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.

Jamilti and Other Stories by Rutu Modan

Jamilti and Other Stories
Rutu Modan, 2008, 120p

I previously read and reviewed Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, this is a collection of graphic short stories from earlier in her career. These stories are 10 to 30 pages each, and you can get a lot of artwork in that space, but not a lot of story. You can make up for that lack of temporal space with the depth of content that the artwork holds, but Modan is really only up to that challenge occasionally. Her line work isn't particularly expressive, and she leaves most of the atmosphere to her colour work.

Or perhaps all the elements are here, but not at the same time? There is great atmosphere and variety of perspective in "The Panty Killer", but the story is a limp mystery that didn't engage me at all. "Homecoming" is made up entirely of bold, full page panels with line and colour that put me in a Gauguin mood, and an interesting story, but thin, rote characters. "Jamilti" has an interesting story and an engaging character, but flat, clumsy line work. And so on, until the last story "Your Number One Fan", which has all the pieces in place and I think is superior to "Exit Wounds".

Which leads me to approach this as a satisfying collection of juvenilia. The reader can watch the author diddle around with various notes, before finally hitting a lovely, rich minor chord.

Except from Your Number One Fan

The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout

The League of Frightened Men
Rex Stout, 1935, 230p.

This is the second Nero Wolfe mystery, and one of the better ones. This novel and Fer-de-Lance¹ (the first) were the two selected from Stout's canon for inclusion on the Haycraft Queen Cornerstone² list of influential crime fiction. In my readings so far, these are indeed the two most worthy.

The story is enjoyable and somewhat unusual. A group of college associates are being threatened by one of their own, with good reason to believe it is the author and playwright that was accidentally crippled in one of their college pranks. Two men are dead, with the strong implication from harassing letters that it was murder. Now another man is missing, a man who had come to Wolfe for help and been turned away. Wolfe wants to cajole the whole group to sign on (and pay up) to have the case solved. As always, Wolfe is staying put, his investigations take the form of reading the potential culprit's books and plays. The street-level action is left to narrator and sideman Goodwin and a long standing group of contract footmen.

Like many of the Wolfe stories, the business angle is as much a part of the intrigue as the crimes. In fact, in this story, Wolfe's chess game with his clients easily takes up as many words as the putative crimes under investigation. Or perhaps I should say, a key dimension of the mystery here is how Wolfe plans to lure customers and execute his contracts.

The artful turn of phrase that I enjoyed so much in Fer-de-Lance is less present here, though not gone. Stout came to these two novels after a series of failures at writing literary fiction, and you can tell. At times playful with sentence and imagery, the narrative feels much more like Archie's voice than the later works I have read. Later works, like The Doorbell Rang seem to have narrative language that melts away from the reader and lets the action sit in the foreground largely unadorned (though the dialogue remains fairly sharp and contorted). Knowing little about Stout's progress, I am inclined to believe that his sense of his audience (boys and young men) evolved, and he dialed up the action and dialed down the language play. This certainly makes the later works more accessible. While he never strips matters to the dial-tone dumb of a Hardy Boys novel, it has dampened my favourite dimension of his work.

As with many of the Wolfe books, don't try to figure out the motivations of any of the secondary characters. The secondary characters are scenery, and trying to understand them as people is like wanting backstory for the fire escape. Actually, given some of Stout's notes included in this series's printing, I think that the fire escape is more likely to have backstory than most of the characters.

Notes:

1. I previously reviewed Fer-de-Lance
2. The Haycraft Queen Cornerstone is a list of influential crime fiction written before 1952 (when the list was last amended).