Random Quotes That Express How Much I Love Reginald Hill

For those of you who don’t read his books, Reginald Hill writes the Dalziel and Pascoe novels set in Mid-Yorkshire CID: I mentioned how frustrated I was by the television treatment of these books in this earlier post, but this disconnected post (I’ve been Christmas shopping and trying to cook with, you know, vegetables and stuff, so I’m tired) is about the books themselves.

The series started with A Clubbable Woman in 1970, and the most recent book was published this year, though I personally haven’t read anything after 2002’s Death’s Jest-Book.

In this earlier thread on puzzles I’ve noticed in Agatha Christie novels, we segued in the comments thread into a discussion of Poirot’s age, and how an elderly detective can be a problem in detective fiction. There’s something of a problem with this in the Dalziel and Pascoe novels: Pascoe is relatively young in the first book, a newly minted Detective Sergeant, albeit one with a university degree, so slightly older than colleagues who went straight from school to Hendon. He does age as the books advance, but it seems to me that he ages more slowly than time passes.

The second book, for example, An Advancement of Learning (1971), is clearly set in 1971: there are documents and objects within the novel that explicitly date the action. Similarly, On Beulah Height (1998) definitely takes place in the mid to late 1990s, but twenty-seven years have not passed in Pascoe’s private life—his daughter is still a young girl. Once we move into Death’s Jest-Book, in which Pascoe’s nemesis Franny Roote reappears but should be at least fifty-three years old by a conventional reckoning of the time that’s passed since his first appearance, we know time is moving at two speeds inside the books, as it does in most detective fiction.

That doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of the books, any more than an awareness that Poirot is incredibly old in the later books destroys my enjoyment of Agatha Christie (but it is an aspect of detective fiction that fascinates me right now).

(What does bother me is the completely backwards attitude to the novels and television series on the Wikipedia page from which I’ve been getting my publication dates. The brief section on the television series on this page offers this tidbit: “The TV and novel continuities are separate, so both Ellie and Wield still appear in the most recent books despite having been written out of the TV series.” Yep: put that the other way around, and you may have something. Hill is not actually obligated to follow the continuity of the television programme, you know.)

Ranting aside, it might be time for the random quotes portion of the evening, as promised in the title.

On Yorkshiremen in general:

[Ted] Agar was only paid to keep the place ticking over for half a day five days a week, but he liked to keep a closer eye on things, especially on weekends when potential customers, on discovering the Centre was closed, were not above excavating a couple of young bushes and tossing them in the boot before driving off. The previous day, Saturday, he had been otherwise engaged, watching Yorkshire prod their way to a draw in a County Championship match. Today however there was only a one-day game on offer and Agar believed that if God had wanted cricket to end in a day, He’d have rested on Tuesday instead of waiting till the end of the week. (A Killing Kindness, 1980. HarperCollins 2003 re-issue, 307-08)

On the implacability of Dalziel:

But this didn’t affect Dalziel’s gut feeling that this wasn’t one to counter with subtle defensive tactics, this was one to hit in mid-flight with a hospital tackle!

Such was the conclusion he reached after long dark brooding, and now the light of action came back to his eyes, and he rose like that famous bull from the sea summoned by Theseus to destroy his own son as he fled from the scene of his monstrous crime.

Of course, Hippolytus was completely innocent, but Theseus didn’t know that, and it made not a jot of difference to the bull. (Death’s Jest-Book, 2002. HarperCollins 2003 paperback, 312)

And the ambiguity of Pascoe, from probably my favourite of the books:

There had been a time when life seemed a smooth learning curve, a steady progress from childish frivolity through youthful impetuosity to mature certainty, which would occur somewhere in early middle age, whenever that was, but you’d recognize it by waking one morning and being aware that you’d stopped feeling nervous about making after-dinner speeches, you really believed the political opinions you aired at dinner parties, you no longer felt impelled to tie your left shoelace before your right to avoid bad luck, and you didn’t have to read the instruction book every time you programmed a video. (On Beulah Height, 1998. HarperCollins Best Reads paperback, 106)

The books aren’t consistent: the early ones are good detective fiction, but far less complex and not as rich as the later ones.

As I say, the one that pulled me in was On Beulah Height, which is simultaneously a song of praise to and a eulogy for the Yorkshire dales, a book so devastating that it cannot possibly end well—and doesn’t.

But, then, that’s not uncommon for the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, at least in the later ones. They don’t always get their man—sometimes they can’t, but sometimes they don’t even know they’ve missed him.

And while I like a good parlour scene, it’s this ambiguity—in the characterisation and the mysteries—that appeals to me in these novels.

That and the fact that I just can’t be offended by Dalziel, no matter how hard he tries.

And try he does.