Reginald Charles HillFRSL (3 April 1936 – 12 January 2012) was an English crime writer and the winner in 1995 of the
Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement.[2] He was inducted into the prestigious
Detection Club in 1978.
Biography
Hill was born to a "very ordinary"[3] 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.[4] He passed the
eleven plus exam and attended
Carlisle Grammar School where he excelled in English.[2] After
National Service (1955–57) and studying English at
St Catherine's College, Oxford (1957–60), he worked as a teacher for many years, becoming a senior lecturer at Doncaster College of Education.[5] 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 (née Soper). 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 (dedicated to "you, dear readers, without whom the writing would be in vain, and to you, still dearer purchasers, without whom the eating would be infrequent"[6]) 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.[7]
Hill died at his home[8] in Ravenglass, Cumbria, on 12 January 2012 after suffering a brain tumour.[9][10]
The Death of Dalziel (2007), Canada and US Title: Death Comes for the Fat Man
A Cure for All Diseases (Canada and US title: The Price of Butcher's Meat) (2008) Shortlisted for
Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award 2009.[11][12]
Midnight Fugue (2009)
Joe Sixsmith
Blood Sympathy (1993)
Born Guilty (1995)
Killing the Lawyers (1997)
Singing the Sadness (1999)
The Roar of the Butterflies (2008)
Other
Fell of Dark (1971)
The Castle of the Demon (1971) (As Patrick Ruell) (apa The Turning of the Tide)
A Fairly Dangerous Thing (1972)
Red Christmas (1972) (As Patrick Ruell)
Heart Clock (1973) (As Dick Morland) (apa Matlock's System as Reginald Hill)
Death Takes a Low Road (1974) (As Patrick Ruell) (apa The Low Road)
A Very Good Hater (1974)
Albion! Albion! (1974) (As Dick Morland) (apa Singleton's Law as Reginald Hill)
Beyond the Bone (1975) (apa Urn Burial ) (As Patrick Ruell)
Another Death in Venice (1976)
Captain Fantom (1978) (As Charles Underhill) – inspired by the life of
Carlo Fantom
The Forging of Fantom (1979) (As Charles Underhill)
Pascoe's Ghost and Other Brief Chronicles of Crime [SS] (1979)
^
ab"The Barry Awards". Deadly Pleasures. 9 October 2008. Archived from
the original on 23 April 2012. Retrieved 27 January 2012.
Further reading
Binyon, T. J., 'Murder Will Out': The Detective in Fiction (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Herbert, Rosemary, 'Reginald Hill', in The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers (New York: G. K. Hall, Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, & Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994), pp. 194–223.
Ling, Peter J. "Identity, Allusions, and Agency in Reginald Hill's Good Morning, Midnight." CLUES: A Journal of Detection 24.4 (Summer 2006): 59–71.
Salo-Oja, Mari, Lost in Translation? Translating allusions in two of Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels[1].