More sense from a pissed parrot

Look, I was not exaggerating when I said in my Gratitude Monday post that Reginald Hill had a gift for language as great as his talent for storytelling, which the BBC TV series didn't quite get across. Here are just a few examples of same:

In Exit Lines, Detective Superintendant Dalziel infiltrates a country estate on a shooting weekend. (If you’re unfamiliar with the British concept of “shooting” I commend to you the 1985 film The Shooting Party, or the shooting sequence in 2001’s Gosford Park.) The notion alone sends regular readers into fits of giggles; but Fat Andy takes us even further when he informs his sidekick of his planned activities.

Pascoe blurts out, ““’You mean shooting…things?’

“’Aye,’ said Dalziel gravely. ‘They tell me things are in season.’

“’Birds? You’re going to go shooting birds!’ exclaimed Pascoe, incredulity struggling with indignation.

“’I asked about sheep,’ said Dalziel regretfully. ‘I wondered if they’d let me start with sheep, being only a trainee, so to speak. Something a bit bulky and sort of static. Sheep-shooting’s never caught on, they tell me. Stags, yes. But not sheep. You can do all kinds of things with sheep, especially if you’ve been stuck out on the moors a long time, but you can’t shoot them. It has to be birds. I asked about swans then…’”

Also from Exit Lines:

“The Deputy Chief Constable was not a man he liked. It was Dalziel’s not inaudibly expressed view that he couldn’t solve a kiddies’ crossword puzzle and had only been promoted out of Traffic because he couldn’t master the difference between left and right. More heinously, he rarely dispensed drink and when he did it tended to be dry sherry in glasses so narrow that it was like reading a thermometer looking for the bloody stuff, which in any case Dalziel regarded as Spanish goat-piss.”

But some of my favorite vignettes come from Pictures of Perfection. For example, when one of the villagers assures Pascoe that her son (who’s been seen riding about the place with a shotgun across his bicycle handlebars) would never have killed a kingfisher:

“She spoke with absolute conviction, but Pascoe was unimpressed. In his experience ninety-nine out of a hundred mothers confronted by a video of their offspring robbing a bank or ramraiding a warehouse or even just jumping a red light would say, ‘No, not my Tom or Dick or Clint. He’d never do a thing like that.’ He was looking forward to meeting the hundredth who’d say, ‘Yes, that’s the little toe-rag. Why don’t you bang him up forever?’”

Or this description of a garden shed:

“It was basically a store shed containing most gardening implements both ancient and modern, ranging from graip and dibber to chainsaw and strimmer. There was a musty, peaty, earthy smell distantly and not too pungently underpinned by something vaguely stercoraceous. A double row of shelves bowed under the weight of various tins and bottles containing stuff to kill and stuff to quicken.”

(And yes—I keep a dictionary to hand when reading Hill. A graip is a three-tined garden or manure fork; a dibber is a pointed stick for making holes in the ground for planting seeds; something stercoraceous resembles dung.)

Regarding one of the key characters, Girly Guillemard—well, I could go on at length, but all you really need to know is this:

“She was clearly on the edge of her nerves, yet Wield sensed it was more than a mere organizational crisis which had brought her here. He got the impression she could have supervised the building of a pyramid without breaking sweat.”

And I’ll leave you with this depiction of Wield’s dilemma at one point in the novel:

“He tried to soothe his dyspeptic conscience with the Fat Man’s frequent assertion that, the way the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] threw out perfectly good cases that had cost overworked detectives many sleepless hours, it made more sense morally, socially, and legally to leave justice in the hands of a rational, informed intelligence such as his own.

“Dalziel’s precise words were, ‘Them wankers couldn’t spot a bishop in a brothel. You get more sense from a pissed parrot.’”

I’ve been trying to find a way to work that sentence into a conversation, somehow. But probably not a job interview.