Jim Marshall was the most successful detective in solving murders there has ever been in Sussex.

During 1973, as head of Sussex CID, there were 16 murders in the county and he solved the lot. His total tally was more than a hundred.

It led to his being dubbed Supercop by the Sunday Mirror which serialised his memoirs after he retired in 1976.

But Marshall tended to use traditional, painstaking methods to achieve his results and made sure he had a good team to help him.

The most sensational murder was the easiest to solve – that of seven year old Maria Colwell in Brighton who was killed by her stepfather.

He was jailed for manslaughter but the real story was the horrific neglect that should have been detected well before she died. The case was a sensation and led to changes in the law.

Marshal himself wrote a book about the Ollie murder – the case of Clive Olive who was killed by Hell’s Angels before his body was thrown into Shoreham Harbour and weighted down so that it did not surface.

Proud of hailing from Yorkshire, Marshall arrived in Sussex in 1959 during a period of difficulty for the police especially in Brighton where there had been corruption.

He soon made sure that did not return and quickly made the force proud of its work. He used the press to help get results.

“I don’t seek personal publicity,” he said although friends reported he had two suitcases full of cuttings at his home in Goldstone Crescent, Hove.

There were failures as well as successes. One was the killing of schoolboy Keith Lyon, son of a bandleader, who died at Happy Valley in Woodingdean.

Police were fairly sure they knew who had committed the crime but never had enough evidence to prosecute anyone.

And although he was second to Scotland Yard in trying to find what happened to Lord Lucan, it irked him that the mystery was never solved.

Marshall had a life both before and after the police. As a young man he fought in Burma during the Second World War and never forgot the horrors he had seen. He always attended Burma Star reunions.

After he retired he became a Tory councillor in Hove. “I’m not political," he said and it was true although it was hard to imagine him as a Socialist.

He headed the governors at Goldstone School in Hove for many years and took a particular interest in Hillside Special School in Portslade. He wrote poetry about the children.

Marshall never become Mayor, a role he would have loved, because of his wife’s poor health but he was a popular and successful councillor.

His main interest was in social services but he was also keen on sport and tried to make Hove the sporting capital of the south.

Friendly and fearless, Marshall was a firm favourite with reporters who enjoyed his unusually open approach to solving crime.

He died in 2014 at the ripe old age of 97 and is still missed by many people –although not by the criminal fraternity.