Reginald Hill

• Born: April 3, 1936
• Birthplace: Hartlepool, England
• Died: January 12, 2012

Type of Plots: Police procedural; private investigator; thriller

Principal Series: Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, 1970-; Joe Sixsmith, 1993-

Contribution

Reginald Hill introduced Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe in A Clubbable Woman (1970), and followed this work with An Advancement of Learning (1971). Such titles indicated early on the wordplay and double entendres that would become staples of the series: The victim in the first novel is not just “clubby” but bludgeoned to death, and the second novel’s title as well as its chapter epigrams come from the writings of Sir Francis Bacon. Hill has been praised for his precise characterization, from the ample use of Yorkshire dialect and manners to the deployment of various points of view in the narration, voice-over techniques, interior monologues, and fragments of letters and diaries. In the later novels, Hill has been given to ingenious plots that function on several levels other than the investigation of the central crime. He has said he does not consider his books police procedurals per se but simply good stories.

Biography

Reginald Hill was born in 1936 in Hartlepool in northeast England, where his father played soccer for the local professional team. When Hill was three years old the family moved to Cumbria. He grew up there, went on to attend Oxford University, and became a teacher for several years in Yorkshire, the setting for his acclaimed Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe crime novels. Hill has said that, like most children, he was fond of stories but decided to become a writer when he discovered—at the age of seven—that one could be paid “for making things up.” His first novel, A Clubbable Woman, was published in 1970, and introduced the mid-Yorkshire police duo of Andrew “Fat Andy” Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, who have gone on to be featured in more than twenty novels and in a popular British television series. In addition, Hill has written a series of mysteries featuring the private detective Joe Sixsmith as well as several thrillers under the pseudonym Patrick Ruell. In 1990 Hill was awarded the Gold Dagger for Bones and Silence (1990), and in 1995 the British Crime Writers’ Association honored him with its Cartier Diamond Dagger for his lifetime contribution to the genre. The Dalziel and Pascoe mystery Good Morning, Midnight (2004) received the 2004 People’s Choice Award from the Mystery Thriller Book Club.

Analysis

Though Reginald Hill is the author of more than forty books in many genres, he is known first and foremost as the creator of Yorkshire detective superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, who together have been solving crimes since A Clubbable Woman was published in 1970. That novel introduced readers to Dalziel (pronounced “Dee-ell”), sometimes referred to behind his back as Fat Andy and by other even less flattering nicknames by friend and foe alike. Coarse, corpulent, given to glaringly impolite remarks about race, class, and gender, Dalziel nonetheless confounds both criminal and law enforcement minds with his almost clairvoyant perception of human motivation. He also possesses a physical prowess that belies his considerable girth. More than one reviewer has applied the term “Falstaffian” to the superintendent: He can outdrink his staff even as he outthinks them, out-joking and outfoxing his adversaries as well as his allies.

This is not to say Dalziel requires no help. Peter Pascoe begins the series as a fresh recruit, a university-educated representative of a kinder, gentler police mind-set that the old-fashioned Dalziel openly scorns. Much of the humor and human interest in Hill’s writing develops from this tension between personalities and philosophies. With each successive case, it becomes increasingly clear that Dalziel’s blunt force needs Pascoe’s nuances to solve modern-day crimes. Their partnership thus grows from an initial wariness (even distaste) through a mutual grudging respect to a shared affection and reliance on each other’s strengths.

Ellie Pascoe, Peter’s wife, begins the series as a foil to both men. An academic who disapproves of Dalziel’s excesses, she also proves to Peter that he is often less enlightened—and more Dalziel-like—than he would care to admit. In later books, Ellie takes on more and more importance as a character: In Arms and the Women (1999), for example, it is Ellie’s situation that provides the main plot and her voice that controls much of the narrative. Peter and Ellie’s courtship (college sweethearts years before, they are reacquainted in An Advancement of Learning) and the progress of their married relationship into parenthood over the course of many novels is just one of several story lines Hill maintains from book to book.

Hill allows other recurring characters to develop as well, personalities who collectively become a rich and varied supporting cast rather than merely a set of stereotypes. These finely drawn roles include Sergeant Edgar “Wieldy” Wield, whose chiseled features are repeatedly mocked by Dalziel even as the superintendent counts on Wield’s nearly photographic memory. Through the early novels Wield keeps his homosexuality closely closeted to preserve his police career ambitions, but as he comes out, he gives the stories added depth and human interest. Another character, Detective Shirley Novello, similarly has to navigate a career environment traditionally hostile to her presence. One of Hill’s many accomplishments is that such roles never seem gratuitous; each character is given a fair share of the plot—investigative and personal—without the author’s using them as spokespersons for a cause or social issue.

Indeed, the intricate weave of private life with professional life is one of the most pronounced features of the Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries. In The Wood Beyond (1996), the crime plot is paralleled by and then intersects with Pascoe’s family history; in Good Morning, Midnight, Dalziel’s past implicates him in a questionable suicide case that Pascoe must investigate. Often cited as Hill’s main accomplishment is the sheer vitality of his writing, credited with “raising the British mystery to new heights,” as The New York Times has said. In the words of Donna Leon of The Sunday Times (London), Hill’s gifts include a “formidable intelligence, quick humor, compassion, and a prose style that blends elegance and grace.” The intelligence is easily perceived in the range and intricacy of Hill’s storytelling: A tragic but seemingly isolated incident often has implications and motives far beyond its Yorkshire locale, and the plot often crosses continents, even generations. No crime seems minor in Hill’s world, where investment swindlers cross paths with pornographers and where old family scandals merge with contemporary drug trafficking or international arms deals.

Grim as these elements may be, Hill maintains a quick humor. The dialogue is rife with puns and the arch remark; Dalziel’s sarcasm or Ellie’s playful skewering of Peter’s ego would be enough to delight and amuse even those readers who fail to catch the witty allusions (usually unattributed, much less explained) to William Shakespeare, John Keats, or Homer. In some novels, however, the erudition is on display from the start. Not only does Hill favor epigraphs from a wide variety of classic authors to open sections or chapters, but he also uses such sources to frame the entire story. Arms and the Women, for example, obviously calls to mind George Bernard Shaw’s famous play Arms and the Man (pr. 1894, pb. 1898). The Wood Beyond borrows its title from the opening of Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), and Pascoe must in the course of the novel descend through the darker circles of his own family’s past. Similarly, Good Morning, Midnight begins with the Emily Dickinson poem of the same name. Dialogues of the Dead (2001) provides no fewer than three alternative titles (one of them a spurious reference to a board game), an entry from the Oxford English Dictionary, a stanza from the nineteenth century poet Heinrich Heine, and a passage from Thomas Lovell Beddoes before the opening chapter. Such devices contribute to the overall appeal of Hill’s work and prepare the reader for the multiple layers of plot and the variety of narrators given full voice by the time Dalziel can declare the case closed and his single-malt scotch open.

The Wood Beyond

The Wood Beyond, the fourteenth in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, is widely regarded as having secured Hill’s reputation as Britain’s finest living mystery novelist. Just as the series has fully developed the endlessly surprising persona of Andrew Dalziel, Hill devotes the bulk of this installment to Peter Pascoe, whose sleuthing discovers a great-grandfather executed for cowardice during World War I. Whether this or the discovery of a human skeleton on the grounds of an animal research clinic is the main story line is hard to say. Dalziel, meanwhile, becomes romantically involved with a woman who happens to be a suspect in yet another case. In its complexities of plot and depth of feeling, The Wood Beyond marks a turning point in Hill’s career.

Arms and the Women

Just two novels later, Hill turns to Ellie Pascoe to provide the focus. In the intervening novel, the Pascoes very nearly lost their daughter, and at the outset of Arms and the Women, Ellie is the victim of an attempted kidnapping. Sent away for safekeeping as well as for recuperation, she unwittingly becomes ensnared in a web of plots involving the Irish Republican Army, Colombian drug dealers, and unnamed government agents. As the tension mounts, Hill releases it with wildly comic passages from Ellie’s novel in progress, an updating of Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), in which, despite Ellie’s best intentions, the hero winds up looking, acting, and sounding maddeningly like her husband’s boss, Fat Andy.

Dialogues of the Dead

Dialogues of the Dead, Hill’s tour de force, begins a kind of series-within-the-series, as this novel and the next two, Death’s Jest-Book (2002) and Good Morning, Midnight, form a trilogy bound by the same set of crimes and a continued plot. What begins as a pair of seemingly unrelated accidental deaths evolves into a gruesome case of serial murders, apparently perpetrated by the Wordman, an anonymous writer of “dialogues” sent to a local newspaper as part of a short-story competition. The Wordman’s letters, as well as the interpolated interior monologues of the murderer, drop intriguing clues along the way, and from the novel’s baffling “paranomania” (obsession with wordplay) to its disturbing epilogue, Dialogues of the Dead is vintage Hill.

Born Guilty

Born Guilty (1995), the second Joe Sixsmith novel, begins with the middle-aged Joe trying to elude his meddling aunt and her matchmaking efforts. When Joe comes upon a boy’s corpse in a cardboard box, he must elude even more determined characters, including abusive police officers, drug addicts and dealers, and various others whose interest in Joe may or may not be wholesome. This work is briefer and grittier than the Dalziel and Pascoe novels tend to be and a bit less complex in its plotting but no less gripping in its emotional content and just as appealing in its characterization.

The Stranger House

In The Stranger House (2005), a nonseries mystery, Hill employs a number of the features that have made his Dalziel and Pascoe series so effective: a pair of seemingly mismatched protagonists, an intricate plot involving overlapping personal and family histories, the eccentricities of village England, and multiple narrators. The Stranger House, the local inn in the village of Illthwaite, gives the novel its name and also—typically for Hill—provides an overall metaphor for the diverse backgrounds ultimately linking the main characters’ families or “houses.” Though neither main character is a detective (one is a mathematician, the other a former novice priest turned historian), together they ferret out the clues to their respective mysteries, going back decades in one case and centuries in the other.

Principal Series Characters:

• Andrew Dalziel , is detective superintendent of the Yorkshire police, a flamboyantly larger-than-life figure whose girth, garrulousness, and proudly old-fashioned investigative techniques mask his exceptional physical prowess, acute intelligence, and surprising grasp of contemporary social and cultural realities.
• Detective Peter Pascoe , is Dalziel’s younger, more sensitive crime-fighting partner. As introspective and as mild-mannered as Dalziel can be overbearing, Pascoe uses less bluff and brute force, relying instead on psychological insight. His is the character who grows the most from novel to novel. As the series goes on, Pascoe and his wife, Ellie, become as much a focus as the criminal investigations.
• Joe Sixsmith , is a laid-off lathe operator who becomes a private investigator to pay the bills. As a working-class black man in the gritty town of Luton, Joe inhabits a role that allows for a more direct examination of issues of race and class than in the Dalziel and Pascoe books.

Bibliography

Cohu, Will. “A Writer’s Life: Reginald Hill.” The Daily Telegraph, June 23, 2005, p. O12. Hill describes how he got started in writing and how he does his writing. Contains some biographical information.

Herbert, Rosemary. The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Hill talks about his preference for character over plot and describes his childhood shyness.

Hill, Reginald. “The Plot’s the Thing.” Writer 108, no. 11 (November, 1995): 11. Hill discusses the importance of plot, saying its touchstones are pace, point of view, and continuity. Sheds light on his works. This issue of Writer also contains an interview with Hill that looks at writing mysteries.

Kirkus Reviews. Review of Death Comes for the Fat Man, by Reginald Hill. 75, no. 2 (January 15, 2007): 53. Favorable review of a Dalziel and Pascoe novel in which Fat Andy Dalziel lies in a coma for much of the work.

Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. This general work features chapters on private investigators, thrillers, and postwar British crime fiction. Add perspective to Hill’s work.

Richards, Huw. “College Drop-out Loves Life of Crime.” Times Educational Supplement, September 20, 2001, p. 34. Discusses how Hill gave up teaching to become a full-time writer and examines the Dalziel and Pascoe television series.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York, Routledge, 2005. Contains chapters on police procedurals, thrillers, and detectives.

The Yorkshire Post. “A Fresh Chapter Opens in a Life of Crime.” March 22, 2007, p. 1. Contains a discussion of Hill’s series and the popular British television series that it spawned as well as details of Hill’s personal life.