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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 6 |
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REGINALD HILL'S "THE PRICE OF BUTCHER'S MEAT"
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Fat Andy is back, but now
Pascoe's running things
of TheColumnists.com
As I began reading Reginald Hill's 23rd "Dalziel & Pascoe" murder mystery, "The Price of Butcher's Meat," Harper, $26.95), I couldn't help but think it was like watching an episode of the "Lewis" series in which Inspector Lewis discovers his old mentor, Inspector Morse, didn't die after all, but has just been convalescing in Yorkshire, listening to opera music while Lewis tackles all the tough cases.
In the previous novel in the long series--"Death Comez For the Fat Man"--Detective Supt. Andy Dalziel was seriously injured in an explosion that seemed to doom his possible return to service. Moving up to take his place as the man in charge of police detective investigations in Yorkshire was Andy's college-educated assistant, DCI Peter Pascoe.
One of the joys of "Lewis," the sequel to the "Inspector Morse" TV series, has been discovering that Robbie Lewis really had learned well as sidekick to Inspector Morse and, in fact, had even taken on some of the old boy's bad habits.
Not so with Peter Pascoe, who has the bad luck to be in charge of a complex and puzzling murder case set in the British seaside resort of Sandytown, the very place where his former boss, Andy Dalziel, is recovering from his wounds at the much-praised Avalon Clinic. Does Pascoe shine with Fat Andy watching over his shoulder? What do you think?
I've been a fan of these two oddly-matched English detectives ever since I saw the first episode of the long-running "Dalziel & Pascoe" TV series on the A&E cable network more than a decade ago, then searched out the first novel in the series, "A Clubbable Woman," and discoverd the source novels were even better. For that matter, I also learned I'd been reading Reginald Hill even before that, starting with his stand alone novel "The Long Kill," written under one of his pen names, Patrick Ruell.
Never as popular in the U.S. as some of the P.D. James, Ruth Rendell or Minette Walters mysteries nor the Colin Dexter novels about Inspector Morse, Hill's "Dalziel & Pascoe" mysteries are still among the finest contemporary mysteries published anywhere. The TV series is no longer being shown regularly in the States, but I just noticed the first season is now available in a DVD boxed set in England and no doubt soon will be available over here in a format that can be played on our DVD players.
The pairing of these two sleuths is an interesting one, tapping into a formula quite familiar in both U.S. and U.K. crime shows. Dalziel (prounced "dee-ell) is older and has lots of rough edges, drinks and eats quite a bit and is nowhere as properly finished as his younger partner. Pascoe is married and well-educated and a much better representative of what modern police detectives are supposed to be like. But it's usually Dalziel who blunders his way through to the solutions to the mysteries they tackled in concert.
In "The Price of Butcher's Meat," we spend lots of time with Andy as he's recuperating from his injuries and introducing us to all the characters who eventually will become suspects in a series of murders. The seaside community of Sandytown is in the process of being remade and expanded as various developers seek to take advantage of the attention brought there by the Avalon Clinic and its cutting edge medical facilities. The banner over the main road into town says "Home of the Healthy Holiday."
But everything suddenly goes awry when a wealthy matron is found strangled and her body placed in a grill where a hog is supposedly being roasted for a big community feast. A second corpse is discovered in an acupuncture salon where one of the long needles used in that form of therapy has been shoved through a patient's spine.
Hill chooses a variety of ways to tell his story. First, we read a series of emails written by a young, attractive psychology student who's a guest at a grand estate in Sandytown, whose observations help us learn who the major players will be. Then we get Andy himself, dictating his opinions into a digital recorder he has nicknamed "Mildred," supposedly part of his recuperative therapy. When Pascoe and his team of detectives and forensic evidence-gatherers arrive, we also have the story told in more conventional narrative form.
Gradually, we come to know who loves or hates everyone else and are presented with a considerable array of potential killers and their possible helpers. There's a great deal of wealth waiting to be inherited by some of them and an even greater deal of resentment to be vented by others. There are gay people, animal rights "terrorists," a former criminal now confined to a wheelchair, even a "healer" who's looking for a place in the overall scheme of things in Sandytown.
But in my mind it's Andy Dalziel who holds it all together as his curiousity about what's going on slowly overcomes his desire to let Pascoe handle things on his own without any interference from his former mentor. Once he gets rolling, the case is never the same again.
This is a big (500-plus pages) and sprawling mystery, but it holds your interest all the way to the nefarious finish line. Will Dalziel and Pascoe get back together again in the near future? You'll know the answer to that soon enough.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The illustrations are courtesy of the book publishers. This column first posted Jan. 19, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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