Davies always gets the cases no one else wants, and no one notices when he eventually succeeds. But his old-fashioned decency and dogged determination have won him legions of loyal fans.