DALZIEL &
DICKENS:
The Detective
Fiction of Reginald Hill
“Reginald Hill’s stories must
certainly be
among the best now being written, and with each successive book he
seems to be
widening his range. He reverses the
normal priorities of detective fiction: character is always more
important than
plot – although plot, and well-constructed, too, there always most
undoubtedly
is.”
–
T.J. Binyon, Times Literary Supplement, 26th
December 1980
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Although he has been writing crime stories featuring
the fat, coarse and cunning Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and the more
sensitive Inspector Pascoe since the publication of A
Clubbable Woman in 1970, it was not until the appearance of Recalled to Life in 1992 that Hill
showed what he was really capable of: an extremely long and complex
detective novel
with a plot spanning decades and continents, characters who are neither
black
nor white but a mixture of the two (as we all are), humour and tragedy
in equal
measure, and a shocking – yet inevitable – ending.
Since that time he has given us the sparkling
Austen pastiche, Pictures of Perfection;
the Great War novel The Wood Beyond,
which, despite some arbitrariness in the solution (a fault to which
Hill, like many
of his contemporaries, has been prone), pushed the boundaries of the
genre; the
breathtaking On Beulah Height, with
its drowned village, missing children and chief clue hidden in full
sight on
the first page; and the linguistic tour de force Dialogues
of the Dead. Since
the publication of Recalled to Life,
which borrowed its title and theme from A
Tale of Two Cities, Hill has been the Dickens of the detective
story, using
a popular form to say something serious.
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What's New:
These pages copyright Nicholas Lester Fuller,
2000--2010. Created 5th December 2004.
