What do You think about Bones And Silence (1991)?
While I enjoyed the first of the Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries, A Clubbable Woman, I thought this one was better. Hill has fleshed out the personalities of his two lead sleuths. I found myself not particularly liking Dalziel in the first book - his unreconstructed blokishness was just a bit much. In Bones and Silence, Dalziel is still the same crude, hard-drinking policeman who's not above a little bending the rules to catch a guilty man, but he has a sympathetic side. Pascoe has been fleshed out as well. Hill has also really brought his unnamed Northern town setting to life. I have very little experience of Northern English towns, so I can't really speak to the accuracy of it, but the place is crammed with the kind of odd details and quirky minor characters that certainly suggest verisimilitude. There are two major mysteries to be solved in Bones and Silence. First, Andy Dalziel looks out of his kitchen window one night to see a man and a woman struggling with a gun in an adjacent house. A shot is fired, and he arrives to find the woman dead, and her husband holding the gun. Dalziel thinks it's murder, but the husband claims that his wife was attempting to kill herself, and that the gun went off as he tried to take it from her. It looks like a verdict of suicide is going to prevail, unless Dalziel and Pascoe can unearth more evidence. The second plot involves a series of letters sent to Dalziel by an anonymous writer who says she's decided to kill herself at a specified date in the future. Pascoe sets out to find out who she is before it's too late. There's a side plot involving the efforts of a local community theater director to put on a staging of medieval mystery plays, with local people playing all the parts. Hilarity ensues when she casts Dalziel as God, and his murder suspect as Satan. The resolution of the murder plot for me falls just on the right side of the line between "satisfyingly improbable" and "totally outlandish". Somewhat more skeptical readers might have a problem. I wasn't completely happy with the resolution of the suicide letter plot - it's plausible, but perhaps I just didn't want that particular character to be so deeply unhappy. Definitely worth a look if you want a literate, twisty, mystery with lots of local color.
—Wendy
"Bones and Silence" is one of the many Dalziel/Pascoe mysteries by Reginald Hill that I have read although the first I have discussed on goodreads. It is typical of the series--the two main characters are police officers in mid-Yorkshire. Andy Dalziel is the fat, pugnacious and extremely effective senior officer--he is steadily promoted in the course of the series while Peter Pascoe is his more educated, less impulsive but still effective alter ego who is always a couple of pay grades junior to Daziel. The crime is, of course, murder. In this case Dalziel has witnessed either a cold blooded murder or a suicide that has almost been averted. The victim is an unstable women and the two men with her when she died, shot in the head at very close range, are her husband and the man with whom she is currently committing adultery, something she is very good at. There are good reasons to assume she killed herself and other reasons, perhaps not quite as convincing, that her husband killed her. When the arrest and interrogation of her husband leads only to a claim of police harrassment by the husband's very able lawyer and the man who has been cuckolding disappears, the case is stalled and the inquest will probably bring a finding of death by suicide. While Hill is an accomplished mystery writer he is even better as a social observer and commentator on the human foibles of his protagonists and those around them. The story is told in a modified third person point of view sometimes told through the eyes and actions although not the words of Pascoe and other times from a "fly on the wall" viewpoint. Hill is a master of his genre, a delightfully droll writer who enjoys wordplay and unexpected references classic or popular literature. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys well written mysteries, particulary ones set in England and especially fans of the two current queens, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell (long may both of them reign). Like both of them Hill excells in social and class commentary and takes a jaundiced, occasionally hopeful view of society during the turn of the 20th century.
—Ed
BONES AND SILENCE by Reginald Hill is the eleventh book in the series featuring Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe. Dalziel starts receiving letters from a woman who has decided to commit suicide, and have also decided to let know the fat man of her decision through a series of letters. Dalziel then gets an offer to play God in a local play, as he witnesses a death of a woman. He is convinced that the husband is responsible for the crime, while all evidence along with his boss thinks it’s an accident. Things come to head when a crucial witness goes missing, as Dalziel realises that the main suspect is to play Lucifer to his God in the local play.I normally tend to get bored by the type of crime novels where 10-15 odd pages gets filled with inter departmental chit-chat, the politics of the department, how the protagonist is trying to disobey his boss, and off course, his musical taste. These 15 pages are followed by a couple of pages of material related to the main plot, and then again the reader gets face to face with another 10-15 pages of the same stuff. All in the good name of “realistic” crime fiction. Bones and Silence being a long book, had all the possibility of having all the above mentioned “real” points. But all it had was a tight plot, which meanders through a handful of clues. An ending which is not surprising, but still throws up a few delightful twists, and the great relation between Dalziel and Pascoe, which grows tighter with each passing book. In a way this was a complete crime novel, which justified its length.
—Anirban Das
