Last Monday I focused on being grateful for a film,
because it was intrinsically good, and I happened to watch it at a point when I
really needed something to lift my spirits.
Today I’m grateful for a particular writer, whose books
unfailingly engage my mind, expand my vocabulary, introduce me to vivid
characters and entertain me to the last word of the last page. Of every book.
As you probably know, I read a lot; on average in the
range of 110-150 books per year. Most of that is non-fiction; when I do step
over to the dark side, it’s almost invariably detective fiction, and just about
all of that encompasses police procedurals. There are loads of crappy purveyors
of that genre out there, a fair number of adequate writers, a very few good ones
and one consummate master.
Reginald Hill. And specifically his series on Chief Superintendent
Andy Dalziel and Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe, set somewhere in
mid-Yorkshire (England).
I’ve been a fan of Dalziel and Pascoe since…well, I
probably discovered them in the 80s. But I revisited them last year in the
process of seeking inspiration on how to set up detective plots. Reginald Hill
almost made me give it up.
Not to put too fine a point upon it, he writes the bloody
hell out of a story. He wields language like a samurai does a katana. His
characters are indelible—beginning with Dalziel: fat, vulgar, loud, and capable
of holding more booze than anyone since Falstaff. Especially if someone else is
paying for it. And yet—unlike Falstaff—nothing much slips past him. It’s
gobsmacking to watch him in operation; he crosses over to cringeworthy on many
occasions, but he is magnificent in his oblivion. Or (as it turns out) in his unapologetic
dedication to doing whatever it takes to solve the case.
Pascoe, his series partner, starts out a Detective
Sergeant in A Clubbable Woman, and
progresses until he’s a DCI in the latest books. He’s a university graduate, in
sociology, of all things; although thankfully he doesn’t seem to apply its
precepts a whole lot. Perhaps because Dalziel generally makes preemptive
strikes with his old-school-copper politically incorrect observations, which
generally turn out to be spot-on.
Pascoe is a bit like Pauline (as in The Perils of)—he’s
always getting shot, being buried alive in a mine collapse, finding unknown
relatives, suffering through his daughter’s bout of meningitis or having her
taken hostage by thugs. Well, a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.
Pascoe’s wife, Ellie, is a counterpoint to the cops—starting
out as a university lecturer and then chucking it all to write a novel. She
seems to take on more of the function of criticizing Dalziel’s political incorrectitude,
leaving her husband a little freer to get his job as a policeman done. I expect
Hill meant her to grate, because she does—a feminist who doesn’t seem to much
like any woman with both a career and gumption, particularly DC Shirley Novello.
Not even after Novello actually takes a bullet in defense of Ellie and others
in Arms and the Women. (Hill may have
got tired of her, too, as she barely makes an appearance in the most recent two
books.)
Most interesting to me is Edgar Wield, who starts and ends
the series as a Detective Sergeant. His dilemma as a corruscatingly ugly, gay
cop (and you wonder at someone so physically and emotionally earthbound being
associated with the word “gay” in its, uh, lighter sense) becomes one of the
story arcs in Child’s Play,
which—like Exit Lines—weaves threads
of different colors and textures into a vivid and oddly harmonious tapestry of
human frailties: fear, love, fury, foolishness, hope. You know—all the usual.
As a homosexual in one of the most virulently homophobic
environments possible (especially in the 1970s, when Hill started writing the
novels), Wield has to compartmentalize his life absolutely, and even after he
comes out he makes the decision not to seek promotion beyond Detective
Sergeant. He also takes pre-emptive measures to set expectations when he comes
across new graduates who might have ideas that tutus and nipple rings loom large in his private
life.
(As it happens, they don’t. His passions are H. Rider Haggard, Gilbert
and Sullivan, and his classic Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle.)
Hill sets up characters and pulls them through subsequent
novels, like DC Novello and DC “Hat” Bowler. (I won’t give away his actual
Christian name, because it’s only mentioned once in all the novels, and you
should find it out for yourself), DC Dennis Seymour and DC Hector.
Hector is a tad on the one-dimensional side, one of Hill’s
weakest presentations. And I could have done without a recurring character like
the sociopath Franny Roote, who’s so annoying that readers must have been
lining up to slit his throat, starting with the voice box.
Yeah, I’d read Hill for the characters alone, but he
weaves plot and subplot like a Bach fugue. Everything—everything—fits together. You skip over one bit of (seemingly) idle
description, and it’ll come back to bite you in the butt at the end. If someone
picks a daffodil or shoves a recording of medieval plainsong onto a shelf, sure
as the earth revolves around the sun, that flower or music will be key to the
ultimate resolution. As much as I want to rush headlong into finding out
what-the-hell-happened, I’ve learned that I have to take my time and pay
attention to everything along the way. It’s a good life-lesson, actually.
In addition, Hill’s not afraid to violate the canons of
detective writing, and he doesn’t do anything according to a template. Some
novels develop over a period of weeks; one plays out in just a single day. Not
everything is solved; not every book involves a murder; not every puzzle is put
together correctly. Shite, as Dalziel would say, happens; but in Hill’s
cosmography, it happens so stunningly vividly that you just stand in awe.
Well, at least—I do. And I’m not that easily awed.
Hill’s first career was as a university lecturer, and all
manner of literature informs his books. I enjoyed the conceit of Ellie’s
reworking of the Aeneid in Arms and the Women—casting Odysseus as a
fat, farting Yorkshireman and Aeneas as a slender, somewhat effete intellectual;
possibly with a sociology degree.
Good
Morning, Midnight turns on the poems of Emily Dickinson and
features one of the most dysfunctional families I’ve ever seen; and I’ve seen a
lot. Exit Lines is the interwoven
stories of three old men who die unnatural deaths in a single night, alongside
that of Pascoe’s father-in-law, who is withdrawing from life via dementia. In On Beulah Height, worked around Mahler’s
“Songs of Dead Children”, a little girl lost dredges up the nightmare of 15
years earlier, when three more had gone missing-presumed-dead.
Child’s
Play
encompasses interlaced stories about sons and parents; about families; about
love. It’s in this one that Wield comes out, although it turns out that Dalziel
knew all along and didn’t care. With Dalziel, it’s who you are and how you do
your job that matters, not whom you sleep with. He does, after all, put up with Ellie’s
unending claptrap.
And Pictures of
Perfection is a fabulous (as in “fable-like”) tale, set in a village that
reminds me a bit of Santa Cruz: if you weren’t slightly loopy when you (or your
ancestors) came to Enscombe, you either left or took on the characteristics of
dottiness.
The Wield Contradiction comes to the fore in Pictures, one of the ones with minimal
violence. The exchanges between Wield and the caustic-tongued bookseller Edwin
Digweed are handled with a delicacy that would not be out of place in the pages
of Jane Austen (whose letters form the framework of the novel). Absolutely
beautiful—one of the most romantic encounters I’ve ever seen in any kind of
literature.
And if you don’t believe me about how ugly Wieldy is
meant to be (or how exquisitely Hill uses the English language), try this from Pictures:
“Wield barked the sound which friends recognized as his
way of expressing amusement—though others often took it as a sign that the
interrupted lycanthropic process suggested by his face was about to be
resumed.”
Well, you see what I mean?
When I discovered last year that Hill had died two years ago yesterday, age 75, my first—entirely selfish, I admit—reaction was, “Oh, I hope to
God he stockpiled a bunch of D&P manuscripts with his publisher. At least
two or three. Well, even a couple of outlines that some other really
spectacular writer could run with.”
But, you know—I can’t think of any writer out there who
could match Hill for dexterity of wit and elegance in telling a story.
I was absolutely gutted to think there’d be no more—the
last outing was Midnight Fugue, in
2009. If I’d known that when I started out last year to re-read them, I’d have
paced myself instead of gorging on his banquets of characters, plots, full
range of humor and bloody great use of language.
But in the meantime, I’m so grateful that Reginald Hill
took up a life of crime, and that I was able to join him, Dalziel, Pascoe and
Wield on those wonderful sorties into the human condition.
No comments:
Post a Comment