The Calleshire Chronicles, also known as the Sloan and Crosby canon, is a series of 24 crime novels by the English author Catherine Aird.
[1] Christopher Dennis Sloan, known to his colleagues as "Seedy", is a long-suffering detective inspector.
In each novel he is helped by the hapless Detective Constable William Crosby, a fast-driving but slow-thinking young man avoided by his colleagues: only Sloan's wife Margaret has ever been known to say a good word about him.
The only other three characters who appear regularly are: Dr Dabbe, the lugubrious pathologist; Dyson, the caption-loving police photographer; and traffic division head Inspector "Happy" Harpe, so named because he claims he has never had anything to smile about.
The books, set in a county easily identifiable as Kent, often turn on ecclesiastical matters and show Aird's deep knowledge of canon law.