Reginald Hill, whose Dalziel and Pascoe novels were far stranger than the TV show

Two women are about to inherit the names Dalziel and Pascoe. ITV and BritBox are making a new series from Reginald Hill’s Yorkshire detectives, with Kerry Godliman as Detective Inspector Andrea Dalziel and Nina Singh as Detective Sergeant Paige Pascoe, and almost every report of it has led with that swap. The more interesting question is what the new writers will find when they open the books. Hill, who died more than a decade ago, left a long shelf of crime novels that were odder, cleverer and far less comforting than the BBC drama that made his detectives famous.

His Andy Dalziel is rotund, bullish and indifferent to procedure. His Peter Pascoe is lean, university-educated and careful to go by the book. The friction between them carried the series for nearly four decades, but Hill treated it as a frame for experiments. He broke chronology, slipped letters and diary entries from the past into the middle of an investigation, built whole novels around a single writer or work of art, and allowed some cases to end with nobody in the dock.

Reginald Charles Hill was born in West Hartlepool on April 3, 1936. His father, Reg Hill, was a professional footballer, and when the boy was three the family moved to the north-west of England, where he went to school in Carlisle. His mother loved the Golden Age crime writers, and he discovered the genre by fetching her library books. At Carlisle Grammar School he excelled in English. After National Service from 1955 to 1957 he read English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, on a scholarship.

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Hill worked for the British Council in Edinburgh and then spent years in teaching, ending up as a senior lecturer at Doncaster College of Education. He left salaried work in 1980 to write full-time. The decision, he said later, was not a hard one: “I had been making up stories as long as I could remember and writing them down as long as I could write.”

The first Dalziel and Pascoe book, A Clubbable Woman, came out in 1970, a northern whodunit that made an immediate impression. An Advancement of Learning followed in 1971, then Ruling Passion (1973), An April Shroud (1975), A Pinch of Snuff (1978) and A Killing Kindness (1980). In 1978 he was elected to the Detection Club. He also wrote thrillers, some under his own name, such as Traitor’s Blood (1983), and others as Patrick Ruell, Dick Morland and Charles Underhill. Many of those pseudonymous books were later reissued as Reginald Hill.

The 1990s brought the prizes. Bones and Silence won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 1990. Recalled to Life (1992) and Pictures of Perfection (1994) followed, and On Beulah Height (1998) won the Barry Award for best novel. The CWA gave him the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 1995, and the Royal Society of Literature elected him a fellow in 1999. Some books alternated with chapters from a novel supposedly written by Pascoe’s wife, Ellie. The novella One Small Step sent a retired Dalziel and a Pascoe serving as a European police commissioner to investigate the first murder on the Moon.

Hill also refused to be only the Dalziel and Pascoe man. He wrote five books about Joe Sixsmith, a Black machine operator turned private detective in Luton, and kept writing standalone novels to the end. In 1986 he described his change of heart about the genre: as a teenager he had decided to grow out of crime fiction, but it took him another decade to understand that “many of the crime writers I had decided to grow out of were still as interesting and entertaining as the ‘serious novelists’ I now revered.”

That ambition had a cost. His plots were dense and his prose was crowded with detail. The Scotsman’s obituary said he wrote “in an involved style that positively wallowed in minute information,” and that he delighted in challenging his readers, who were expected to keep hold of every clue. Admirers saw the density as the pleasure. Anyone arriving from the brisk television episodes in search of a quick puzzle will find the novels slower and more demanding than the show.

Television made him internationally known, at the second attempt. In 1993 Yorkshire Television adapted A Pinch of Snuff with the comedy double act Hale and Pace, and Hill was unhappy with the result. When the BBC took on the series in 1996 he was cautious and declined to write the scripts. The BBC hired writers including Alan Plater and Malcolm Bradbury and cast Warren Clarke as Dalziel and Colin Buchanan as Pascoe. The pairing ran for about a decade and fixed the characters in the public mind.

Hill kept writing almost to the end. Good Morning, Midnight appeared in 2004. The Death of Dalziel (2007), published in North America as Death Comes for the Fat Man, had a title that warned readers its central figure was in danger, and Midnight Fugue (2009) turned out to be the last Dalziel and Pascoe novel. His final book, The Woodcutter (2010), won the Barry Award for best British novel. Hill died at his home in Ravenglass, Cumbria, on January 12, 2012, from a brain tumour, aged 75. To the end he kept a strict routine, at his typewriter by nine every morning, and he had been married to Patricia Ruell for 51 years. Ian Rankin, paying tribute, called him “a lovely man, a fine writer and a great wit.”

The new series, co-created by the Vera writer Colette Kane and Daisy Martey, runs to six episodes and is listed for ITVX in 2027. Its source is unusually rich: more than twenty novels, a moon-murder novella and late books that appeared after the BBC series had ended. Rankin once said that “once you read about Andy Dalziel he’s never forgotten.” Whether Godliman’s Andrea Dalziel will be remembered that way depends less on the casting than on how much of Hill’s strangeness the scripts dare to keep.

Tags: writers, novelists, crime fiction, Dalziel and Pascoe, Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman

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