R.I.P. Reginald Hill

I’m veering wildly off-topic, but isolated as I am I feel the need to write something expressing my strong sense of loss at returning from a lovely ski weekend to the news that one of my favorite writers Reginald Hill has died at 75. 

I am an enthusiastic reader of classic British detective fiction – I prefer to call them “mysteries” – but having come to the genre through the work of Dorothy L. Sayers and then P. D. James I am very, very picky.  I want good writing, a complicated but realistic puzzle and strong, complex characters.  I want a solution that is based on showing me a different way of looking at something.  I want a lot of interesting local color – think Colin Dexter’s Oxford.  Hence, it’s not often that I come across a writer that can consistently provide that sigh of happy satisfaction as I settle into a new story.  Once I discovered Reginald Hill’s writing in the 1980s I was never dissatisfied, and I took great pleasure at the continued development of his work, in complexity and especially in bulk, in the years since.

I can not improve upon the words of The Telegraph’s obituary:  “Hill called himself a crime novelist, but his work owed nothing to the hard-boiled tradition of the genre. His approach was cerebral, his plots labyrinthine, his characterisations sharply etched, and his dialogue richly laced with humour. His novels bristle with shrewd perceptions and whimsical wit.”  As a historian, I would only add that his plots often made effective use of the powerful effects of past events upon the present.

Hill is best known for his series about Yorkshire policemen Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe.  Dalziel (pronounced for some indubitably British reason “DEE-el”) was the superior officer, menacingly large, obnoxiously crude but of course surprisingly brilliant, in an awkward match with slender college-educated politically correct Pascoe.  They always made a potent crime-solving team but through 24 books since 1970 their relationship deepened and evolved to the point at which in recent books they almost seemed to be switching personalities.  And there was a host of secondary characters – among them Pascoe’s girlfriend and later wife Ellie, a passionate feminist who often tangled with Dalziel, and their sergeant Edgar Wield, at first cautiously in the closet but eventually settled in a happy gay relationship – what is to become of this rich universe now that their creator has died?

I can, of course, begin to explore the many other works that Hill wrote, often under pseudonyms, in intervals between his Dalziel-Pascoe stories.  The most recent of these, The Stranger House (2005) and The Woodcutter (2010), which I happily seized upon at a London bookstore during a visit last year, were similarly richly-plotted and full of engaging characters.  I can devote myself to searching out some of these that I haven’t yet read, I suppose.  But I will greatly miss looking forward to how my old friends Pete, Andy, Ellie and Wieldy are getting on.

I knew nothing about Hill personally.  From the tributes being made by prominent British writers he seems to have been a true gentleman.  I would like to offer my condolences to Patricia Ruell, his wife of 51 years, and to their friends.  He – and the lively imaginary world he created and populated – will be greatly missed.