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GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT
by Reginald Hill
HarperCollins, February 2004
400 pages
12.00GBP
ISBN: 000712340X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Having resurrected, if only briefly, the obscure Death's Jest-Book, Reginald Hill now turns his gimlet eye on my favourite poet, Emily Dickinson, whom Pascoe, to his shame, confuses with Ella Wheeler Wilcox. (Rather like confusing Edgar Guest and Robert Frost, only worse.)

The improbably-named Palinurus MacIver has evidently committed suicide in exactly the same manner as did his father ten years earlier, leaving as his note a volume of Dickinson's poetry open to one that ends with the lines "Caressed a trigger absently/and wandered out of life." Pascoe is not altogether happy that this is the uncomplicated suicide-by-shotgun that it appears, though Fat Andy is curiously willing to wrap the whole thing up and go home.

What ensues is a complicated and mystifying tale that has its roots, as we might expect, in the past, a past that in some way implicates Dalziel with the widow of the elder suicide. The widow, since married to a powerful head of an international company formerly owned by Pal Senior, may be the devoted step-mother of her very pregnant step-daughter or perhaps a scheming enchantress happily having it off with every young man in sight and guilty of crimes of an order that would put Medea in a good light.

Is it possible that even hard-headed, unromantic Andy has fallen under her spell and is now corrupted enough to try to cover up a murder? Pascoe is certainly reluctant to think so, but he feels compelled to pursue the investigation in the face of Dalziel's attempts to dissuade him.

It is not quite accurate, I think, to classify the later entries in this series as police procedurals in the sense, at least, that someone like Graham Hurley writes about how the police go about solving a crime, or even in the way that Ian Rankin portrays the inner workings of the Edinburgh police force.

Hill's interests in the last few years have been in the subjective, the play of relationships among his on-going cast of characters, who are brought forward or retired to the background as the plot demands. (Ellie has only a brief, if impressive, cameo here, while Hat is gradually reintroduced, and the sullen Shirley Novello appears quite prominently).

As well, Hill is playing around with one of the most sturdy of genre conventions, the locked room mystery, and, I might add, getting away with it. And there are other echoes of classical crime fiction, as well, that cannot be ignored. All of which is, however, placed firmly in the present, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Hill is dazzlingly able to keep all these balls in the air without any apparent sense of strain and to mystify the reader thoroughly along the way. Highly recommended.

Reviewer's note: This review refers to the original UK trade paperback edition. It is not as yet published in the United States.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, February 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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