On Beulah Height - Humanities-Ebooks

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.
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