Murder in midwinter

In our roundup of the season's best mysteries, a cracking new Dalziel-Pascoe yarn, echoes of a forgotten murder, S.J. Rozan's appealing private-eye duo, and the bleak brilliance of Ruth Rendell.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 10, 2003 |
"Death's Jest-Book"
By Reginald Hill
576 pages
HarperCollins
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In Reginald Hill's 20th Dalziel and Pascoe mystery, there is no mystery -- at least for readers of the series. The identity of the Wordman, the serial killer whose murder was the subject of Hill's previous book, "Dialogues of the Dead," was revealed to readers at the end of that novel. "Death's Jest-Book" contains a subplot about the planned robbery of an exhibition of artifacts from England's past, but the real interest is the continued fallout from the Wordman case. Hill's readers already know that the cops never really caught the Wordman, who, in Hill's hands, is the most tormented and sympathetic of killers.

"Death's Jest-Book" also marks the reappearance of Franny Roote, an ex-con who drives the normally reasonable Peter Pascoe to distraction. Roote has been the focus of Pascoe's suspicion before, often to the cop's embarrassment. The copious long-winded letters Roote sends Pascoe here, all of them perhaps hinting at Roote's involvement in other murders, stoke the fires of that suspicion. Hill pulls off a neat turnaround. In "Dialogues of the Dead" Pascoe's obsession with Roote seemed a good cop's blind spot. Here, it's hard to understand why the letters he receives rouse the suspicion of no one else, neither his wife, Ellie, nor his partner, Andy Dalziel -- the "fat bastard," as he's called, not usually with warmth. Hill uses Roote's letters to pull the reader into Pascoe's obsession, leading us to an eventual understanding of the myopia of which even the best of men are capable.

Twenty novels into the series, nothing about "Death's Jest-Book" suggests that Hill is writing out of habit. It's an insult, particularly to a mystery writer, to say that his work is literate -- a novel, by definition, should be literate. But it may be necessary to use that descriptive to get at the high quality of Hill's writing. The ingenious "Dialogues of the Dead" featured the kind of mad wordplay that would set critics' superlatives flying had it appeared in a work of "serious" fiction. The fineness of Hill's writing is evident not just in the language itself but in the ease of his construction, the ease with which he cuts among his large cast of Yorkshire cops. Best of all is the poignancy of the burgeoning romance between D.C. Hat Bowler and the Rye Pomona, the librarian featured in "Dialogues of the Dead." The real tribute to mystery writers comes when you can say that you pick up their books to keep company with the cast of characters. Dalziel and Pascoe are nowhere close to wearing out their welcome.

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"The Distant Echo"
By Val McDermid
384 pages
St. Martin's Minotaur
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Val McDermid's new one-shot has the kind of premise that hooks you at once. Four college friends are walking home from a party late one night when they come upon a young girl who's been raped and stabbed. She dies before they can help her, and the friends find themselves under suspicion for her murder. The police never find evidence to charge the young men, but 25 years later someone starts killing them off.

"The Distant Echo" suggests that for McDermid the construction of mysteries has become effortless (or that she's good enough to make it appear that way). As is usual with her, the characters are remarkably vivid; the supporting characters, particularly the dead girl's family, are rendered with the sort of nuanced compression that short-story writers must envy.

But the real distinction of "The Distant Echo" is that it's a novel about the way the bonds of friendship are inevitably frayed as people pass from adolescence to adulthood. Writing from the point of view of men, McDermid is uncanny about how habits and personality traits that were once tolerated or looked on fondly now act as irritants, how people who were once inseparable drift away from each other and how they can never really cut those ties that bind. McDermid ends on a note of hope that she earns. What stays with you from "The Distant Echo" is its melancholy portrait of youthful camaraderie battered by experience. It's a terrific mystery and a novel whose sadness does not dissipate.

Next Page: OK, so I'm a little late on S.J. Rozan's muckraking realism. And Ruth Rendell scourges the English countryside with her wrath

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