Gratitude Monday: Wielding the language

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.