On Beulah Height - Humanities-Ebooks

Humanities-Ebooks
Genre Fiction Sightlines
Running Head 1
A Guide to
Reginald Hill
On Beulah Height
by John Lennard

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Text © John Lennard, 2007
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Published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk.
Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
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isbn 978-1-84760-035-6

Reginald Hill: On Beulah Height
John Lennard
Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author
John Lennard took his B.A. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, and his M.A.
at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught in the Universities of
London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame, and for the Open University, and is
now Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West
Indies—Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation
of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The
Poetry Handbook (1996; 2/e, OUP, 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama
Handbook (OUP, 2002), and the Literature Insights Hamlet (2007).
He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series,
and has written Sightlines on works by Octavia E. Butler, Ian McDonald and
Walter Mosley. His critical collection Of Serial readers and other essays on
genre fiction (2007), published simultaneously with this e-book, launches
the Monographs Series.

Contents
1. Notes
1.1 Reginald Hill
1.2 The Dalziel & Pascoe Series
1.2.1 The Series
1.2.2 The Regular Cast
1.2.3 Mid-Yorkshire and Northern English Speech
1.2.4 TV Adaptations
1.3 Police Ranks in England and Wales
1.4 Beulah in the Bible and in Bunyan
1.5 Rückert’s and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder
1.5.1 Background
1.5.2 The German texts and literal translations
1.6 Thatcherism and Water Privatisation
1.7 Serial Killing and Paedophilia
1.8 Meningococcal Meningitis
2. Annotations
2.1 Epigraphs
2.2 Day One: A Happy Rural Seat of Various View
2.3 Day Two: Nina and the Nix
2.4 Day Three: The Drowning of Dendale
2.5 Day Four: Songs for Dead Children
3. Essay: Singing the Sadness of On Beulah Height
4. Bibliography
4.1 Works by Reginald Hill
4.2 Works about Reginald Hill and Crime Writing
4.3 Useful Reference Works

1. Notes
1.1 Reginald Hill
Reginald Charles Hill was born in 1936, in West Hartlepool
in Northern England. His mother, Isabel née Dickson
(1907–98) was a factory worker who loved Golden-Age © Reginald Hill
crime writing, and his father was a professional football (soccer) player at a time
when sportsmen were poorly paid, so his background was very proletarian but
reading was privileged. The family moved to the Lake District in 1939, and Hill
later attended Carlisle Grammar School, from which he won a place to read English
at St Catherine’s College in Oxford. He did National Service without distinction or
danger 1955–7, went up in 1957, graduated in 1960, and immediately married his
childhood sweetheart, Patricia Ruell.
After some odd jobs Hill became a teacher, in Essex (1962–7) and then at
Doncaster College of Further Education, in Yorkshire (1967–81), where he rose to
Senior Lecturer before becoming a full-time writer in 1981. Hill had begun writing
prose fiction in the mid-1960s, and from 1970 published prolifically, producing (to
date) more than 50 novels and collections of short stories under four names. In
addition to the 20 Dalziel & Pascoe novels, Hill writes superior stand-alone crime
and supernatural tales, while ‘Patrick Ruell’ has written eight thrillers, ‘Charles
Underhill’ two historical romances, and ‘Dick Morland’ (in Hill’s early days) two
political thrillers. All the work is enjoyable, and from the mid-1970s increasingly
substantive as well as richly comic and intertextual, so that Hill’s career as a whole
strongly bears out his avowed intention of writing crime novels to high literary
standards.
Since retiring from teaching at 45 Hill has preferred to let his books do the
talking, but he has over the years published a number of critical essays and
introductions that reveal a wise, wry, and thoughtful critic of his chosen genre/s.
There are also some excellent interviews, but Hill is also a wise, wry, and very
elusive interviewee, who sensibly prefers not to analyse himself when others have
such fun doing it for him. He now lives in the Lake District, is a keen fell-walker,
and remains, as he has always been, an avid reader.
6

1.2 The Dalziel and Pascoe Series
1.2.1 The Series
The 20 Dalziel & Pascoe (D.-&-P.) novels are, in order of publication 1 :
A Clubbable Woman (1970).
An Advancement of Learning (1971).
Ruling Passion (1973).
An April Shroud (1975).
A Pinch of Snuff (1978).
A Killing Kindness (1980).
Deadheads (1983).
Exit Lines (1984).
Child’s Play: a tragi-comedy in three acts of violence with a prologue and an
epilogue (1987).
Under World (1988).
Bones and Silence 1990). (CWA Gold Dagger, Best Crime Novel, 1990.)
Recalled to Life (1992).
Pictures of Perfection: A Dalziel and Pascoe novel in five volumes (1994).
The Wood Beyond (1996).
On Beulah Height (1998). (Barry Award, Best Novel, 1999.)
Arms and the Women: an Elliad (2000).
Dialogues of the Dead: or Paronomania! an aged worm for wept royals a warm
doge for top lawyers a word game for two players (2001).
Death’s Jest-Book (2002).
Good Morning, Midnight (2004)
The Death of Dalziel (2007) 2
There is also one D.-&-P. collection, Asking for the Moon (1994), containing two
novellas, ‘Pascoe’s Ghost’ & ‘One Small Step’, and two stories, ‘Dalziel’s Ghost’ &
‘The Last National Serviceman’. There are also seven uncollected D.-&-P. stories
written for newspapers, magazines, and anthologies—‘Auteur Theory’, ‘Where the
Snow Lay Dinted’, ‘A Candle for Christmas’, ‘Brass Monkey’, ‘A Gift for Father
Christmas’, ‘The Game of Dog’, and ‘Fool of Myself’. 3
1 Full details in the Bibliography.
2 Don’t worry! The title’s a tease.
3 The stories have been variously published; full details in the Bibliography.
7

As the staggered dates of publication suggest, Hill did not (before 2001–2) write
consecutive D.-&-P. books, giving him time to consider what he wanted to do with
the series, and the novels have grown steadily more complex and ambitious. From
the beginning they were clever, entertaining, and gave something serious to chew
on. From the mid-1980s they grew exponentially in gravitas and range to encompass
subjects including the Miners’ Strike and its consequences; the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, a
serial killer of the late 1970s, and his legacy; the activities of the security services,
MI5 and MI6; animal-rights activism; and paedophilia.
The novels are allusive and intertextual, not only in their titles and epigraphs but
in using inset-texts and weaving quotations (some acknowledged, some not) into
dialogue and narrative. They also summon and measure themselves against highcanonical
literature from Shakespeare and Milton to Austen and Dickens, yet rarely
leave the largely realistic and necessarily brutal world of murder and investigation—
a combination from which Hill draws ever-expanding and deepening resonance. He
is also a superb comic writer—and while series novelists have to be comedic, as
their protagonists survive, they are by no means necessarily comic. Hill’s metaphors
for his Unholy Trinity—Dalziel’s fatness & unstoppability, Pascoe’s fastidiousness
& imagination, and Wield’s ugliness & efficiency—are often memorable,
summoning P. G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh as much as any crime writer. And the
combination of wry laughter and open mockery with an unflinching gravitas in
analysing crimes is a major part of Hill’s triumph.
1.2.2 The Regular Cast
The supporting casts vary from novel to novel; the major series players are:
Detective Chief Superintendent Andrew Dalziel (‘Andy’, ‘the Fat Man’), Head
of Mid-Yorkshire Criminal Investigation Department (CID), is of Scottish stock but
a Yorkshireman to the bone. Enormously fat, frequently crude, almost always blunt,
and astonishingly light on his feet, he is a hard drinker very rarely drunk, far more
subtle than most folk guess, and easily mistaken for God. He is long divorced, but in
The Wood Beyond (immediately preceding On Beulah Height) began a relationship
with divorcee Amanda ‘Cap’ Marvell, built on the same lines but of a higher social
class. Cap is also politically radicalised, having nearly lost her soldier-son in the
Falklands War, and the relationship was in trouble as The Wood Beyond ended, but
resumes after a hiatus in On Beulah Height.
8

Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, once Dalziel’s protégé and now his
deputy, is also of Yorkshire stock (though Pascoe is a Cornish name) but a
Southerner by upbringing. Unlike Dalziel, he is university educated, a fast-track new
breed of less brutal detective, but has recently been enraged and troubled by the
discovery that his great-grandfather, who ‘died in World War One’, had in fact been
executed for ‘cowardice’. Peter is married to Eleanor (Ellie), née Soper, once a
college teacher and still a political activist of sorts on the populist left, but now also
an aspiring novelist and full-time mother of Rose (Rosie).
Detective Sergeant Edgar Wield, the experienced CID organiser, is as
phenomenally ugly as Dalziel is fat, with a near photographic memory. He has a
limited formal education but is very sharp, and has voluntarily stuck at sergeant to
avoid the public exposure of higher rank—because he is also gay, out to his closest
friends and superiors but not openly at work. After various intersections of his
personal and professional lives, in Pictures of Perfection he met Edwin Digweed,
trained as a lawyer but now running an antique book business. Wield and Digweed
now cohabit at Corpse Cottage in the unusually tolerant village of Enscombe (which
Dalziel, appreciating its unreality, tends to call ‘Shangri-La’ or ‘Brigadoon’).
Detective Constable Shirley Novello (‘Ivor’, but only to Dalziel), is the most
recent junior officer to join the Mid-Yorks CID team. She is a twenty-something
Catholic, sturdy and bright but still learning her way.
Chief Constable Dan Trimble (‘Desperate Dan’), the Head of Mid-Yorks Police,
is a Cornishman Dalziel more or less respects, and the only superior to whom he
usually answers.
The four major figures, Dalziel, Peter & Ellie Pascoe, and Wield, have been together
since Wield was introduced in A Pinch of Snuff (1978), but while Hill’s settings have
always remained more-or-less contemporary with publication, his characters have
aged more slowly than real time. Dalziel & Pascoe are in many ways a comic duo,
an ‘odd couple’ like Laurel & Hardy deliberately pairing a fatter, older, more brutal
Northerner with a slimmer, younger, more liberal Southerner; but Dalziel is also
Rosie’s godfather, ‘Uncle Andy’, and adores her. Ellie nurses a liberal left-wing
suspicion of the police, but is caught by her love for Peter and acknowledgement of
his sense of civic obligation in policing, not least as a counter-weight to Dalziel (a
9

heroic, hopeless task). Wield started as necessary underling, a replacement Detective
Sergeant when Pascoe made Inspector, but in coming to terms with his identity as a
gay policeman (and latterly finding contentment with Digweed) has grown into
close personal friendship with the Pascoes.
Some minor characters have also become established presences— solicitor Eden
Thackeray, vicar Larry Lillingstone in Enscombe, idiotic and disaster-prone PC
Hector—but these are tagged or re-explained when they recur.
1.2.3 Mid-Yorkshire and Northern English Speech
All Hill’s D.-&-P. novels are set in the fictional, archetypal ‘Mid-Yorkshire’ (Mid-
Yorks.), an additional imaginary administrative county drawing freely on the land-
and cityscapes of the whole of Yorkshire. Detailed settings—villages like Dendale
and Enscombe—are fictional; real place-names are rarely given, but the industrial
cities of Sheffield and Doncaster (where Hill lived), and the cathedral-city of York,
are often recognisable, as are features of landscape, economy, and demography.
Mid-Yorks., that is, is an archetype, like Hardy’s Wessex or Paul Scott’s Ranpur and
Mirat a blend of typicalities and fictions making a place utterly grounded in the real,
but never restricted to it, or to real-world geography. To understand it, therefore, one
has to know something of the Yorkshire that provides Hill with his raw materials.
A very large traditional county in Northern England, Yorkshire stretches from
Sheffield to Middlesbrough and the Pennines to the East Coast. It covers some 6,000
square miles (15,000 km 2 ), and has a population of roughly 5 million. (See
http://www.yorkshirenet.co.uk/maps/index.asp.) Yorkshire is traditionally divided
into the North, West, and East ‘Ridings’ (or ‘thirds’), reflecting the Vikings’
division of land around the cathedral city of York.
Much of the North Riding is uneven rural land, the Yorkshire Dales in the east
and North York Moors in the west. A ‘dale’ is a valley; most are farmed both for
arable and dairy produce, and they are flanked by ‘fells’, hills used for sheepfarming.
The moors, often boggy, are high and desolate. Administratively the North
Riding is now mostly the county of North Yorkshire.
The East Riding is low farmland, some higher ground (the Yorkshire Wolds),
and a fishing coast, with Hull the only big city. It is still known as the East Riding,
and most is administratively its own county.
The West Riding has been very heavily urbanised and industrialised since the
early nineteenth century, but service and light industries now predominate. The
major cities of Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Doncaster (where Hill lived
10

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