bookshelves of doom

A Pinch of Snuff: Dalziel and Pascoe, #5 -- Reginald Hill

A Pinch of Snuff is set about a year after An April Shroud.

A local controversy about pornography, a snuff film, a dentist accused of sexually assaulting a young patient, arson, S&M, and, of course, murder.

Some good bits:

[Pascoe] felt annoyed.  She could please herself what she thought about his manners, but further than that she could get stuffed.  Dalziel again.  I'll be scratching my groin next, he thought in alarm.

...

Distasteful though it was to have to bow to ratiocinative powers wielded like a shillelagh, Pascoe had to admit that [Dalziel] was right.

...

Dalziel, he knew, would never be kind out of mere sentiment.  Something had rung a bell with him, distantly perhaps but clear enough to make him hesitate the blasting, blaspheming, coruscating scorn that was his favorite response to the vague and the absurd.

...

Dalziel rolled his eyes heavenwards in what was doubtless intended as an expression of bewildered piety but came out more like a lecherous peek up God's skirts.

...

"Come on, Peter.  You youngsters are all the same.  You've forgotten what your feet are for!"

Pascoe looked at the fat behind he was following and remembered wistfully one thing a foot was for.

Also, it should be noted that in this book, Dalziel enjoyed what might have been his longest scratch yet -- he started at the beginning of a conversation with Pascoe and was just barely "reaching the end of his scratch" when the conversation ended three pages later.  Yuck.  But also awesome.

I've decided that I really to make some sort of "I Heart Fat Andy" t-shirt.

An April Shroud: Dalziel & Pascoe, #4 -- Reginald Hill

Pascoe and Ellie are off on their honeymoon and Dalziel is on holiday.  Dalziel's luck being what it is, one day into his vacation a flooded-out road claims his car and he finds himself "rescued"* by a floating funeral procession. 

It doesn't take long for the grieving family to be treated to one of my favorite Dalziel-moods:  RAGE:

Tillotson drove the punt forward into a half-submerged hedge, the bows rose in the air, Tillotson screamed and went over the side, Uniff and Dalziel fell together in a tangled heap from which Dalziel recovered just in time to see his suitcase slowly toppling into the water.

Furious, he rose and put his huge hand into the face of Tillotson who was trying to clamber back on board.

"My case!" he yelled.  "Get my bloody case!"

Recognizing that this was an essential condition of re-admittance, Tillotson pursued the case which had floated only a few feet but was sinking fast.  Dalziel took it out of his hands and tried to drain it as, unassisted, the blond youth dragged himself on board, his exertions freeing the punt from the hedge.  Uniff all the while took pictures, including one of the pole which for once had not become embedded in the mud but was floating away at a distance of some twenty feet.

Dalziel banged his case down with a force that nearly brought on a new disaster.

He is taken home by the (strangely light-hearted) mourners and bullies his way into staying at the house until his car is repaired.  It doesn't take long for him to become interested in the circumstances of the recent death.

You can't beat Reginald Hill.  That's all that really needs to be said.

*If you're familiar with Dalziel, you'll understand why the quotation marks are there.  If not, you're missing out in a big, big way.

A Very Good Hater -- Reginald Hill

This isn't part of the Dalziel/Pascoe series.  It's a stand-alone tale of accidental death, sketchy business deals, war crimes, romance and revenge.  Reginald Hill's prose is true-to-form:

"Hold on," said Goldsmith, suddenly full of guilt at his outburst.  A few drinks quickly brought out a latent sentimental vein in him.  Templewood might be an egotistical sexual obsessive who fancied himself as a detective, but there were strong bonds of experience holding them together.

So far, my favorite of his stand-alones is The Stranger House.  But this one was pretty fun.  Although I knew who the baddie was pretty early on, there were other plot lines that kept me guessing all the way through.  I've come to the conclusion that every Reginald Hill book is worth reading at least once.

The Stranger House -- Reginald Hill

Reginald Hill's new book isn't a Dalziel/Pascoe mystery.  It's a stand-alone novel set in Cumbria:

This was the setting of my formative and is the setting of my degenerative years and I feel some natural unease at locating on my own doorstep a story which is full of eccentric people often behaving badly.  So let me state without reservation that the valley of Skaddale and its village of Illthwaite are entirely figments of my imagination.  Their names, population, history and topography are invented, and they bear no relation other than the most basically generic to any real places.

This means that my dear friends, my excellent neighbors, and indeed all occupants, native or new-come, of this loveliest of landscapes can rest peacefully in their beds.

And so can their lawyers.

My heroine's terms of reference are mathematical, my hero's religious.

No theologian or mathematician I have met provides a model here.

Yet, despite the above disclaimers, it should be remembered that just as theologians and mathematicians use impossibilities, such as the square root of minus one or the transubstantiation of wine into blood, to express their eternal verities, so it is with writers and their fictions.

In other words, just because I've made it all up doesn't mean it isn't true.

After reading that except from the introduction, I don't know why you'd need any more convincing. 

(But if you do, I loved it.  In The Stranger House, you get a ghost, stigmata, two unsolved mysteries--one from two generations back and one from the sixteenth century, priest-holes, a crucifixion, Norse mythology, a pissed-off Australian mathematician who slings bizarre slang and a blacksmith named Thor.  And that's just off the top of my head.  There's way more.)

(It starts out slowly (in a good way, not in a dragging way) and just gains momentum.  By the middle, I was so hooked that I was reading in the car.  I would read a chapter, stop to let the nausea pass, and then read another chapter.)

Ruling Passion: Dalziel and Pascoe, #3 -- Reginald Hill

Pascoe and Ellie are late for a reunion with old friends.  When they finally get there, three of the four friends are dead, murdered by someone wielding a shotgun.  The fourth friend is missing. 

Meanwhile, Dalziel is dealing with a string of burglaries.

For me, these books really aren't about the mysteries.  Which isn't to say that they aren't good--they are.  As police procedural mystery novels go, these are some of the best out there.  They're so well written.  And funny--but in a smart, sometimes-I-have-to-re-read-the-paragraph-to-make-sure-that-I-read-it-right kind of way. 

But (again, for me) the mysteries are secondary to the characters themselves.  Seeing their relationships change slowly from book to book, learning more and more about them (especially Dalziel--how can he not be everyone's favorite?) and well, just following their lives...  I like all that even more than the mysteries themselves.

For instance:

The old Dalziel logic.  Pascoe drank the last of his beer.  He must be reaching maturity; he hardly felt even slightly irritated.

See?  See how much closer Dalziel and Pascoe have become?  Pascoe almost doesn't want to strangle him now!  And hell!  Ellie's even going out for drinks with him:

Ellie stood up clutching her handbag to her stomach.  "I was right about you," she said clearly.  "You're a heartless old bastard."

"Are you going?" asked Dalziel.

"Only to the loo.  I'll have another gin when I get back."

I love them.

An Advancement of Learning, Dalziel and Pascoe, #2 -- Reginald Hill

The first Dalziel/Pascoe mystery was set in an environment that Dalziel found completely comfortable--a rugby club.  This book, the second mystery, is just the opposite; the setting is a college campus, so it's Pascoe who's more at ease.  Then again, how uncomfortable does Dalziel ever get?

It might be interesting to hear what they say, he thought as he closed the door behind him.  But it'd only have curiosity value.  He rarely questioned his own powers of perception, but he now admitted he'd probably have difficulty in taking in whatever the hell it was they were going on about.  They seemed to treat words as things of power, not as tools.  They could get stuffed.  He had work to do.

Holm Coultram College is bulldozing a memorial garden to build a new science wing.  To do so, a large bronze statue (nude female) has to be moved.  Not too surprisingly, a skeleton (with trailing red hair, no less) is uncovered.  Dalziel and Pascoe are called in.  Over the course of the investigation, they discover that a student has brought charges of sexual misconduct and grade tampering up against a teacher.  They also discover what might be a Satanic cult.  To make matters more confusing, an old flame of Pascoe's teaches at the school.  Dalziel reaches new heights of vugarity (not too high, though--it's only the second book) and the detectives' working relationship is still a little rough around the edges:

Jauntily he left the room.  Pascoe had to close the door behind him.  He jerked two fingers at the solid oak panels.

When he turned round he found two students solemnly staring at him through the large open window.  They nodded approvingly, each tapped the side of his nose with the forefinger, and they went on their way.  Despite the heat, Pascoe closed the window before he started telephoning.

I'm in love with these books.

A Fairly Dangerous Thing -- Reginald Hill

Eh.  It was okay.

It was like a watered-down cross between Tom Sharpe and Donald Westlake.

A Clubbable Woman: Dalziel and Pascoe, #1 -- Reginald Hill

This is the first Dalziel/Pascoe novel.  It's going to be a lot of fun reading the series through in order.  I suspect that they just get better and better. 

If I had read this one first, I'd have been really impressed with it--since I'd already read one of his later novels, I already knew what he's capable of--but in comparison with Bones and Silence, it was kind of weak.  (Of course, a weak Reginald Hill novel is still better than a lot of stuff out there).

In some mysteries, the main characters are great, but everyone else might as well be cut from cardboard.  Not these.  Like the Carol O'Connell books I've been reading, the characters are real people, fully fleshed out--not just Dalziel and Pascoe, but all of the secondary characters.  I especially liked Antony, the boyfriend of the murdered woman's daughter, who attempts to help the investigation:

"Oh please, Sergeant.  I would not presume to try to do your job.  No, I haven't come down here with suggestions--that would be presumptuous--but with information, or what might be.  This chap had obviously been watching Mrs. Connon in her bedroom, from the street almost certainly, or the garden.  When I was waiting at the Connons the other night before you all so efficiently arrested me, I had occasion to use the phone-box almost opposite the house.  I rang my parents to say where I was.  I also took the opportunity of giving them Mr. Connon's phone number so they could contact me if they wished.  To do this, I had to look in the directory."

"And?"

"And it was heavily underlined."

He's lucky that he was talking to Pascoe.  Dalziel might have strangled him for taking so long to get to the point.

Bones and Silence: Dalziel and Pascoe, #11 -- Reginald Hill

I still don't know how I lived with Collomia for as long as I did without reading any of the Reginald Hill mysteries. As I read it, I kicked myself for waiting until now--but now that I've had a little more time to reflect, I'm happy that I still have 20 of them left.

I realize that this book is pretty late in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, but it was the earliest one that I happened to have at home (pub. date 1990--the series started in 1970), so I read it anyway. Phew. If they're all like this one, it really is a wonderful set of books. (Not that I ever doubted you, Collomia).

It was just a joy to read:

The tenant of Badger Farm turned out to be as stingy with words as he was with fuel till Dalziel's threat of RSPCA and Environmental Health inspectors touched a lingual nerve. Then he recalled noting Bluebell's arrival some four weeks earlier. He kept a close eye on it for a while, suspicious that it should remain so long in such an unattractive mooring. But once assured that its sole occupants were a man and a woman with no kids, no dogs, and no desire to trespass on his land and bother him for milk, eggs, or fresh water, he'd lost interest. He was a man of no curiousity and less sympathy. He remarked that he'd spotted the man wading around in the canal a couple of times with what he assumed was a fishing rod. "Though what the stupid sod was looking to catch, God alone knows. There've been no fish in that cut since the First War."

"You likely pointed this out" said Dalziel.

"Nay! Let folk find out their own errors, that's my way."

It seemed a not unattractive philosophy, so Dalziel did not tell the farmer that he'd set the RSPCA and Environmental Health people on to him anyway.

Reginald Hill isn't one of the annoying authors that re-introduces everybody at the beginning of every book--it took a little while to catch up, but I eventually had everyone straight. I did, however, go ahead and order the first book in the series, A Clubbable Woman, over Alibris--it seems to be out of print, in the States, at least. It will be a lot of fun to read them all in order--if I can handle the waiting. I hate waiting.