The Death of Dalziel

Like Ian Rankin, Reginald Hill is often impatient with the "genre author" label.  Hill frequently and pointedly links his Dalziel and Pascoe series to canonical--or, at least, recognizably high culture--literary texts: at various times, the novels have been mock-heroic (Arms and the Women), mock-Lucian (Dialogues of the Dead), and mock-Austen (Pictures of Perfection), leavened with nods to Gustav Mahler (On Beulah Height), Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Death's Jest-Book), and Emily Dickinson (Good Morning, Midnight).  The novels burst into epistolary narrative or literary pastiche, and feature multiple or occasionally unreliable narrators; dialogue bristles with allusions that jumble classical literature with English pop culture.  For this reader, at least, Hill's experimental mode hit its high point with the triptych of Pictures of Perfection, The Wood Beyond, and On Beulah Height.  The novels that followed grew increasingly unwieldy--no offense to Sgt. Wield--without any proportional aesthetic payoff, and with some bizarre characterization glitches.  Either Hill's editor or Hill himself may have agreed, since Good Morning, Midnight was surprisingly stripped down, and The Death of Dalziel* is even starker in outline.

While Hill usually tries to stay away from explicitly topical subjects, the better not to date his novels (the characters don't age in real time),  The Death of Dalziel is very much in the world created by the War on Terror.  The key villains are the Knights Templar, a secret society of anti-Jihadist vigilantes who assassinate known and suspected terrorists; one of their bombs accidentally takes out Dalziel, who spends virtually all of the novel experiencing out-of-body states while comatose.  Pascoe, then, winds up doing the detecting, and he soon discovers that somebody in Combined Anti-Terrorism (CAT) must be connected to the Knights.   He also discovers that several keys to the mystery lie in the hands of Mid-Yorkshire CID's most famously incompetent bobby, DC Hector.  While Hill generally avoids thwacking his readers over the head with the Sledgehammer of Moral Seriousness, the fallout (or blowback) from the war clearly haunts the narrative.  The Knights Templar have all been physically or psychologically maimed by warfare, but what they see as a quest for justice has its own unintended effects--most notably, the "death" of Dalziel. 

Aside from a quick pastiche of macho adventure fiction and one amusing bout of magical realism, Hill reins himself in for most of the novel.  (He does have fun sending up the culture of book publicity, thanks to the near-total failure of Ellie Pascoe's novel.)   The cast of CID characters is as sharply reduced as Hill's more baroque stylistic quirks: the charming Shirley Novello is mentioned only once and the rather dull "Hat" Bowler is mentioned not at all.  Sgt. Wield's partner, Edwin Digweed, crops up in thought several times, but doesn't actually appear.**  (Incidentally, I'm guessing that Wield and Digweed are now the only gay couple in mainstream detective fiction to have gone through an official civil union ceremony.)  Monte the Marmoset does make a cameo, so all is not lost.  The plotting--not usually Hill's strong suit--works reasonably well here, although a key confession feels terribly unrealistic; readers will probably figure out the CAT mole long before Pascoe does (or doesn't). 

Readers familiar with the D&P novellas and short stories may be intrigued by Pascoe's moments of self-doubt near the end: "Truly, he thought, I am the great chameleon. Fat Andy and Wieldy are themselves whoever they speak to, but me, I change shape and colour and idiom according to my company" (367). Pascoe, in other words, has mastered the art of the public persona.  In One Small Step, the "final" story of the series--in terms of series chronology, not publishing chronology--Pascoe turns out to be on the side of Officialdom, not the side of Dalziel; his sudden burst of self-consciousness here possibly prefigures that later, less appealing incarnation of himself.  With any luck, though, it will be some time before we find out. 

*--Amazon, incidentally, is pre-selling the novel under its original and far more allusive title, Death Comes for the Fat Man.   
**--I admit to a partiality for Edwin Digweed, since he's an antiquarian bookseller.