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.
