THE TEST OF whether a detective novel is a good novel apart from its merits as a puzzle or a thriller comes on rereading: if it can hold us without depending on suspense it qualifies for an honourable place in the main stream of fiction. I`ve read all eight of Eric Wright`s novels at least twice, and they pass the test, to a large extent because they belong to that branch of the genre in which the detectives are constant characters whose stories are carried on from novel to novel. I`m not thinking of detectives like Holmes or Poirot, who are essentially mere vehicles for the interpretation of evidence, with a few characteristics and mannerisms to give them an artificial individuality. In the kind of novel I mean the detectives have real lives beyond the particular problems they are set to solve, so that each series becomes a serial novel in the Trollope tradition. Final Cut, then, is the latest episode in the story of Charlie Salter of the Metropolitan Toronto Police, his wife, Annie, their sons, Angus and Seth, and their various friends and relations. Charlie was born in what was then the Toronto Anglo-Saxon working-class ghetto of Cabbagetown, the son of a Toronto Transit Commission maintenance man of Archie Bunkerish tastes and views. Annie is a daughter of old Prince Edward Island money, and their sons go to Upper Canada College because the boys in her family always have. Which suggests some of the inevitable strains in a marriage of generally cheerful companionship and pleasant middle-aged sex. When we first met Charlie, in The Night the Gods Smiled (1983), he felt that his career had come to a stop as a result of his too vocal backing of the wrong horse for deputy chief He had been shunted aside into a section devoted to doing jobs that nobody else wanted, like showing visiting firemen round the headquarters building. But this meant that he was also given cases that Homicide was too busy to handle; since then he has gradually built a solid reputation and become happy in his work again. In Final Cut he is assigned to a unit making a film about a hunt for a war criminal, ostensibly to advise on Toronto police procedure but actually to investigate a series of malicious pranks that threaten to delay the film and even prevent its completion. Wright`s books derive much of their strength, charm, and individuality from his deliberate use of them to talk about subjects that interest him, whether or not they are relevant to his plots. In the first book we learn about futures trading, harness racing, and squash. Later, in Death in the Old Country (1986), he gets off his chest a lot of shrewd observations about his native England, showing it through the eyes of Charlie and Annie on their first visit. And in every book there is much to say about Toronto. Final Cut begins with a fine account of an old Toronto institution, the St. Lawrence Market. And then it launches into a detailed history of the making of a film. Here for the first time, I think, Wright allows the pursuit of an interest to overpower his story: the crimes and their detection didn`t hold my attention. But the Salter story continued to do so, now centring on the younger son Seth`s ambition to be a ballet dancer, and how a famous and aged actor deflects him towards a career for which he may actually have a talent. Another Englishman, of a later generation, who has taken to writing detective novels since settling in Toronto, is Peter Robinson. He sets his books, not in Canada, but in the Yorkshire Dales from which he comes, and for whose landscape he shows a strong affection. By doing so he at once challenged comparison with the incomparable Yorkshire novelist Reginald Hill; and after Hill`s gross Superintendent Andy Dalziel, the sophisticated Inspector Peter Pascoe, and Peter`s spirited wife, Ellie, Robinson`s Chief Inspector Alan Banks and his associates seemed in the first three books a bit like ciphers. The fourth book, The Hanging Valley (1989), changed all that. Banks came to life, and the story - excellent detection like its predecessors - was more ambitious, complex, and moving. Now, with Past Reason Hated, the story of the brutal murder of the younger member of a lesbian couple, Robinson comes fully into his own; and so does Alan Banks. The investigation takes him to London, and we learn much more about his previous career there and why he fled from it to a quiet provincial town. After reading it, I found I could go back to the first three books (Gallows View, 1987; A Dedicated Man, 1988; and A Necessary End, 1989) and find in them the resonance I had missed before.