Death's Jest Book by Reginald Hill

Dalziel and Pascoe: wanted for literary murder

This, the 20th book featuring detectives Dalziel and Pascoe of the Mid-Yorkshire Constabulary, is an awful warning of what can happen even to one of our finest crime writers. One opens Death's Jest Book with pleasurable anticipation. A traditional Yorkshire Christmas is looming over dales and shopping centres alike; the local villains are plotting away to fill their various stockings and the constabulary is hoping for peace and quiet, or else to feel a few well-deserving collars during the season of goodwill.

There's an absorbing literary twist: the title is borrowed from Thomas Lovell Beddoes's pseudo-Jacobean melodramatic work of the same name, and the complex plotting involves Franny Roote. He is a dangerous psychopathic ex-con turned academic who intends to publish a work on Beddoes and won't let anyone stand in his way, bringing jailbird skills to bear on his scholarly career. Stir in a copper's dangerous liaison with a rentboy, a treasure hoard belonging to a family of local aristocrats and some weird mental activity on the part of a major female character, and we should have an absorbing tale, in part a sequel to Hill's previous book featuring the "Wordman" puzzler.

The problem is that Hill has grown much too indulgent to his two leading policemen, too persuaded that they are as fascinating to the reader as to the author. It's a danger facing many crime fiction writers who feature the same detectives in book after book. Courageous authors take the Reichenbach Falls solution, kill off their Sherlocks and try something new. A couple of years ago, in On Beulah Height, Hill had the balance right, focusing on child murder, the tragic and believable theme of that book, rather than on the personalities of the investigators.

But here, narrative and character development are impeded at every turn by DS Dalziel and DCI Pascoe, now a dreary old pair of plonkers who pop up as soon as a chase gets under way or a minor personality threatens to become interesting. I longed for them to stay out of it so that their young sergeants could get on with investigative duties, but the two have been promoted way beyond their capacity to entertain, though not to interfere.

The Beddoes plot, which should be a gripping interwoven narrative, is retailed in the improbable form of letters written to Pascoe, a device that deprives the story of any suspense, rather like firing burning arrows into wads of wet Kleenex. Elsewhere, just as an important female character is revealing absorbing emotional depths, in comes the pantomime figure of Dalziel, with his programmed vocabulary of bugger, bollocks, tripe and onions, to deprive the episode of anything but clichés.

Surely not even in deepest Yorkshire can Dalziel's utterly predictable political incorrectness still pass as entertaining, nor his inadequacy with women be regarded as some sort of bold anti-feminist statement. He's an irritating character who urgently needs cutting down to size. Castration would be a start.

The reviewer's new crime novel, 'In the Kingdom of Mists', is published by Doubleday in July