Tags
Book Review, Crime Fiction, Dalziel & Pascoe, On Beulah Height, Police Procedural, Reginald Hill
Drowned villages, lost daughters and the Fat Man
I was pushed towards this by a fellow blogger and Crime Queen (well crime fiction reader queen!) FictionFan, who thought this might be suitable lit ficcy for me, as I do like my dead bodies to be rather more than just a bodybag count. And if Ian Rankin also recommends Hill, who am I to demur.
This was certainly a gripping and absorbing read. Set in a partly real, partly invented area of the North Yorks Moors, it encompasses some real history that happened to real places – villages drowned to create a huge dam for urban conurbations and their water needs. Although Hill transposes these events into his enhanced locations, I have visited the area, its wildness, its beauty and its isolation and indeed read some of the history of the drowning of similar villages, and the breaking up of community.
Within this community Hill creates a police procedural around disappeared children, spanning a fifteen year period. However, the complex story is about much more than solving a crime (though that does happen)
I have never seen the TV series, and came to the relationships between the characters, the various people in the hierarchy of the police team, and the central characters of Dalziel and Pascoe themselves, completely fresh. There’s a lot of the dark side of human nature (inevitably, given the subject matter) and so the sly injections of the intentional or unintentional wit, sarcasm or irony of the major players, is welcome, as is the evidence of Hill’s wry, almost throwaway line in humour:
The sun was laying its golden blade right down the centre of the street so there was no shade to be found. Dalziel thought of following the example of the owner of the white cabriolet parked in front of him which had been left with its top down and its expensive hi-fi equipment on open offer. Surely in these ecclesiastical surroundings such confidence was justified? He wound his window down an air-admitting fraction, walked a step or two away, remembered the Church Commissioners, and returned to wind the window up as far as it would go.
However, the main thrust of this is not the humour, welcome though that it is. Incredibly tightly plotted with many false conclusions which different investigating police personnel (and this reader) come to, the final revelation for me occurred right at that final page, as the last pieces of jigsaw fell into place.
Satisfyingly, nothing felt like any sort of gratuitous red herring at all, merely an echo of the frustrating and often twisting journey of solving complex crimes, against the background of all the other investigations, events and crimes which are always going on. I guess it may only be in fiction that things may seem to be linear!
The particularly potent and intense relationship between parents and children, the sense of connection to landscape, what it is to be an outsider, the masks we wear in public and the insecurities within are all part of the web of the book, and Hill a most accomplished spider, catching this fly fast.
Glad you enjoyed it! I am now compiling a list of the Top 1000 Most Literary Crime Novels just for you… 😉
Whimpers nervously. You would, too
Incidentally (review on here tomorrow, already on the Azzes) I thoroughly recommend Robert Harris’ An Officer and A Spy. He has not falsified anything, but has used all the purely factual books about The Dreyfus Affair and approached it with a novelist’s eye.
I quite literally lost a night’s sleep last night, as i kept putting the book down, turning out the light, and thinking about it, turning the light on, reading a bit more etc etc. Which given that i did know the bare bones of it was rather extraordinary. The whole sorry saga is one that is too extraordinary to be credible as a fiction! I heard him being interviewed i think by John Humphreys about it, on Today. it is/was on Galley, and i applied for it, but never got accepted or rejected, and its clearly going to be very very popular and has no need for an ever so ‘umble reviewer in search of a freebie, so i bought it.
Serendipitously, my WW1 history wot I’m currently reading has been going on about the Dreyfus affair big time – so a well-timed recommendation! I’ve requested it from NG just in case but will add to the wish list as well…
Is that us quits? 😉
Only if NetGalley tug their forelocks to YOU and say yes, rather than pick their nails and noses and ignore you, as they did with me
Could I interest you in the fascinating book about the placenta which is probably going to be my science book of the year?
Ha! Can’t wait! Perhaps you’d like to take a look at my blog post about sheep c-sections. 😮
What with the book about the placenta and Ruth Ozeki’s book re the beef industry there is a lot of rather shocking obgyn stuff I’m wading through, sometimes discovering stuff i might have been happier not knowing. Or at least, happier not knowing the digestion side of a meal!
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