The Death of Dalziel
The Superb New Dalziel and Pascoe Novel by Reginald Hill
Reginald Hill excels himself in "The Death of Dalziel," which begins with Dalziel himself being blown up, leaving Pascoe to investigate a complex series of crimes.
The Death of Dalziel is the newest crime novel by Reginald Hill, and provides continued proof that Hill is one of the most entertaining and versatile English novelists currently writing in either “genre” or “mainstream” fiction. Hill’s characters Dalziel and Pascoe are best known from their TV incarnations by Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan, but the novels they originated in provide far more than a police procedural whodunnit.
Has The Fat Man Sung?
The Dalziel and Pascoe novels, particularly the more recent additions, are ferociously literate, and The Death of Dalziel is no different. The reader is offered epigraphs from Shakespeare, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Emily Dickinson and Sir Thomas Browne, but it is the easy incorporation of literary touches into the prose itself which puts Hill way above other crime writers who can stick a bit of Joseph Conrad above their first chapter and muse noisily about hearts and darkness.
A list of glancing references which includes T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Beowulf, John Aubrey, Christopher Marlowe and Middle English poetry sounds as if The Death of Dalziel should be stiff, pretentious and irritating, but Hill uses each for a purpose, not for ornament. However good his reading list, Hill is concerned with writing about things which could really happen to realistic people in Yorkshire - an almost aggressively real part of the world. And not all of his references are to high art: when the legend of Troy enters the narrative (previously used to some effect in Arms and the Women) it does so via Homer, Christopher Marlowe, and the Brad Pitt movie on the subject.
The Knights Templar...Yorkshire chapter
Hill’s treatment of terrorism, conspiracies and the security services, all of which are involved in The Death of Dalziel, is similarly purposeful. He avoids wild-eyed fanatics, spreading tentacles and threats to world security, yet makes his novel disturbing and exciting. The Knights Templar even make an appearance in The Death of Dalziel, not as a secret survival of the Order who have stayed underground for hundreds of years, but as a group of embittered right-wingers who assume the names of the founders of the Templars to undertake their version of an eye for an eye. As so often with Hill, the idea is incongruous, inventive, and convincing. Ideology in Dalziel and Pascoe is not the end of a puzzle, but the beginning: Hill seems more interested in how people react to big ideas like jihad, multiculturalism and rendition, how they live with them and what happens if they don’t.
As ever, Hill provides a lot of laughs and a gripping plot, via a hugely entertaining and interesting narrative style. The Death of Dalziel is a fantastic book by a writer at the height of his considerable powers.
