Sherry Chandler

O constant reader, here’s a hobbyhorse of mine while Sherry polishes her craft or sullen art.

I greatly admire the books of the English mystery writer Reginald Hill and cannot see why he is not better known or more highly regarded on either side of the Atlantic. J K Rowling is lionized–with some justification since she has gotten a passel of little sods prized away from xbox and telly and reading books–and Ian Rankin is a literary darling, touted as a “serious, edgy” genre writer, supposed inventor of “Tartan Noir”. But Andrew Dalziel’s allusive roots are as deep in Edinburgh as they are in any Chandler noir or McBain procedural. And I propose that Hill can outwrite almost any of his contemporaries with one dactyl tied behind his back. Or held aloft in true IMPUDICUS salute.

He has had some commercial success, especially after his Dalziel and Pascoe novels were adapted for British telly. The series ran here on A&E, but I’ve never seen it. I can’t imagine how anyone could translate Mr. Hill’s scintillant and pellucid language into that crabbed visual medium. Also, the actor portraying Pascoe is ” far too handsome” in Hill’s opinion.

Anyway, he mixes earnest with game in that same proportion which the best comic masters of English have always managed–Chaucer, Austin, Shakespeare and Sterne come to mind and they and many other artists are frequently evoked in his work. The last D&P conjured up the spirits of Jean Rhys, Emily Dickenson and Charlotte Bronte while skewering the CIA, the “Emmies” [Brit Intelligence] and the whole rationale for wee Geordie’s jolly little mideast adventure.

GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT also involved that most ancient of themes in Western Literature, the Matter of Troy. Hill mixes large doses of satire and the absurd into his troy-books. Robert Graves noted that Homer’s epics are satiric criticisms of his Danaan masters rather than historic or “epic” celebrations of the Greeks of Odysseus’ day. Hill echoes Graves’ comments repeatedly in his earlier novel, ARMS AND THE WOMEN and his treatment of the Matter in MIDNIGHT is in direct descent from Chaucer’s TROILUS, and Shakespeare’s even more satiric iteration.

Hill poses his great themes as dramatic questions and he has tested them closer to destruction as his skills have matured. He asks: What is the price of Loyalty? What constitutes a Family? Are the police THE new priestly class? How many more bumps and swerves will it take to throw his surviving coppers from their Keystone wagon? What is the Nature of a Hero? Is there any human activity more stupid and ill-considered than War?

I reccommend Hill’s novels unreservedly. To read one is like watching the slow balletic collision of a multitude of pop and “serious” cultural genres. Kurosawa and the Canterbury tales trip over the English musical stage and the grand Guinol, Dr Who morphs into a comic Odysseus before his mask slips and–why there’s Dr. Johnson. Or Falstaff. Or Andrew Dalziel, MA, Edinburgh University, one of the first literary patrons of Robert Burns, master of languages, and a poet in his own write. Sometimes one of Hill’s villains even redeems himself.

Hill’s latest effort is THE STRANGER HOUSE, published in July in England but not until October over here. It is not a Dalziel & Pascoe but the reviews paint it as congruent with his body of work. I have yet to acquire a copy but hope to rectify that soon.