The Incomer (1981), written under the pseudonym of Graham Gaunt, is not part of the Lovejoy series. Instead, it is a mystery in the vein of those of Ruth Rendell, a study of the vigilante "justice" of English villagers whose prejudices predate Oliver Cromwell; the novel pits "incomers," those not born and bred in the village, against locals over the treatment of Les Taunton, a simple man accused of murdering a local girl but freed for lack of evidence. Behind the gossip, the affairs, and the secret spying of neighbor on neighbor lurks a cruel self-righteousness that evokes "the dark days of past ages when folk were half-mad with superstition." The tensions in the novel depend on a love-hate relationship between a self-assured doctor, Clare Salford, and a hesitant priest, Reverend Shaw Watson. Their combined efforts reveal the truth and save a life, while proving that a courageous heart is perhaps more important than technological expertise. The style and tone of The Incomer are more traditional than those of the Lovejoy series.
The Mehala of Sealandings
Under the name Jonathan Grant, Gash produced a trilogy titled The Mehala of Sealandings, comprising The Shores of Sealandings (1991), Storms at Sealandings (1992), and Mehala, Lady of Sealandings (1993). With its mythological and ecological concerns, it is a major departure from his mystery stories.
Clare Burtonall Series
In 1997, with Different Women Dancing, Gash launched a new detective series featuring an unusual detective team: Clare Burtonall, a medical practitioner, and Bonn, a streetwise gigolo of growing importance in her life. The duo meet for the first time when they both stop to assist at a fatal road accident. The accident begins to look suspiciously like murder, however, and Clare's husband, an influential property developer, seems somehow involved: the dead man is a business associate, and his battered briefcase is furtively delivered to the Burtonall home. Bonn, who heads his own team of men for the Pleases Escort Agency, draws Clare into unfamiliar territory--the criminal underworld of urban England. Unlike the ribald and jovial village tales involving Lovejoy, these novels share a darkness akin to that of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (1938). They depict a world inhabited by the down-and-out, the dregs of society, and the predators. They are graphic explorations of hard-boiled urban settings and personalities. In Prey Dancing (1998), the second novel in the series, Clare, determined to pass on the dying words of an eighteen-year-old drug addict and street person to the man to whom they were addressed, discovers he is an angry, threatening criminal, a weapons man for a gang of murderous thugs with revenge in mind.
Until this new series, Grant had, in the main, avoided medical concerns in his novels, but since he had retired from medicine, he was no longer writing to escape his daily routines and the human problems they involved.
Die Dancing (2000) returns to Gash's new detective team. Clare is newly divorced, Bonn has become her lover as well as partner in amateur detection, and, unbeknownst to Clare, the Pleases Escort Agency is the secret sponsor of her own new medical practice. While the pair merrily dance away an evening, a "fixer" for important businessmen is brutally beaten to death. The death has political implications because of the man's ties to a member of Parliament and personal associations for his similar links to Clare's former husband. While the detective inspector on the case follows these leads, Clare and Bonn follow other leads that end in more murder.
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