by John Lennard - Humanities-Ebooks

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Running Head  1

Genre Fiction Sightlines  A Guide to

Reginald Hill On Beulah Height

by John Lennard

Publication Data Text © John Lennard, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copyright in images and in quotations remains with the sources given. Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright materials. If any have not been traced the author will be glad to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk. Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-035-6

Reginald Hill: On Beulah Height John Lennard

Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author John Lennard took his B.A. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, and his M.A. at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught in the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame, and for the Open University, and is now Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2/e, OUP, 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002), and the Literature Insights Hamlet (2007). He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, and has written Sightlines on works by Octavia E. Butler, Ian McDonald and Walter Mosley. His critical collection Of Serial readers and other essays on genre fiction (2007), published simultaneously with this e-book, launches the Monographs Series.

Contents 1. Notes 1.1 Reginald Hill 1.2 The Dalziel & Pascoe Series 1.2.1 The Series 1.2.2 The Regular Cast 1.2.3 Mid-Yorkshire and Northern English Speech 1.2.4 TV Adaptations 1.3 Police Ranks in England and Wales 1.4 Beulah in the Bible and in Bunyan 1.5 Rückert’s and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder 1.5.1 Background 1.5.2 The German texts and literal translations 1.6 Thatcherism and Water Privatisation 1.7 Serial Killing and Paedophilia 1.8 Meningococcal Meningitis 2. Annotations

2.1 Epigraphs 2.2 Day One: A Happy Rural Seat of Various View 2.3 Day Two: Nina and the Nix 2.4 Day Three: The Drowning of Dendale 2.5 Day Four: Songs for Dead Children

3. Essay: Singing the Sadness of On Beulah Height 4. Bibliography

4.1 Works by Reginald Hill 4.2 Works about Reginald Hill and Crime Writing 4.3 Useful Reference Works

6

1. Notes 1.1 Reginald Hill Reginald Charles Hill was born in 1936, in West Hartlepool in Northern England. His mother, Isabel née Dickson (1907–98) was a factory worker who loved Golden-Age © Reginald Hill crime writing, and his father was a professional football (soccer) player at a time when sportsmen were poorly paid, so his background was very proletarian but reading was privileged. The family moved to the Lake District in 1939, and Hill later attended Carlisle Grammar School, from which he won a place to read English at St Catherine’s College in Oxford. He did National Service without distinction or danger 1955–7, went up in 1957, graduated in 1960, and immediately married his childhood sweetheart, Patricia Ruell. After some odd jobs Hill became a teacher, in Essex (1962–7) and then at Doncaster College of Further Education, in Yorkshire (1967–81), where he rose to Senior Lecturer before becoming a full-time writer in 1981. Hill had begun writing prose fiction in the mid-1960s, and from 1970 published prolifically, producing (to date) more than 50 novels and collections of short stories under four names. In addition to the 20 Dalziel & Pascoe novels, Hill writes superior stand-alone crime and supernatural tales, while ‘Patrick Ruell’ has written eight thrillers, ‘Charles Underhill’ two historical romances, and ‘Dick Morland’ (in Hill’s early days) two political thrillers. All the work is enjoyable, and from the mid-1970s increasingly substantive as well as richly comic and intertextual, so that Hill’s career as a whole strongly bears out his avowed intention of writing crime novels to high literary standards. Since retiring from teaching at 45 Hill has preferred to let his books do the talking, but he has over the years published a number of critical essays and introductions that reveal a wise, wry, and thoughtful critic of his chosen genre/s. There are also some excellent interviews, but Hill is also a wise, wry, and very elusive interviewee, who sensibly prefers not to analyse himself when others have such fun doing it for him. He now lives in the Lake District, is a keen fell-walker, and remains, as he has always been, an avid reader.

7 1.2 The Dalziel and Pascoe Series 1.2.1 The Series The 20 Dalziel & Pascoe (D.-&-P.) novels are, in order of publication 1 : A Clubbable Woman (1970). An Advancement of Learning (1971). Ruling Passion (1973). An April Shroud (1975). A Pinch of Snuff (1978). A Killing Kindness (1980). Deadheads (1983). Exit Lines (1984). Child’s Play: a tragi-comedy in three acts of violence with a prologue and an epilogue (1987). Under World (1988). Bones and Silence 1990). (CWA Gold Dagger, Best Crime Novel, 1990.) Recalled to Life (1992). Pictures of Perfection: A Dalziel and Pascoe novel in five volumes (1994). The Wood Beyond (1996). On Beulah Height (1998). (Barry Award, Best Novel, 1999.) Arms and the Women: an Elliad (2000). Dialogues of the Dead: or Paronomania! an aged worm for wept royals a warm doge for top lawyers a word game for two players (2001). Death’s Jest-Book (2002). Good Morning, Midnight (2004) The Death of Dalziel (2007) 2

There is also one D.-&-P. collection, Asking for the Moon (1994), containing two novellas, ‘Pascoe’s Ghost’ & ‘One Small Step’, and two stories, ‘Dalziel’s Ghost’ & ‘The Last National Serviceman’. There are also seven uncollected D.-&-P. stories written for newspapers, magazines, and anthologies—‘Auteur Theory’, ‘Where the Snow Lay Dinted’, ‘A Candle for Christmas’, ‘Brass Monkey’, ‘A Gift for Father Christmas’, ‘The Game of Dog’, and ‘Fool of Myself’.3 1 2 3

Full details in the Bibliography. Don’t worry! The title’s a tease. The stories have been variously published; full details in the Bibliography.

8 As the staggered dates of publication suggest, Hill did not (before 2001–2) write consecutive D.-&-P. books, giving him time to consider what he wanted to do with the series, and the novels have grown steadily more complex and ambitious. From the beginning they were clever, entertaining, and gave something serious to chew on. From the mid-1980s they grew exponentially in gravitas and range to encompass subjects including the Miners’ Strike and its consequences; the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, a serial killer of the late 1970s, and his legacy; the activities of the security services, MI5 and MI6; animal-rights activism; and paedophilia. The novels are allusive and intertextual, not only in their titles and epigraphs but in using inset-texts and weaving quotations (some acknowledged, some not) into dialogue and narrative. They also summon and measure themselves against highcanonical literature from Shakespeare and Milton to Austen and Dickens, yet rarely leave the largely realistic and necessarily brutal world of murder and investigation— a combination from which Hill draws ever-expanding and deepening resonance. He is also a superb comic writer—and while series novelists have to be comedic, as their protagonists survive, they are by no means necessarily comic. Hill’s metaphors for his Unholy Trinity—Dalziel’s fatness & unstoppability, Pascoe’s fastidiousness & imagination, and Wield’s ugliness & efficiency—are often memorable, summoning P. G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh as much as any crime writer. And the combination of wry laughter and open mockery with an unflinching gravitas in analysing crimes is a major part of Hill’s triumph. 1.2.2 The Regular Cast The supporting casts vary from novel to novel; the major series players are: Detective Chief Superintendent Andrew Dalziel (‘Andy’, ‘the Fat Man’), Head of Mid-Yorkshire Criminal Investigation Department (CID), is of Scottish stock but a Yorkshireman to the bone. Enormously fat, frequently crude, almost always blunt, and astonishingly light on his feet, he is a hard drinker very rarely drunk, far more subtle than most folk guess, and easily mistaken for God. He is long divorced, but in The Wood Beyond (immediately preceding On Beulah Height) began a relationship with divorcee Amanda ‘Cap’ Marvell, built on the same lines but of a higher social class. Cap is also politically radicalised, having nearly lost her soldier-son in the Falklands War, and the relationship was in trouble as The Wood Beyond ended, but resumes after a hiatus in On Beulah Height.

9 Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, once Dalziel’s protégé and now his deputy, is also of Yorkshire stock (though Pascoe is a Cornish name) but a Southerner by upbringing. Unlike Dalziel, he is university educated, a fast-track new breed of less brutal detective, but has recently been enraged and troubled by the discovery that his great-grandfather, who ‘died in World War One’, had in fact been executed for ‘cowardice’. Peter is married to Eleanor (Ellie), née Soper, once a college teacher and still a political activist of sorts on the populist left, but now also an aspiring novelist and full-time mother of Rose (Rosie). Detective Sergeant Edgar Wield, the experienced CID organiser, is as phenomenally ugly as Dalziel is fat, with a near photographic memory. He has a limited formal education but is very sharp, and has voluntarily stuck at sergeant to avoid the public exposure of higher rank—because he is also gay, out to his closest friends and superiors but not openly at work. After various intersections of his personal and professional lives, in Pictures of Perfection he met Edwin Digweed, trained as a lawyer but now running an antique book business. Wield and Digweed now cohabit at Corpse Cottage in the unusually tolerant village of Enscombe (which Dalziel, appreciating its unreality, tends to call ‘Shangri-La’ or ‘Brigadoon’). Detective Constable Shirley Novello (‘Ivor’, but only to Dalziel), is the most recent junior officer to join the Mid-Yorks CID team. She is a twenty-something Catholic, sturdy and bright but still learning her way. Chief Constable Dan Trimble (‘Desperate Dan’), the Head of Mid-Yorks Police, is a Cornishman Dalziel more or less respects, and the only superior to whom he usually answers. The four major figures, Dalziel, Peter & Ellie Pascoe, and Wield, have been together since Wield was introduced in A Pinch of Snuff (1978), but while Hill’s settings have always remained more-or-less contemporary with publication, his characters have aged more slowly than real time. Dalziel & Pascoe are in many ways a comic duo, an ‘odd couple’ like Laurel & Hardy deliberately pairing a fatter, older, more brutal Northerner with a slimmer, younger, more liberal Southerner; but Dalziel is also Rosie’s godfather, ‘Uncle Andy’, and adores her. Ellie nurses a liberal left-wing suspicion of the police, but is caught by her love for Peter and acknowledgement of his sense of civic obligation in policing, not least as a counter-weight to Dalziel (a

10 heroic, hopeless task). Wield started as necessary underling, a replacement Detective Sergeant when Pascoe made Inspector, but in coming to terms with his identity as a gay policeman (and latterly finding contentment with Digweed) has grown into close personal friendship with the Pascoes. Some minor characters have also become established presences— solicitor Eden Thackeray, vicar Larry Lillingstone in Enscombe, idiotic and disaster-prone PC Hector—but these are tagged or re-explained when they recur. 1.2.3 Mid-Yorkshire and Northern English Speech All Hill’s D.-&-P. novels are set in the fictional, archetypal ‘Mid-Yorkshire’ (MidYorks.), an additional imaginary administrative county drawing freely on the landand cityscapes of the whole of Yorkshire. Detailed settings—villages like Dendale and Enscombe—are fictional; real place-names are rarely given, but the industrial cities of Sheffield and Doncaster (where Hill lived), and the cathedral-city of York, are often recognisable, as are features of landscape, economy, and demography. Mid-Yorks., that is, is an archetype, like Hardy’s Wessex or Paul Scott’s Ranpur and Mirat a blend of typicalities and fictions making a place utterly grounded in the real, but never restricted to it, or to real-world geography. To understand it, therefore, one has to know something of the Yorkshire that provides Hill with his raw materials. A very large traditional county in Northern England, Yorkshire stretches from Sheffield to Middlesbrough and the Pennines to the East Coast. It covers some 6,000 square miles (15,000 km2), and has a population of roughly 5 million. (See Œ http://www.yorkshirenet.co.uk/maps/index.asp.) Yorkshire is traditionally divided into the North, West, and East ‘Ridings’ (or ‘thirds’), reflecting the Vikings’ division of land around the cathedral city of York. Much of the North Riding is uneven rural land, the Yorkshire Dales in the east and North York Moors in the west. A ‘dale’ is a valley; most are farmed both for arable and dairy produce, and they are flanked by ‘fells’, hills used for sheepfarming. The moors, often boggy, are high and desolate. Administratively the North Riding is now mostly the county of North Yorkshire. The East Riding is low farmland, some higher ground (the Yorkshire Wolds), and a fishing coast, with Hull the only big city. It is still known as the East Riding, and most is administratively its own county. The West Riding has been very heavily urbanised and industrialised since the early nineteenth century, but service and light industries now predominate. The major cities of Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Doncaster (where Hill lived

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