Customer Reviews

Good Morning Midnight

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

British award-winner Hill delivers another witty and delightful Dalziel and Pascoe novel, his 21st. An irascible force of nature, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel seems uncharacteristically incurious about the peculiar suicide of antiques dealer Pal Maciver, ordering Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe to write it off without further investigation. Which Pascoe would have been inclined to do - room locked from the inside, toe through shotgun trigger guard - but for Dalziel's suspicious complacency.

Now, the reader knows, as the police do not, that Maciver went to considerable trouble to stage his suicide as a murder, framing his hated stepmother, and that only careful investigation would turn up the clues he had planted. His suicide is a replica of his father's a decade before, right down to the volume of Emily Dickinson poems open on his desk.

These were a favorite of the American stepmother, Kay, now Kafka, married to Tony Kafka, head of the munitions company that swallowed the Maciver family business all those years ago. It's Kay whom Dalziel seems to be protecting, an enigma who may be as calculating as she is beguiling, though she has the fat man's total confidence.

Point of view switches among the various members of the police team (though never Dalziel; that would blunt his mystique), the family, and the spooks surrounding Kafka's business. The plot thickens as it goes, the by-play among the cops remains witty and shrewd (vaguely like a British version of McBain's 87th precinct), the characters' interactions are complex and satisfyingly underhanded and Hill delivers a sharp twist at the end that settles some questions while raising a host of new ones. Another winner from a writer who just keeps getting better.

I was glad to see this book come out and even happier to read it. The past few Reginald Hill books in the Dalziel and Pascoe series have been entirely too cerebral for a simple sot like me and I started to actually resent Reginald Hill for ramming home his blinding intellect so fiercely. He must have gotten that out of his system, because in "Good Morning, Midnight", we have a really nifty, twisty mystery with the usual great attraction/avoidance between our beloved inspectors Dalziel and Pascoe. This doesn't mean that Hill deprives us of Dalziel's fantastically literate musings (and I'm sure I only "get" a small percentage of these) but they aren't the centerpiece. The story is. And there is nothing so delicious as a good old-fashioned "body in the library" mystery with lots of nasty family members involved. It is even better when the ugliness goes back a few generations and we get an intriguing backstory as a result. I still wish Ellie Pascoe would get a life and that Dalziel's love life would pick back up again, but that might have made too weighty and dense a story. In truth, this one was just right.

In this latest entry in the long-running Dalziel and Pascoe series, Hill leaves the "literary" plots of the last two novels and returns to regular chapter titles, without the amazingly relevant quotes that preceded chapters in these works (although Emily Dickinson's poetry does give the book its title and figures into the plot in a minor way).

Fans of the series won't be disappointed. Having said that, I don't feel that GMM is quite up there with the best of the series, like On Beulah Height and Bones and Silence. Still, just when I think I might tire of reading another Dalziel and Pascoe story and would rather read something else, I find myself very interested in the plot and caring about the characters again. Hill is so insightful psychologically that it is always a delight to read the thoughts of his characters. Even when you don't agree with his political views (which certainly creep in), you have to respect his honesty and the fact that Hill really seems to be able to find something likeable or at least interesting in almost every character (including Dalziel, who never sounds like as good a character as he really is when I describe him to my wife).

So be a clever clogs and enjoy the funny buggers in GMM.

In my view, Reginald Hill is the most literate and witty of all current writers of police procedurals. Dalziel and Pascoe are a great pair as the gruff bearlike Dalziel plays off "college boy" Pascoe. Gay Sgt Weld and PC Shirley Novello round out the team as they unravel a complex plot. Each of the numerous players here is a distinct and memorable personality. Highly recommended.

A decade ago a man committed suicide in the Moscow House in Yorkshire. Now his son Pal Maciver kills himself in the same place in the same manner while his spouse Sue Lynn was playing patient-doctor in the bed of her lover Tom Lockridge. Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel and Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascal head the inquiries into what is obvious, a locked door suicide.

As the police investigate, Andy seems to be thinking with his wrong head as he appears to compromise the case by his relationship with Kay Kafta, widow of Maciver the father and stepmother to Maciver the son. Even stranger is that Andy led the inquiries into the father's suicide. As the international corporate world and government spies intersect the investigation, Peter worries that Andy is covering up the working of a killing feline due to desire for the merry widow.

GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT is an entertaining Dalziel and Pascal police procedural more for their battling (seem like a married couple) than the actual investigation. Peter is very concerned that Andy has stepped over the ethics line to protect Kay and wonders if the DS did the same ten years ago. This is a terrific British cop series with the investigations always fun to follow, but this time especially pleasurable is when the lead couple fuss, fight, and fume.

Harriet Klausner

The body of local big-shot Pal Maciver is found in a locked room with half of his head blown off and with a number of deliberately placed clues pointing towards his hated step mother, Kay Kafka. Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel is an old friend of Kay so chooses to direct the investigation from the rear, leaving his off-sider, DCI Peter Pascoe to front the team. The strange and very involved past histories of Pal, his two sisters and Kay, their stepmother, become evident, as does the fact that the killing exactly copies the suicide of Pals' father, 10 years previously.
I found this to be an immensely readable book, full of suspense and with enough twists and turns to keep the reader glued to it well into the small hours.

This is a satisfactory entry--but no more than that--in a long-running and entertaining series. Fat Andy Dalziel of the outrageous name is always worth the price of admission. (In some future outing he should become involved with an American southerner named Taliaferro, thus affording opportunity for 400-plus pages of trans-Atlantic mispronunciations.)

At this stage of his career, Hill has taken to mixing genres. In this book, without digging too hard, we find comedy of manners, international thriller, police procedural, locked room puzzle, English country house mystery, multi-generational epic and literary navel-gazer. Unfortunately, none of these elements has quite enough freedom to soar, nor do they manage to blend together into a satisfactory whole. The locked room story, for example, shoots itself in the foot (so to speak) right at the beginning of the book. At the end of the book [SPOILER ALERT!] the Emily Dickinsonian literary thread turns out to be ... irrelevant, a mere McGuffin.

I suspect that Reginald Hill's long-term triumphs have been enough to ensure that his publishers apply little save the most mechanical sort of editing to his hefty manuscripts. It is hard, of course, to argue with success, but "Good Morning, Midnight" would be a better book if an editor with blue pencil poised had asked some hard questions of Hill. There are really too many narrative strands to form much more than an unsightly tangle. The final answer to a big "WHY?" question just isn't massive enough to bear the accumulated weight of the hundreds of pages we have traversed to get to it. The backstory of the series is becoming unwieldy. The character of Hat Bowler, another preposterous name (there are more), simply does not make any sense at all in terms of THIS book, except as an annoying weakling. Sergeant Wield, on the other hand, is strong enough but he is given nothing to do. He is a player listed on the program who is given the opportunity to stride on stage, bow to the audience, collect a polite round of recognition applause and then obliged to depart before affecting the shape of the drama in any degree.

Then there is the matter of language. British editors should have a stick bearing the motto "You write in American at your peril" with which to beat English authors over the head. As an American long-ago transplanted to Canada, I still occasionally stumble over the very much more subtle differences between 'Murrican and Western Canajan. Hill's Americans sometimes sound almost as hilariously wrong as dear old Agatha Christie's, not so much in their vocabulary but in rhythm of speech and sentence structure. (Come to think of it, Hill's Yank does say "reckon." In all my life, I have heard just two Americans say "I reckon": Gary Cooper and John Wayne, and then only in movie westerns.)

"Good Morning, Midnight" does have one estimable advantage over several other outings of the series. DCI Pascoe's wife, the egregious Ellie, makes only perfunctory appearances. True to form, as other Amazon reviewers have noted, even in her brief turn on stage she manages to sound a profoundly wrong note on one of her many false fiddles. It is a measure of Hill's talent that with Ellie Pascoe he has managed to create the complete Anti-Nora Charles, the most distasteful cow in all of contemporary mystery (and perhaps any) fiction.

It's a strange death, but it seems indisputable that it's a suicide. There's a locked door, a bare toe with a shotgun, and no extraneous fingerprints to be found. The only problem is, Pal Maciver has precisely duplicated the suicide of his father ten years earlier. Now, what kind of man would do that? Although his boss tells him to rule the death a suicide and turn over the case to the uniformed services, DCI Peter Pascoe senses something he can't quite put his finger on. There's the dead man's family--all weird and definitely equipped with both money and hatred. Then there are the little details of the case. Two glasses are clean while the others are dusty--and where is the bottle the dead man had been drinking from. When he learns that his boss had been in charge of the investigation of the father's suicide, Pascoe is even more torn.

Pascoe's investigation turns up sexual misdeeds, lies, and brushes on the corners of a large company that just might become the next recipient of the American Securities and Exchange Commission's attentions. Finally, even his boss, Detective Superintendent Dalziel, is forced to agree that there's something going on--and that they need to continue the investigation.

Author Reginald Hill spins an interesting take on the classic 'locked room' mystery. Readers know from the start that Pal's death was a suicide, but we're still pulled into the investigation--and the mystery that lurks beneath the mystery.

Hill tosses out plenty of hints of what Pascoe is likely to find, eventually. Too many hints, I thought. In fact, that might be the key weakness in an otherwise fascinating book--the reader knows too much, too soon, and spends too much time waiting for the police to catch up.

Still, GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT makes for an entertaining read as Pascoe and Dalziel try to game one another, each trying to bring about some hint of justice in their own way, but finding the other obstructing what they do.

Pal Maciver's body is found behind locked doors. The shotgun close by is obviously the weapon of choice. All signs SCREAM "suicide" ... and that is what Detective (DCI) Peter Pascoe's boss wants him to list it as and close the case. However, Peter simply cannot bring himself to do so.

Peter's boss, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, was the officer that investigated the "suicide" of Pal's father ten years ago. Both Macivers died exactly the same way. Pal's stepmother and an arms dealer make it all murkier still. One thing Peter knows for sure: the answers could shatter the police department to its very foundation.

**** A very good mystery, but the "suicide behind locked doors" scenario has already been played to death. The author does manage to throw in a surprise or two though. If you are a fan of this series or simply enjoy a good mystery, I can certainly recommend this one. ****

Reviewed by Detra Fitch of Huntress Reviews.

Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe books may not be for everyone.

First, there is the style. An ex-professor, Hill sprinkles (and over-sprinkles) his prose with quotations, allusions, oblique jokes, neologisms, Greek words, etc. to a maddening degree.

Add to that, in this book, the frequent quotes from and references to Emily Dickinson. Dickinson is a fine poet, but a little of her goes a very long way.

I don't particularly favor this style, but to his credit, Hill manages to deliver in spite of the style, rather than because of it.

First, he is a master of character. In a few strokes, he can memorably and inimitably sketch any character, small or large.

Second, his plotlines are convoluted and unpredictable, yet emotionally satisfying and suspenseful.

That's especially true in this book, which is resolved--if it is resolved--by a deus-ex-MI6.

But the lack of resolution--the possibility that many people may have been in on the crime, or may not--actually adds to the intrigue.

The whole thing has a wonderful symmetry.

And just speaking personally, I like Pascoe better than Dalziel, and in this book Pascoe dominates.

Really a fine book for lovers of tight-woven, surprising fiction.