A Touch of Frost: David Jason as Detective Inspector William 'Jack' Frost, whose sixth case will be his last. Photograph: ITV
In the space of four novels, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace has established himself as part of the crime writing firmament. Possessed of a missing wife and a fascination for the paranormal, he works erratically yet successfully in a vividly realised Brighton of stag dos and drunkenness, organised crime and drugs. It's a winning combination, and Peter James, the author of the bestselling series, has hit the jackpot. ITV is in talks to produce what's likely to be another hugely successful adaptation. I just hope they get the casting right, and don't employ John Hannah.
Around the same time as James was negotiating Roy Grace's televisual beginnings, another fictional sleuth was coming to the end of his literary endeavours. Following RD Wingfield's death last year, Detective Inspector William "Jack" Frost's sixth case will be his last. For one of our greatest detectives, it seems odd that there was little of the hype that surrounded Rebus's exit music, or the last breaths of Morse. As notoriously camera and publicity shy as Wingfield was, surely he deserved better?
Essentially it's David Jason's fault. The vast success of the television show means that the artistry and plotting of Wingfield's novels have been somewhat overshadowed - not to mention his original vision of Frost: the grubby, priapic, slapdash detective with smoke dribbling from his lips. Jason's Frost, cosily rumpled, slightly grumpy, is only a distant relation to the character who tells jokes so disgusting they can make people physically sick.
Wingfield's Frost is a dreadful policeman. His superiors know it, he knows it, and Wingfield makes sure the reader knows it. In one scene during A Killing Frost, a magistrate catalogues the occasions when Frost's "instincts" have turned out to be wide of the mark. In another, Frost admits his gut feelings are normally wrong. It's no wonder the top brass at Denton CID want him gone.
His fallibility and vulnerability add depth to Frost, but it comes at the price of his bravado and never-ending stream of antagonism. His sarcasm and dark, gallows wit are tiring for both the reader and the supporting characters, and his invective against women in particular is somewhat disturbing. They're slags, moos, and in a couple of cases are actually referred to as fannys. There's talk of leg-overs and bums and breasts and knickers and a bit of the other, even when they're dealing with a serious rape case. These could never be broadcast, but in shedding light on Frost's attitudes to women after the traumatic death of his estranged wife they are both startling and instructive.
The Frost of the novels surrounds himself in juvenile trappings: the scowling demeanour, the sexual innuendo, the playground banter. He is nasty, grubby, unpleasant, obsessed with toilet functions and the female body. But for me, better this way than the sanitised television version. Unlike Inspector Morse - one of the most arrogant, unpleasant and dubious detectives in print - Jack Frost is not improved by taking away his more dislikeable flaws; rather he is reduced to a comfortable, cosy and cantankerous old boy.
Wingfield claimed not to like writing novels - his six books took 24 years to produce - but the way he stitched his narratives together suggested he had a real understanding of the form. He took aspects of the gritty police procedural, set it in a fictional town that's a mess of rundown streets, slate-grey skies and deserted office blocks, and welded them to a brand of jaded, juvenile humour. It's a formula that, in a very sanitised form, became hugely successful for ITV; I only hope Peter James won't have to compromise on DS Roy Grace.
