Reginald Hill


Reginald Charles Hill FRSL was an English crime writer and the winner in 1995 of the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 1978.

Biography

Hill was born to a "very ordinary" family. His father, Reg Hill, was a professional footballer. His mother was a fan of Golden Age crime writers, and he discovered the genre while fetching her library books. He passed the eleven plus exam and attended Carlisle Grammar School where he excelled in English. After National Service and studying English at St Catherine's College, Oxford, he worked as a teacher for many years, becoming a senior lecturer at Doncaster College of Education. In 1980 he retired from salaried work to devote himself full-time to writing.
Hill is best known for his more than 20 novels featuring the Yorkshire detectives Andrew Dalziel, Peter Pascoe and Edgar Wield. The characters were used by the BBC in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, in which Dalziel was played by Warren Clarke, Pascoe by Colin Buchanan, and Wield by David Royle. He also wrote more than 30 other novels, including five featuring Joe Sixsmith, a black machine operator turned private detective in a fictional Luton. Novels originally published under the pseudonyms of Patrick Ruell, Dick Morland, and Charles Underhill have now appeared under his own name. Hill was also a writer of short stories and ghost tales.
Hill's novels employ various structural devices, such as presenting parts of the story in non-chronological order or alternating with sections from a novel supposedly written by Peter's wife, Ellie Pascoe. He also frequently selected one writer or one work of art to use as a central organizing element of a given novel, such as one novel being a pastiche of Jane Austen's works, or another featuring elements of classical Greek myth. The novella One Small Step is set in the future, and deals with the EuroFed Police Commissioner Pascoe and retired Dalziel investigating the first murder on the moon. The duo do not always "get their man", with at least one novel ending with the villain getting away and another strongly implying that while Dalziel and Pascoe are unable to convict anyone, a series of unrelated accidents actually included at least one unprovable instance of murder.
Hill commented in 1986:

I still recall with delight as a teen-ager making the earth-shaking discovery that many of the great "serious novelists," classical and modern, were as entertaining and interesting as the crime-writers I already loved. But it took another decade of maturation to reverse the equation and 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.

Hill died at his home in Ravenglass, Cumbria, on 12 January 2012 after suffering a brain tumour.

Dalziel and Pascoe

  1. A Clubbable Woman
  2. An Advancement of Learning
  3. Ruling Passion
  4. An April Shroud
  5. A Pinch of Snuff
  6. A Killing Kindness
  7. Deadheads
  8. Exit Lines
  9. Child's Play
  10. Underworld
  11. Bones and Silence
  12. One Small Step, novella
  13. Recalled to Life
  14. Pictures of Perfection
  15. The Wood Beyond
  16. Asking for the Moon, short stories
  17. *"The Last National Service Man"
  18. *"Pascoe's Ghost"
  19. *"Dalziel's Ghost"
  20. *"One Small Step"
  21. On Beulah Height
  22. Arms and the Women
  23. Dialogues of the Dead
  24. Death's Jest-Book
  25. Good Morning, Midnight
  26. The Death of Dalziel, Canada and US Title: Death Comes for the Fat Man
  27. A Cure for All Diseases Shortlisted for Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2009.
  28. ''Midnight Fugue''

    Joe Sixsmith

  • Blood Sympathy
  • Born Guilty
  • Killing the Lawyers
  • Singing the Sadness
  • ''The Roar of the Butterflies''

    Other

  • Fell of Dark
  • The Castle of the Demon
  • A Fairly Dangerous Thing
  • Red Christmas
  • Heart Clock
  • Death Takes a Low Road
  • A Very Good Hater
  • Albion! Albion!
  • Beyond the Bone
  • Another Death in Venice
  • Captain Fantom – inspired by the life of Carlo Fantom
  • The Forging of Fantom
  • Pascoe's Ghost and Other Brief Chronicles of Crime
  1. "Pascoe's Ghost" #
  2. "The Trunk in the Attic"
  3. "The Rio de Janeiro Paper"
  4. "Threatened Species"
  5. "Snowball"
  6. "Exit Line"
  7. "Dalziel's Ghost"
  • The Spy's Wife
  • Who Guards a Prince?
  • Traitor's Blood
  • Guardians of the Prince
  • No Man's Land
  • The Long Kill
  • There Are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union and Other Stories
  1. "There Are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union"
  2. "Bring Back the Cat!"
  3. "Poor Emma"
  4. "Auteur Theory"
  5. "The Bull Ring"
  6. "Crowded Hour"