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.