Two New Crime Writers

 

Lately I’ve been surrounded by (literary) death. John Irving’s Owen Meaney started it, with his poor mother felled by a random baseball strike, and then it just so happens that I’ve been simultaneously reading books by two crime writers I hadn’t tried before: Reginald Hill and Susan Hill (no relation, just more coincidence). What makes us choose one book from the TBR pile rather than another? It’s a mystery that defies science, but in this instance it resulted in two wildly contrasting reads, despite the fact that both are ostensibly police procedural novels.

 

Reginald Hill’s characters, the combative, no-nonsense, un-pc Yorkshireman, Andy Dalziel, and his much-maligned long-suffering side kick, Peter Pascoe, are well known to television viewers in the UK from the adaptations of Hill’s novels. Or at least in the beginning they were Hill’s novels, and pretty fantastic programmes they made, too. Nowadays the scripts no longer derive from the originals, but are created by the overheated brains of writers who think the butterfly attention span of viewers requires a preposterous body count and relentless plot twists. But I mustn’t bore you with my prejudices; what I really wanted to say was that the books are in any case even better than the best of the serialisations. The relationship between Dalziel and Pascoe is wonderfully drawn, with Dalziel hogging the best one-liners, and Pascoe receiving most of the detecting credits, but overall they produce a compelling portrait of teamwork. The novel I read was An Advancement of Learning, set in a university campus in the 1970s when the removal of a statue commemorating a former principle brings a skeleton to light. Universities never fail to produce satisfyingly eccentric characters amongst both the student and the teaching populations, and there’s no shortage here of suspects, dodgy dealings and hidden intrigues. It’s a cleverly constructed novel with a satisfyingly un-guessable conclusion, and I really like the way Hill writes. He has an economical style, conveying sharp-edged impressions in a few concise sentences with lots of snappy dialogue. I was delighted to note what a prolific writer Hill is, and I’ll certainly be reading more of his novels in the future.

 

Then I turned to Susan Hill’s novel expecting, I suppose, something similar, but although the novel I read, The Various Haunts of Men, had all the external trappings of a police procedural crime novel, it made an ambitious attempt to transform the usual formula. The first thing to say is that it is beautifully written; Hill was a much-admired novelist before she turned to crime fiction, and it shows in her lucid, exquisitely timed prose. The second impression I most forcefully received was the novel’s fascination – almost obsession – with human vulnerability. The majority of characters are all sick and suffering in some way, partly because the plot focuses on the power imbalance between the practitioners of medicine in both its orthodox and alternative forms, and those who desperately need its help. But even the police force are not immune to frailty, Hill’s detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler (the man who will carry the novels in this series, although he does not as it were, dominate this initial one) portrayed as a profound enigma with unknown depths of suffering in his past. And as for the focus of the novel, young policewoman Freya Graffham who is recovering from a damaging marriage and who falls hopelessly in love with her boss (and this is extremely well done, by the way), well, tragedy will strike her life in a wholly unexpected way. But the vulnerability of Hill’s tale does not begin and end with its characters. What felt so affecting to me was the way that Hill explores the traditional plot structure as being vulnerable. I have to be careful here because I don’t want to give the ending away, and it is one of the most shocking endings I’ve read. But whereas the orthodox crime novel is paradoxically an exercise in reinforcing our readerly security – solutions come at the end of the novel just as evil can be identified, confined and imprisoned – this book undermines all our expectations for an orderly and controllable world. I can imagine how some people might feel bitterly let down by the end, and I can imagine how others would find a brave and bold challenge to conventional fiction. As for me, to be honest, I don’t know what to think. But the book did affect me profoundly, and I felt as if a shadow had fallen over me when I was reading it, and it was one that proved quite tenacious.

 

So, two novels that could not have been more different, a case of contrasting black and white, of old school and new, of vigorous, active, quick-thinking coppers, and of new style realism. In Reginald Hill’s novel the quirks and oddities of his characters made them dispensable, and the force of detection forged ahead, confident in its ability to make sense of the crime. In Susan Hill’s novel the characters were profoundly recognisable and thus crime became more troubling, more evil, I suppose, and the police force seemed only able to limp along behind its glittering wake. I really wondered how other people felt about the sanctity of the formula in crime novels. Is it time to shake up the genre and make it different? Or are there some pleasures in reading that are tightly bound to the fulfilment of our expectations? What do you think? One thing’s for sure; I’m really intrigued by Susan Hill now and will check out her blog.