An April Shroud by Reginald Hill

An April Shroud
Reginald Hill, 1975, 256p.
Series: Dalziel & Pascoe #4

A couple of years ago, I was having a terrible time reading fiction. My mind was constantly flooded with thoughts about my job and other aspects of my life, and my brain seemed incapable of engaging with the sorts of books I really wanted to read. I wanted to read literary fiction with evocative language and challenging ideas, and I would exhaust myself in a few pages and find the words simply flowing past me, and my brain crunching on the details of my day.

The solution was series detective fiction, and the series was P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh novels. These books were full of small evocative language and small challenging ideas, cushioned with comfort and familiarity. The hero becomes familiar, the landscape becomes familiar, and the form of the story is familiar. They were indulgences without being indulgent, guilty pleasures without shame. Whenever I got discouraged with some more adventurous reading, the next Dalgliesh book could be summoned from the library and a joyful reprieve was at hand. Until, naturally, I ran out. There are only fourteen Dalgliesh books and my discipline with such things is poor.

There are 24 Dalziel & Pascoe books, and no more are forthcoming¹, but this is my new go-to series for an invigorating indulgence. And this February required such an indulgence.

Ruling Passion, the previous novel in the series², was mostly a showcase for Pascoe. Dalziel played a significant role, but we got very little internal view into him. An April Shroud opens at Pascoe and Ellie's wedding, with a precarious wedding toast from Dalziel. Pascoe heads off on honeymoon, and Dalziel conspicuously takes the opportunity for a holiday. He has lost his enthusiasm, and there is a hint of dismay at Pascoe's coupling. The April shroud here (from Keats³) is the melancholy that has fallen over Dalziel — and if you don't picture melancholy as something that Dalziel would entertain, you are in agreement with Dalziel.

The shroud is also the rain and flooding that immediately descends on Dalziel's holiday. After a very odd aquatic funeral procession, he finds himself stranded at the crumbling manor house of the Fieldings. Naturally, the circumstances of the death are questionable, and we feel confident that there will be additional bodies to follow in time. At least Hill inverts the Jessica Fletcher syndrome in this novel (as in the last) — the initial crime happens before the sleuth arrives, not after. More comedic and light than Ruling Passion, we have a dozen or so characters bouncing around to little particular end in this manor house. Too many, really, and Hill can't dedicate enough space to make even half of them interesting enough. In an on-duty mystery, the duo could knock on a door and question an old lady for a scene and we don't require a lot of commitment to the character. But in a bottle mystery like this, that old lady would hang around in the background, conspicuously uninvolved. Not that there are many old ladies in this bottle, but there are certainly two incidental sisters too many.

The Fieldings are an eccentric family, with eccentric hangers on. Some of it holds together reasonably well. The deceased's father is an aging famous poet, paranoid, irritable and tormented by the lack of opportunities his age affords him. An anarchist film-maker friend of the older son, is essentially squatting at the manor with his sister (yes, an incidental one.) But the matriarch of the family feels an oddly false fresh widow, and is an unlikely romantic leading woman to Dalziel's stupendously unlikely romantic leading man. To his credit, Dalziel finds the situation improbable too, and the potential that she is manipulating him hangs in the air.

That no one particularly seems upset by the initial death, nor the inevitable deaths that follow is remarked on but never explained. Embezzlement, theft, fraud, murder, pornography and prostitution all pop up in the walls of this manor, and in the end Dalziel never really gets a satisfying account. At least the deaths are presumed sorted out and murderers apprehended; Dalziel has his theories, but he is never really on the case, only tangled in it.

But the crimes and mysteries here are just background noise really. This is an outing for Dalziel, and all the interesting activities take place in his stout head. Hill unleashes him in the soggy countryside, gives him some self-doubt to work his way through with a romance and something close to a friend — the elderly poet stands in for Pascoe in a number of ways, but with the power structure and balance of gruffness shuffled about. And where Pascoe spent a lot of his solo time reflecting and comprehending, Dalziel spends his time being and hunching. Dalziel outside of his job is a much more likeable man, and I wished that Hill could have sent him on vacation without being forced to bring murder along for the ride.

This is an entertaining novel, but not a particularly good detective novel. The action is either offscreen or inexplicable and slapsticky. Half of the crimes either aren't crimes or aren't solved. Dalziel can't decide for most of the novel whether he should investigate seriously — and if he does investigate, how much he can keep from the on-duty police without losing conscience? As an outing with Dalziel, it gives us the series first deep look at his character, and it is worthwhile for that reason. Not that the writing isn't strong, nor is the atmosphere thin, but I have to admit that the plot is not strong, and the secondary characters thin too.

Notes:

1. Reginald Hill passed away last month at the age of 75.
2. I previously reviewed Ruling Passion, number three in the series.
3. The title is taken from Keats' Ode on Melancholy, though the inspiration took less of a framing role than in some of the earlier novels. Though perhaps I was simply less alert to it.

Ruling Passion by Reginald Hill

Ruling Passion
Reginald Hill, 1973, 328p.

I have always had something of a bias against the "this time it hits close to home" trope in fiction. In detective fiction, I enjoy when cases have personal resonances for our detectives, but generally I don't like when they have actual personal connections. This bias puts a damper on my enjoyment of movie thrillers, where invariably the hero's family is at risk or requires avenging.

The most obvious reason for this bias is that it seems pretty improbable and needlessly manipulative. How many times in reality has a detective had to go rogue and solved a case before his colleagues catch up with him because they believe him to be the killer? How many times does the hero cop catch up with the real murderer during the same climactic moment his reticent partner catches up with him? It cannot be a large number.

A less obvious reason is that one of the points of a hero is that they do their jobs skillfully and exhaustively even when it is someone else's family at risk, or someone else's wife's murder that needs solving, or someone else's name that needs clearing. The heroic ideal is the person that goes into the burning building to save the person he doesn't know. Part of the joy of a great detective story is that compulsion to make things right that can never be made right again. The sense that they can fulfill an important role that changes things, but doesn't change anything.

So, I was disappointed when I saw where the first chapter of Ruling Passion was headed: Detective Pascoe and now-girlfriend Ellie Soper arrive late for a weekend reunion with out of town college friends only to discover three of their friends savagely murdered, and the fourth missing. This is the third outing for Detective Superintendent Dalziel and his Sergeant Pascoe¹, and Pascoe here is out of his beat, functioning as a shocked and troubled witness rather than an investigator. Dalziel almost doesn't figure in the first third of the novel; he is working away on a string of robberies. The partnership between the two heros is disrupted, and Pascoe's role is disrupted.

Despite my bias, Hill kept me moving, and this outing is in fact the best in the series so far. Pascoe profited from the fish-out-of-water routine, with trenchant observation on his position as a policeman but not an investigator. Pascoe also reflects on grief and shock eloquently (though the voice feels more authorial here), and Hill's writing-in-the-small is tremendous.

As with the last novel, the writing-in-the-large stretches credibility. In An Advancement of Learning, I was more forgiving of this: the character work was stellar, and the characters and the setting largely felt very real. Only the logic of the crime was incredible, and you cut yourself off from too much detective fiction if you cannot forgive a preposterous crime². Or perhaps the problem is that the interactions and reflections of our three series characters (Dalziel, Pascoe and Ellie) are so interesting that you indulge the actual crime investigations only grudgingly. There is murder, fraud, robbery, a suicide attempt and likely more here, and naturally all of it is somewhat implausibly connected, though mercifully not in an "evil genius" or conspiratorial manner. It is interesting enough, incredible but not fantastical, but you shortly wish he would get back to the scuffling between our heros.

The highlight of the book and the low point of the book both rotate around Ellie Soper, Pascoe's girlfriend. The highlight is the introduction of the relationship between Dalziel and Ellie, a relationship of rambunctious tensions. Hill knows these characters intimately, and the reader feels that he only has to put them in a room or on the phone together to have their interactions appear on the page. Dalziel is coarse, meticulously thoughtless, and chauvinist largely for the charm of provocation. Ellie is a strong, smart "modern" young woman³, self-possessed but only casually combative. Dalziel forces an upper hand in an early encounter with a shock attack, but a rematch over beer is endearing in its dance of mutual restraint.

The low point brings us back around to our "this time it hits close to home" trope. If you venture into this territory to generate drama and develop characters, you have to take all the characters along for the ride. Pascoe's reaction to finding his friends brutally murdered is moderately believable: he is a policeman, and he is inured to some aspects of the shock. Grief falls over him, and the combination of the familiar shock and the unfamiliar shock is handled well in the early story. Ellie has little preparation for such a shock, and is whisked away and sedated. Her shock and trauma has moments of reality, but for the purposes of his story, Hill is forced to let it melt away much too quickly. Tough though she may be, the stroll from the bloody scene of a massacre to a sparring banter session in a pub is surely a long one. In this regard, as with some of the writing around the crime, Hill is writing a detective novel from a generation earlier: the body is found, and shortly tea will be served in the drawing room.

That can all be forgiven of authors 80 years ago and of authors today, but I can't so easily forgive taking one character on one journey of discovery while another quickly slides through a trap door into her own expedient developments at great odds with reality.

I've been promised that Hill's novels keep getting better and better, and so far this is deeply affirmed. Hill is getting brave with his characters, and while I think he overreached a bit here, the bravery keeps things moving forward.

Notes:

1. I reviewed An Advancement of Learning previously, the second Dalziel and Pascoe novel.
2. The preposterous murder is perhaps the great tradition of detective fiction, from the exotic poison snake in the sock drawer to the tampered parachute. Hill's murders themselves are realistic so far in the series: firearms or blunt force trauma, usually unpremeditated. It is the scenarios around the murders that are generally the issue, mostly, in my opinion, the challenge with motives.
3. Written as it was in 1973, Ellie isn't remotely contemporary, but she is largely written as progressive for the time, thus "modern".

An Advancement of Learning by Reginald Hill

An Advancment of Learning
Reginald Hill, 1971, 254p

The second novel featuring Dalziel and Pascoe, Reginald Hill's Yorkshire detectives. I read the first novel about a year ago, and wasn't immediately inspired to continue with the series. One of the problems with reading mystery series from the beginning is that the first volume is rarely great. The author is figuring out the characters, the setting, and finding their voice and angle - even more so if this is the authors first series. For example, the first outings of P.D. James's Dalgliesh and Ian Rankin's Rebus - not terrible, but obviously not ready.

Hill's second outing is much more enjoyable. A series of grotesquely improbable murders occurs on a small and somewhat remote college campus. The setting is cozy-style - an insulated and incestuous knot of suspects, but appropriately for its time (the early 1970s) it is lashed through with generational and sexual tension, not to mention generational and sexual experimentation. Superintendent Dalziel is older, corpulent, coarse and direct. His sergeant, Pascoe, is young and university educated - a rarity in a policeman at the time. Pascoe's social science education is a target for constant mockery Dalziel, and the academic setting exacerbates his scorn.

Though credibility is stretched from the starter's pistol, the story is interesting and well told. Hill excels with his secondary characters, though he is more aggressive with scorn and with lust than most. The old maids are generally savaged, and the campus sweater candy is drenched in drool. Largely filtered through the protagonists, the sexism is era-appropriate, though somewhat dissonant to my 21st century ears.

Like James, Hill is concerned with the lives and histories of the primary figures in his mysteries, rather than the mechanics of crime. It makes a richer story, and Hill's writing is thoughtful without being heavy. In this case, though, the climax leaves us with sort of limp motivations for the central crimes. In this book, as with the first, Hill's crimes are improbable and his mysteries a bit soggy, but the thoughtful writing and considered characters makes the flaws easy to forgive.