On Beulah Height (Dalziel & Pascoe, #17) (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
Seventeenth in the Dalziel and Pascoe mystery series set in contemporary Mid-Yorkshire. My TakeOh wow, oh wow, oh wow...this was good. Can ya tell...I think this was good. I'm still a bit overwhelmed...wow.I actually thought I was reading the first book in the series and I was so impressed by how well entrenched all the characters were. You truly can read this story out of its order as Hill doesn't leave you wondering what you've missed. Instead, I fell into their story in total comfort. As though I had known them forever. Now I'm curious about all that has gone before...tch...never happy, am I?Hill has done a beautiful job of writing Yorkshire dialog. It feels very authentic and yet up-to-date. No, I'm not trying to be catty. It's just that you know the story is set in a contemporary day and the characters are everyday people comfortable in "today" while "in character" with their Yorkshire accent and all those "were"s. It helped set the atmosphere beautifully.It's a compelling story with a lovely cast of varied characters. Everyday characters enduring the dramas that attach to parenthood and policework in such a way that you want to know what will happen next. I love the introspection Hill provides us in Pascoe's worries about his daughter and how she views their family; the conclusions we draw as we learn more about Elizabeth and Betsy Allgood---I'd certainly never have expected Elizabeth to turn out as she has...until I reached the end; Ellie Pascoe's thoughts on her many writing rejections are hauntingly funny; there's Novello's worries about the retreats and advances in her own career along with her assessments of the "Holy Trinity"; Hill intrigues and teases with his subtle red herrings although I am confused as to why everyone ignored the 'strine accent of the mysterious "Benny Lightfoot"…!I did enjoy Digweed's paraphrase of Churchill's quote when Monte "came to visit": "Naturally my first thought was, I'm being raped by an ape,...So I lay back and thought of Africa."One thought that rises is that we never pay enough attention to what children say. Nor do we remember how they interpret what they see in relation to what they know...just ask Rosie. And the greatest tragedy? We teach them to tell us what will make us adults happy. We tell them that they should always tell the truth, but then punish them for it. It only teaches them to repeat to us what they think we want to hear. The truth may not have saved anyone the first time around...but, at least, there may have been a chance."The Sumo Wrestler as Sex Object."Ooh, and yet more snark!The StoryHistory is repeating itself when a little girl goes missing on the fells. A throwback to a series of disappearances 12 years earlier when the village of Dendale drowned.It's the Dacre family drama when young Lorraine goes missing that brings back all the past fears and opens us to the inner family and individual crises of those involved from adulteries, child interactions, the dangers of self-righteousness, the terror of meningitis, old romances, the give-and-take amongst the cops, writer and performer anxieties, and successes and failures set in a village where so many seem to know everyone else.Finally, it brings an most unexpected resolution that will make you nuts..!The CharactersDetective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, a.k.a., the Fat Man, is the head of CID and pretty much god amongst the Yorkshire police force. Use his name and it's "open sesame". Amanda "Cap" Marvell reappears back in Andy's life. Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe is suffering from depression and there's his writer wife Ellie and their daughter Rosie. Sergeant "Nobby" Clark seems to live up to his nickname. Detective Inspector Maggie Burroughs organizes the search of the fells. Edwin Digweed is an antiquarian bookseller and the publisher of the Eendale Press as well as Sergeant Edgar Wield's partner. Detective Constable Shirley Novello is anxious to prove herself on this case. Detective Inspector George Headingley is very carefully minding his time until he retires. Sergeant Tom Merriman is the chief mermaid who makes a surprising discovery putting paid to several years-old questions. Jeannie Plowright is now head of Social Services at County Hall and a big help in locating Mrs. Lightfoot.The Dendale villagers in the first set of dramas:Aunt Chloe Wulfstan and her snobby husband Walter with their daughter Mary; Cedric and Mrs. Hardcastle and their Jenny; and Joe and Mrs. Telford with their Madge and more. Betsy Allgood was a seven-year-old, very involved, witness. Mr. Pontifex owned most of the farms in the area and let them to farmers on a tenancy. Arne Krog is a Norwegian baritone who has been singing at the Mid-Yorkshire Dales Music Festival from the beginning and his unsocial accompanist Inger Sandel. Dalziel is pretty cheeky in his stubborn adherence to mistaking the Norwegian's nationality! Benny Lightfoot is a shy young man who passionately avoids others causing them to consider him daft and he's a person of interest in the crimes. He moved in with his grandmother, Mrs. Agnes Lightfoot, when his mother remarried and took his brother Barnaby off to Oz. Geordie Turnbull was one of the heavy plant operators on the dam---and a person of interest. I did enjoy Hill's description of Turnbull as a most charming ladies' man...gentlemen, you could learn sometihng from this!The Danby villagers in today's drama include:Elizabeth Wulfstan is a young up-and-coming singer who has returned to the area for a music festival. Tony and Elsie Coe Dacre and their Lorraine. Benny Lightfoot has left his mark in Mid-Yorkshire: his speed is a byword and the children sing rhymes about him while the seeker in hide-and-seek is "the Benny". Mrs. Shimmings is the head teacher at St. Michael's Primary. The mildly lecherous Derek and unpretentious Jill Purlingstone with their daughter Zandra, Rosie's best friend, is more of a useful side note. The Hardcastles are here with young Jed who provides some insight into how parents unconsciously destroy their children.Billie Saltair, the matron at the Wark House, provides useful information and contacts.The TitleThe title is the key to this story for the answers are found On Beulah Height.
"On Beulah Height" is the first book I've read by Reginald Hill. I came across it almost by accident - through a swap on PaperBackSwap.com. Another member wanted to do a trade and I couldn't find anything on her shelf that I recognized, so I decided to take a chance on this book, based on its synopsis.Wow! I am so glad I did. Hill's work epitomizes everything that is good about British mysteries: a small village, eccentric characters, wry humor, flawed, but brilliant detectives, suspenseful, but with little or no graphic descriptions of violence. British mystery writers seem to be able to describe a crime with as much as they don't say as with what they do.I didn't see the resolution of the mystery coming, even though it was there in front if me all of the time. And in my opinion, this is a good thing! I find it irritating when a writer resolves a mystery by introducing information at the end of the story that we weren't privy to at least somewhere before in the story. However, when a writer resolves a story in such a way that you say to yourself, "how could I have missed that?" And you want to read the book all over again, just so you can fully appreciate the clues that you misinterpreted or completely missed before - well, that is an excellent mystery in my book!Hill's work is reminiscent of that of other British mystery writers I've enjoyed, such as Robert Barnard and Michael Gilbert. "On Beulah Height" reminds me once again why it's so important to take a risk with an author I'm not familiar with. Before this book, I'd been somewhat stuck in my reading, I'd read several books that were good, but not remarkable, and I wondered when I was going to come across that next really good book. "On Beulah Heights" was it and I'm so thankful that there are another 23 books in the Dalziel and Pascoe series I now can look forward to reading!
What do You think about On Beulah Height (Dalziel & Pascoe, #17) (1999)?
A detective story with a painfully slow start which builds to a strong finish. A team of police detectives with their own lives and inner turmoils search for a missing girl... the case might have ties to a series of missing girls from 12years earlier. Hill takes a few fun digressions from the main story to tell the tale of a children's fable: Nina and the Nix, as well as a series of pysch evals and lyrics to a classical piece called 'Songs for Dead Children' ... which tie nicely into the resolution.
—FittenTrim
ON BEULAH HEIGHT. (1998). Reginald Hill. *****.tHill is a masterful writer of dense and labyrinthine mysteries. His two protagonists are detectives from the mid-Yorkshire district (where is that?) in England. The pair play off of each other in a nip and tuck manner, but it is easy to tell that Dalziel is the master and Pascoe is the apprentice. In this case, a yung girl has gone missing, not an unusual case, but one which raises the specter of a case from fifteen years earlier where three young girls went missing and were never found. Dalziel was in charge of that earlier case and still blames himself for not being able to solve it in a respectable manner. Although they had suspects in the case, there was not enough evidence to hold any of them. In the ensuing time, the small town where all of this occured is now under water – the buildings destroyed and a new dam holding back the water which now serves as a reservoir for the new town and surrounding areas. There is still a lot of rancor among the old villagers who had to move, since many of them did not own their land, but simply worked the land for absentee owners. They faced the likelyhood that they would find themselves without a home in the new village if the owner decided to give the land to new tenant farmers. For the last several years, a drought had hit the region and the old buildings below the dam are slowly reappearing, bringing back memories – both good and bad – for the villagers, especially for those families who had lost their daughters. Dalziel and Pascoe slowly piece together the scenario for the current missing young girl and manage to uncover relationships that went back to the earlier times that they didn’t know at the time. Although the case is solved – almost at the last page of the novel – we realize that this mystery is more than a case about a missing young girl, but also addresses more basic issues about the relationship between parents and their children. It is also about love and loss of children and the havoc it wreaks on the parents and other relatives. One of the detectives, while seeking out the latest missing child, muses: “Oh you bastard, you bastard, whoever you are, it’s all of us you kill because you kill our faith in each other, in ourselves. We don’t just recoil in horror from what you do, we recoil in horror from ourselves from being part of the same humanity that produced whatever it is that you are.” This is a powerful story. Highly recommended.
—Tony
The plot of this book is somewhat reminiscent of Peter Robinson's IN A DRY SEASON: a small English village once drowned in the construction of a reservoir is uncovered during a severe drought, and its secrets begin to come to light. (Was there a lot of this going on in Britain in the late 90s?) In any case, Hill's take on it is naturally different from Robinson's: in this one, the receding waters and the reappearance of the village coincide with the disappearance of a young girl, powerfully reminiscent of a similar series of disappearances prior to the relocation of the people of the village and its subsequent destruction. Hill's vulgar head detective Fat Andy Dalziel had been part of the prior, unresolved investigation and is grimly determined to crack this recent case, in the unspoken hope that it might resolve the old one. Dalziel's in his usual amusingly loutish form, his partner Pascoe continues to be a bit of an annoying stick in the mud, and the story, as per Hill's usual pace, takes a while to get anywhere. But the supporting characters are drawn well enough to make you care about them, and every now and then Hill comes up with a turn of phrase that makes you chuckle out loud with its perfection. Worth the extra time it takes to read. Oh, and pay attention to the illustrations, though they may look a bit amateurish. They're important.
—J.D.
