Reginald Hill - Pictures of Perfection

Revisiting Mid Yorkshire as imagined by Reginald Hill is always a pleasure but this work shows a marked shift from what had gone before.  Despite being a book with crimes and criminality at its heart, Pictures of Perfection is much more a study of characters, mores and ideas than a pure procedural.  We have had glimpses of this before of course, particularly in An April Shroud where a holidaying Dalziel stumbles upon a bizarre family in rain-soaked flatlands of Lincolnshire. After that, however, Hill returned to grittier themes in the county town of Mid Yorks and the pit villages of its southern neighbour.

This work also expands on the dynamic of the two key protagonists of the series, Dalziel and Pascoe, by developing the role of their errant sidekick Wield.  Previously a stoic, heroically ugly man-to-be-relied-on, here we find Wield taking on a different role, becoming a third, essential part of the team. Moving from the wings to centre-stage in the previous books, we have learned more about the strengths and weaknesses that make up his character. In a saga that places the books firmly in the era that they were written, we also learn about his sexuality.  

If a similar character were created now, it is unlikely that a Wield would feel constrained by his sexuality, even in the police force. Yet here, it is only a series of unfortunate incidents in a previous book that lead to his ‘confession’ to Dalziel and Pascoe. Hill, devilishly, plays with the idea of Dalziel’s perceived antediluvian attitudes and Pascoe’s wrought liberal angst.  Pascoe had no idea Wield was gay, although his even more liberal wife Ellie was perfectly well aware, as was Dalziel.

Pictures of Perfection begins with Wield still clinging on to the various delineated compartments of his life.  A work he is a humourless, hardworking craggy cliff face of a man, dedicated to getting results.  Out of work he is a leather-clad biker speeding through the bucolic beauty of the Yorkshire countryside.  It is Wield that discovers that there are problems in the picture-perfect village of Enscombe and sets about investigating.  It is Wield that becomes entangled in the goings on in that tiny settlement.  For all his bulk and bluster and his importance elsewhere in the series, Dalziel barely figures here, this is Wieldy’s tale.

The village of Enscombe itself is another key character and in less talented hands, it could have slipped into pastiche and caricature.  It doesn’t because the characters are inherently believable from the publican full of bonhomie who makes his own black pudding to the waspish bookshop proprietor.  The relationship between those in ‘power’ up at the manor house and the ordinary people of the village is mapped out perfectly, with even a tree-lined umbilical pathway physically connecting them.

As mentioned above, crimes are committed here and ones with potentially devastating consequences at that.  It is a crime novelist out of the top drawer who can make the seemingly more banal background activities grab the attention far more than the criminal goings on at the surface. This is one of the problems with, for example, the Miss Marple books of Agatha Christie.  The supposed setting for those places ‘St. Mary Mead’ never feels like a real place, it is a cypher, a proscenium arch under which the events will unfold.  

Enscombe is nothing like that, it has the feel of that sort of place that still exists, even decades after the book was written. It is also peculiarly northern, with a type of harsh beauty that is native not only to Yorkshire, but further north in the likes of County Durham and Northumberland as well.  The county town where Dalziel, Pascoe and Wield do their modern policing utilising the likes of the ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ is very much of the time of writing, there is something much more timeless about Enscombe.

Hill make a very brave decision by opening the book with such vivid scenes of carnage and then rolling back the story and explaining how those events came to unfold.  That this gentle book with an unusually romantic and sentimental tale at its heart begins in such a way jolts the reader into taking the journey required.  Pictures of Perfection marks a turning point for the Dalziel and Pascoe series that began with the traditional two-hundred page ‘detective story’ of the seventies. By A Cure For All Diseases in 2008, a Dalziel and Pascoe tale was turning in at three times that length.

The vogue for vast tomes led some authors to pad out their work either with myriad blind alleys or with stodgy amounts of research designed almost to suggest this was faux non-fiction.  Hill’s genius was that he took this opportunity to play with his obvious love of literature and subvert a genre that often takes itself far too seriously by adding seriously literary tropes to a ‘common’ police procedural series. 

Pictures of Perfection is the turning point in the series, but also make a fine stand-alone work.  Hill has been ill-served by radio and television.  Just one of the series, Exit Lines, was dramatised for radio and there have been two attempts at television versions.  The first, a Yorkshire TV filming of A Pinch of Snuff has its moments and at least tries to dramatize the book it is based on.  Sadly, the casting of a pair of long-forgotten comics whose stock was high at the time, did not create the desired effect.  Hale and Pace, cast seemingly for the simple fact that one of them was fat and the other wasn’t, are no better actors than they were comedians and no further episodes were made.

The second attempt, this time on the BBC, concentrated on the two leads and tried to bludgeon the stories into a ‘format’. Dalziel and Pascoe was aimed at fans of the likes of Lovejoy and Bergerac and benefitted from decent casting for the leads and substantial budgets. Early efforts at televising the shorter novel were creditable but as the series rolled on, the scripts began to veer violently away from their source material.

It is a testament to the strength of Pictures of Perfection that the BBC series did not even attempt to tackle it.  There is far too much to convey in a slick fifty-five-minute production for screening on a Sunday evening.  Any true Reginald Hill fan must secretly be hoping that one day a film producer of note will get hold of a copy of the book and see its potential.  This tale would unfold beautifully over the course of a couple of hours on the big screen. Failing that there is always the possibility of Netflix or Amazon creating a series based on the books as opposed to the leading characters. Until then we must make do with the written word. 

What written words they are.

Moskva - Jack Grimwood

There is a quote from the Telegraph on the cover above and I really hate (on principle) to agree with anything that esteemed organ says.  In this case, however, I can't disagree, this book is better than Child 44, which I very much enjoyed.  Historical fiction can get itself into trouble very quickly by attempting to fit a fictional persona around real characters or by failing to invoke a sense of the era in which it is set.

From the outset this work manages to keep from falling into either of those traps.  The atmosphere of a Moscow on the cusp of change is described well and our 'hero' - for want of a better word - is grimly believable. The Russian characters across different generations are cleverly drawn without being dragged down to caricatures of good/bad communists or capitalists.

If there was one thing that particularly impressed, it was the pacing of the narrative.  Seemingly slow, an awful lot of things are coming together in the first two-thirds that lead to an explosive climax that was as welcome as it was unexpected.

If there is one word that I would associate with the dying days of the Soviet Union, it would probably be melancholy.  This book is shot through with melancholy rather than outright misery.  It involves various characters pondering on what might have been or could have been, which fits with with the uncertainty of the era.

Other reviews compare Moskva to Fatherland by Robert Harris - a lazy comparison perhaps as a better marker is Archangel  by the same author.  It is rare these days that I enjoy a work so much that I begin to idly cast a putative TV drama or film, but that was the case here.  The BBC made a version of Archangel and (mis)cast a pre-Bond Daniel Craig as 'Fluke' Kelso.  I found myself hoping against hope that if Moskva makes it to the small screen that both Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston are otherwise engaged - Tom Fox deserves better than that.

A slight criticism is that the book suffers a little from 'page-turner-chapter-syndrome' with short, punchy chapters designed to reel the reader in.  By no means as bad as those dreadful 'thrillers' predominantly from the US where a paragraph is deemed to be a chapter, the story here is strong enough to withstand that particular stylistic trope.

LJ Ross - Holy Island

A detective yarn set in Northumberland with a plethora of five-star reviews on Amazon. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot as it happens, but let us start with the basics. The 'locked room' mystery is one of the most satisfying subsets of the detective genre. Think of The Speckled Band or Murder on the Orient Express or more recently The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  All of these offerings give us a closed scenario where certain events take place with a limited number of protagonists.  So far, so good.  Ryan has identified the spectacular and windswept Holy Island (or Lindisfarne) as the setting.  A spiritual and unforgiving place, cut off from the rest of the world twice a day.

We have a troubled (naturally) policeman taking some time away from the job by living on the island. Almost instantly we have a gruesome murder and our man decides he is 'ready' to investigate it.  In the real world his boss would have refused point blank, but this is fiction so we can run with the idea that he was on the scene and is therefore best suited to seek out the killer.  Almost immediately we run into serious problems.  The detective is impossibly handsome and irresistible to women, which is not a clever idea in this type of fiction.  There is a reason that 'tecs are often drunks, socially inept or curiously sexless (see Poirot, H) and that is that they should be at the periphery rather than the centre of the narrative.

Joining our detective is a cast of characters straight from the books of cliches-r-us with no caricature left un-turned. Perhaps the most egregious of these are two sisters who are at the heart of the tale. One is a thoughtful academic time with elegant beauty, an academic at Durham University (Newcastle is nearer and larger, but we can let that pass) who has been called in to assist the police. Guess what? DCI Ryan initially dismisses her as being just a girl who will get in the way, but eventually starts to have the feelings for here. Well, I never. Then there is her sister - they haven't spoken for years, naturally, not even via Facebook or WhatsApp - who is a real piece of work. Filed clearly under 'S' for slapper, this non-character uses her blousy ways, excessive makeup and soucy lingerie (which she leaves out on the bed for all to see) to have her way with pretty much all the men on the island.

I can hear the alarm bells starting to sound in the heads of crime aficionados now.  Is this really a detective novel or something that would sit better on the slush pile at Messrs. Mills & Boon?  Sadly the latter is a more suitable home for this as it fails to pass muster in terms of being scary or thrilling.  In fact, I spent most of the time reading it spotting plot holes as big as those in the fishing nets that the local boats use.  If we forget about the wafer-thin and completely forgettable characters, then surely there must be something to like?

The masters of this genre are able to weave their narrative around a truly believable location whether it be real or fictional.  Take, for example, Margery Allingham whose Pontisbright and Mystery Mile are adapations of real places that fit the tale well.  Curiously, for a work of fiction, there has been no attempt to adapt Holy Island to fit to the story. This is a community of just around two hundred souls, in the middle of winter when the number of tourists would be negligible or non-existent.  DCI Ryan seems to believe - quite sweetly for a detective of a relatively senior rank - that the islanders will source their goods only from vendors on the island. This is not Pitcairn. Morrisons in Berwick is a terrifying twenty-three minutes drive away (according to that miracle of technology Google Maps) allowing access to just about anything required.

There are more jaw-dropping holes too, obviously Northumberland County Council are not only able to run a school on the island (pop. 200) but one that runs trips to the island's own museum during the Christmas holidays.   The museum is also, unlike any other tourist attraction at that time of year, open.  Let us turn to police procedure - the heart of any good detective tale.  As I have already mentioned, this island may be cut off from the sea, but it is far from remote.  The flooding of the causeway is more of an inconvenience than a problem as it is easy enough to reach the island by air or water in an emergency.

The idea, therefore that senior officers would allow Ryan to set up the investigation in his house is so laughable as to be more at home in a sitcom than in a supposedly serious piece of fiction.  Not only would any evidence taken in interviews there not have been usable in court, those questioned in such a manner could well have launched action against the officer involved.  If a suspect needed to be detained in custody when the island was not accessible by road, the only sensible (if costly) procedure would be to take them out by helicopter.  The nearest police station is likely to be Berwick, five or ten minutes away.

There is no need to keep picking away as there are sections of the book that work well. It tries, relatively successfully, to cram in a lot of 'stuff'.  There is a secret society, lots of things about old religious beliefs and some great descriptions of the island and its surrounds. This brings me to the crux of what I think is wrong with this book.  It reads to me like a work that has been released to the world half-formed.  Herein lies the problem with the phenomenon of self-publishing. Editors, publishers and proof-readers are no more a luxury than hiring a producer to make a coherent album.

Had someone read this version of the book and asked the author if they intended it to seem quite so sentimental and cloying in parts, there would have been a great opportunity to flesh out the characters. Challenges on some of the geographical, technical and legal aspects may well have led to a rewrite and a more robust result.

There are more of these books and they seem to be gaining in popularity.  Perhaps I will return to the series to see whether any of the later entries are more fulfilling.  It would not surprise me to see a television version of this in the not too distant future, the scenery and a smouldering male lead would be just the thing for drear winter nights.  What's the betting they fiddle with the plot and set it in the height of summer? To sum up, an opportunity missed in purely literary terms, but undoubtedly a popular creation.

Piers Paul Read - The Dreyfus Affair

The book begins by reminding us quite how many books have already been written on this subject.  What is needed then is a clear, readable account of what actually happened.  Personal knowledge was probably limited to Devil's Island, antisemitism and 'J'Accuse!', so I was looking forward to adding to flesh to those bones.

One problem with the affair is the dizzying amount of people involved with outlandish double or triple-barreled names.  The old houses of Europe are all involved as are the inner echelons of the French armed forces and government.  Luckily this book successfully guides us through these complications admirably while keeping the narrative moving at an impressive pace.  The lengthy dramatis personnae at the end of the book is a highly useful addition though.

We learn much about Dreyfus himself, in many ways a thoroughly unlikely and inconsequential figure thrust into an event with international repercussions.  A career military man who cheated on his wife and spoke in a turgid monotone is an unlikely hero.  What makes him that is the jaw-dropping treatment that he received when first accused and then convicted of treason.

After the conviction. his treatment is purely vindictive.  Dreyfus is not only deported to be incarcerated on a prison island complex from which he couldn't possibly escape, he is exiled to a tiny island to serve out his sentence on his own.  Things could be worse one thinks, exiled on a desert island is not the end of the world.  Except that it was, imagine the exquisite mental torture of being confined to a stockade where you could hear the waves breaking on the shore, but couldn't see them? This was life for Dreyfus for almost four years.  The reason?  A panic that his supporters would turn up and help him to freedom.

The book leads us neatly through the affair and to the eventual pardon for Dreyfus.  It should also make us think about situations where people are convicted and imprisoned partly due to perceptions about their religious beliefs.  Dreyfus was not necessarily a good man, but was certainly Jewish.  When it came to trying him, the military authorities took far more attention of his Jewishness than whether the evidence they had before them was credible.

A thought-provoking and nicely written read.  Just the sort of secondary source that the amateur historian needs to get their head around a subject in double-quick time.

The Sandbaggers

A whole year before Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy hit the screens Yorkshire Television gave us this gem.

Starring Roy Marsden who would later find fame as ITV's face of the cerebral sleuth Adam Dalgliesh, this was seven hours of raw in-your-face cold war action.  As far as the plots go it is pretty run of the mill stuff, lots of talk about double-dealing by the KGB and snarls of  'this could ruin the special relationship!'.  In that respect, TTSS beats it hands down.  To be fair though the BBC had excellent source material in the original novel and, one would presume, a significantly larger budget.

So,  thirty five years on, was it worth revisiting the world of The Sandbaggers?  On balance I think the answer is yes.  I have gone back to some series of this vintage and barely made it through the first episode.  Here, however, we have characters that although dated and somewhat caricatured are still interesting.  After a while you start to care about Neil Burnside (Marsden) and the way he leads his team of spooks, the titular 'Sandbaggers'.

That word 'spooks' is an interesting one. Watching this brought to mind very much the relatively recent series of that name,  I think they are closer relations than TTSS. This is darker than some of the other drama of the period - take Bergerac for example which came along a few years later.

Some of the production values are frankly shocking to view today, not least because at the time there would never have been any thought of it being watched on a vast widescreen television.  The cuts between location and studio are clunky but do not detract from the enjoyment.

Where The Sandbaggers starts to get interesting is in its ambition.  I have already mentioned that they budget seems to have been limited and that it was made by Yorkshire Television.  Neither of these things stopped the creation of an ambitiously international show.  The first series features action in London, Vienna, the Kola Peninsula, Istanbul, Gibraltar, Cyprus among other exotic spots.  It seems pretty likely that the London scenes were filmed there, but for the rest they simply used what they had around them (and a little stock footage).  

The relatively eagle-eyed will be able to spot that Yorkshire in general and Leeds in particular were utilised for all the location work.  A particularly quaint example comes as our sandbagger is chasing down a terrorist in Gibraltar with an RPG trained on a vital flight out of the airport. We cut between shots of the fiend holding his weapon and an obvious stock shot of a plane taxiing and then taking off. Panning back to what looks suspiciously like a quarry in the Dales, a horde of policeman dressed in outcasts from an amateur production of the Pirates of Penzance appear to apprehend the villain just as he was about to fire.  The stock-shot flight then jets off into the sunshine.

Meetings with a representative of 'the cousins' take place in a park.  That would usually be St James's Park in London, but this one is suspiciously hilly, could it perhaps be Roundhay instead?  Sometimes they haven't even made an effort. 'Limassol' was clearly Emmerdale with some cardboard numberplates on vaguely foreign looking cars. 

Yorkshire have form for this in some truly dire 'comedies', cansider this;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrington_of_the_F.O.

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_Free_(TV_series)

The highlight was the choice of location for 'East Berlin' in the final episode of the series though.  I won't reveal it here, but will delight anyone who lived in Leeds in the seventies or the preceding few decades.

Even without the jolt of recognition from some of the locations, this would still have been a worthwhile watch.  I have series two and three (there were no more owing to the unfortunate demise of the writer and creator) and will be watching them even more carefully.

Murder on the Home Front- ITV1

Blitz spirits,dark and murderous.

The memoirs of the late Molly Lefebure had been dramatised for radio previously and seemed ripe for a television version.  It seems that the Radio 4 dramas stretch back as far as 1998.

1998.07.04 15:00 The Saturday Play: Murder on the Home Front By Michael Crompton, adapted from the book by Molly Lefebure. It is 1941, and a chance encounter in a dancehall leads Molly to romance, murder and a new career.
1999.06.05 15:00 The Saturday Play: Murder on the Home Front By Michael Crompton, adapted in two parts from the book by Molly Lefebure. 2: `The Case of a Lifetime'.
2000.07.08 15:00 The Saturday Play: Murder on the Home Front By Michael Crompton, adapted from the book by Molly Lefebure. 3: `The Wigwam Murder'.
2001.02.24 14:30 The Saturday Play: Murder on the Home Front By Michael Crompton, adapted from the book by Molly Lefebure. 4: `The Secret Agent'.
2003.12.20 The Saturday Play: Murder On The Home Front By Michael Crompton. Adapted from the book by Molly Lefebure. 5. 'The Horsham Trunk Murder'.Based on the true story of Molly Lefebure, as described in her book, Murder On The Home Front.

(thanks to http://www.suttonelms.org.uk/mcrompton.html for that information) 

So, an intriguing prospect, one drama set in the Second World War was so popular that when ITV tried to cancel 'Foyle's War', they were forced to bring it back to public delight and decent ratings.  Post-mortem/crime scene drama is also a mainstay of the schedules through long-running shows like 'Silent Witness' in the UK and the all-conquering 'CSI' franchise in the US.

Bringing those two formats together should create a winner, the powerful pull of a costume drama with all the blood and gore of a contemporary crime drama.  What we actually got seemed a slightly uneasy mix of the two which cancelled each other out rather than adding to the impact of the programme.

Here was a very dark drama (both literally and metaphorically) with death and bombings all around and a killer with a particularly topical trait, yet it failed to enthrall.  There is a second part to come next week so I shall reserve judgement, but on the basis of the first, I can't see it running to even the number of episodes that Radio 4 produced.  This is a shame because the source material is such fertile ground. Here we have an example of ITV drama reverting to bad old ways.  This was no 'Broadchurch', or even the flawed but fun 'Whitechapel'.

On The Map - Simon Garfield

This splendid piece of work is lavishly (though sadly not colourfully) illustrated with maps of all ages, shapes and sizes.  Essentially a collection of short case studies taking us through the history of the map in all its forms over a thousand or more years, its triumph is some of the personalities behind the stories.

Garfield went to interview Patrick Moore for instance, who was sadly no longer with us by the time I got hold of the book.  A chunky hardback with a lovely cover design, this feel like a volume from a bygone age, yet it recounts the 'Apple maps' fiasco that seems only to have happened yesterday.

We are taken through the potentially disastrous tale of the Mappa  Mundi at Hereford Cathedral, learning that the decision to offload the little-seen map actually turned into a renaissance for the ancient plan.

A little later the history of the A to Z guides appears, something that was an essential part of travel to London (and indeed many other cities) for many decades before SatNav and Google Maps came on the scene.

Each of the chapters is constructed lightly and Garfield imparts knowledge so subtly that the reader could almost forget that this is a 'history book', perusing it is such a pleasure.

In summary, a lovely piece of work.  The only downside (which is nothing to do with the author I would imagine) is that the images inside the book do not live up to the spectacular cover and bold end-papers   Highly recommended.