Mystery Monday: Pictures of Perfection!

Our book today is 1994′s Pictures of Perfection, one of the incredibly entertaining Dalziel & Pascoe mystery novels of the late, great Reginald Hill, although really I could be just as happy picking any of these delightful novels to re-read and praise here.

Hill wrote mountains of prose (the full catalog may never be assembled, since he very often wrote under clever pen-names, the rogue), and all it was filled with the perfect quotability that only first-water hacks ever achieve. But it’s easy to feel, when you’re reading them, that his Dalziel & Pascoe novels were where his writing heart beat strongest and truest. Here we find the adventures of grim, foreboding (and gay, though it’s nowt of your bloody business) Detective Sergeant Wield, sharp young go-getter Inspector Pascoe, and that gruff-mouthed, shovel-handed Lord of All He Cares to Survey, superintendent Andy Dalziel, the Fat Man who rolls through these stories like a literature-quoting rump-scratching avalanche. Hill exploits the ensemble feel as well as any writer, but he clearly knows what his readers also quickly realize: Dalziel is his immortal character, his Sherlock Holmes, his Hercule Poirot, his Judge Dee, his Horace Rumpole.

What makes Pictures of Perfection such a delight is the same thing that makes all the other Hill novels delights: he’s always willing to surprise us. The surprise in this novel comes from the fact that Dalziel and Pascoe themselves are slightly secondary in the plot – this is Wieldy’s book to shine, starting with him at the tail end of a very rare vacation, riding his big motorcycle (in full leather riding gear) through the seemingly idyllic village of Enscombe, where he’s briefly interrogated by an attractive young rural constable named Bendish, who learns to his dismay that he’s been laying the heavy hand on his superior on the force, much to Wield’s amusement – if you can discern it as amusement:

Wield barked the sound which friends recognized as his way of expressing amusement – though others often took it as a sign that the interrupted lycanthropic process suggested by his face was about to be resumed.

Wield no sooner reports back for duty at the station than he’s walking in on a complaint being made by one of the high-strung local grandees of Enscombe – a complaint about him, as a suspicious outsider who may or may not be connected with suspicious goings-on about town. The townsman, one Digweed, is astonished to find the mysterious stranger of his complaints actually working at the police station. Like most people who encounter Wieldy’s rather alarming thuggish appearance, Digweed has trouble believing there’s a trained professional underneath the surface, and he’s not diplomatic about saying so:

“A detective? You? That does indeed sound like a very great mistake. I still find it hard to believe, Superintendent …?”

“This is Detective Sergeant Wield, one of my officers,” said Dalziel in a dangerous voice. “Will someone tell me what’s going on here?”

“I was in Enscombe yesterday, sir,” said Wield. “I met Mr. Digweed briefly. Then a bit later on, I -”

“You assaulted Constable Bendish!” interposed Digweed. “Excellent. To preserve your cover, isn’t that the term? I presume that extraordinary costume you had on was some form of cover?”

“I spoke with Bendish, sir,” said Wield stolidly, addressing himself to Dalziel.

“Oh, aye? And what did he say?”

Wield glanced doubtfully at Digweed, who said, “Yes, yes, of course. From being so vital a witness I have to be dragged from my place of business – which incidentally will be doing no business at all while I’m away – I have become an intrusive member of the general public who must on no account be allowed to overhear high-level police discussion. Excuse me, gentlemen. I shall return home where I will spend more of my valuable time penning a strong letter of complaint. You do, I presume, employ at least one token literate to read such letters? Never mind. I’ll put it on tape also. Now I give you good day.”

He strode out. It was a rather good, very English sort of exit.

Dalziel jerked his head to Filmer, who went in apologetic pursuit.

Then the Fat Man turned to Wield and fixed him with a gaze which would have frozen a Gorgon.

“Right, sunshine,” he said with dreadful softness. “Now you can tell me what you were doing in fancy dress beating up PC Bendish!”

The joy that Hill fell into when writing these books is evident on virtually every page, I think. You can’t help but smile at a tossed-in line like “It was a rather good, very English sort of exit.”

Of course Wield tries to explain everything to his boss (as he sagely observes later in the book, “You didn’t apply human rule to a force of nature”), and soon our team finds itself investigating the odd local rituals of Enscombe – and, as so often happens in these novels, Andy Dalziel finds ample opportunities to exert his oddly effective Neanderthalic charms on the local women:

“I’ll tell you what, luv. You carry on, and I’ll just fit in the odd question as you go by.”

“Well, if it’s official,” she said, weakening.

“If it were any more official, it’ud be wearing pinstripes,” he assured her. “In fact, why don’t I give you a hand with these trays while we’re talking.”

“And yourself a hand with my grub, I don’t doubt,” she said sharply.

” ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn,’ ” said Dalziel. “Deuteronomy.”

“I know where it’s from,” she said. “I’m just amazed where it’s got to.”

“You and I are going to understand each other very well,” laughed Andrew Dalziel. “Is that apple pie? My favorite.”

“Aye, but it’s not cut.”

“Cut? You’re not expecting it to do more than one, are you?”

She began to laugh, and Dalziel would have laughed with her if his mother hadn’t taught him that it was rude to laugh with your mouth full.

I’m pretty sure that Mystery Monday will be returning to the Dalziel & Pascoe books again in the course of 2014, and it’s no good saying Pictures of Perfection is an odd place to start, being so unconventional an entry in the series – all these great books are unconventional in one way or other; that’s a big part of their charm. For somebody so predictable, as one character remarks in an earlier adventure, the Fat Man can be bloody unpredictable.