Reginald Hill: not just classy; cool.

By Ruth Dudley Edwards

Reginal Hill at Harrogate in 2010.

My crime-writing colleagues have been writing sadly, lovingly, admiringly and eloquently about Reg Hill, and I can’t pass up the chance to say what a wonderful writer and delightful man we have lost.  I venerated him greatly and loved his company.  It was my proudest moment as a crime writer when he proposed me as a member of the Detection Club.  I wish I could remember the affectionate jibes he directed at me in his speech.

Reg was erudite, cultivated and a master of the English language, but he wore his learning so lightly and wittily that it was reminiscent of a soufflé surprise.    He could be authoritative, but he was never ever pompous.  He laughed affectionately at himself, at his friends, at the world and at his characters.  When he described himself as being at the Jane Austen end of the crime-writing spectrum he meant he didn’t go in for torrid sex or graphic violence.  But of course the comparison works at a much deeper level.  Like Jane, Reg was a wise and amused observer of the human condition who had great compassion but a subversive pen and utterly despised pretention.

I was a happy member of the audience at Harrogate in 2009 for his memorable discussion with John Banville.  He had wondered in an email what they could talk about.  ‘Dare I suggest that as Iris Murdoch got a full Booker for The Sea! The Sea! he should only have got half a one for The Sea? Maybe not…’

A personal memory of Reginald Hill from Julia Wisdom

By Julia Wisdom, HarperCollins

I was immensely privileged to be Reginald Hill’s editor for eighteen years.  He was erudite, versatile, witty, endlessly inventive and deeply humane – an elegant and profoundly intelligent writer who remained very much his own man.

The first book I published by him was Pictures of Perfection, a playful homage to Jane Austen, and the last was The Woodcutter, a compelling revenge tragedy described in The Times as ‘an outstanding novel of force and beauty’.  In between came a veritable feast of riches, the highlight being (for me) the extraordinary On Beulah Height, a magical novel which wove together past and present, music and tragedy, the loss of children with children’s fables, and passionately evoked landscape and vivid narrative voices, even Reg’s own, Yorkshire-set, lyrics to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. This was a book that moved me and, I suspect, many others to tears, and I’ll never forget how it felt to read that typescript for the first time.

In Appreciation of Reginald Hill

By Val McDermid

When Reginald Hill died in January, I lost a friend, a colleague and a hero. It’s hard for a writer to be completely aware of their influences; it’s often easier for readers and critics to see what we’ve absorbed and reflected back from the books we’ve been drawn to. But I can point to a handful of writers whose work in one way or another helped to shape me. Reg was one of those.

I can still remember the delight of discovering Dalziel and Pascoe in A Clubbable Woman. It was one of those Grafton paperbacks with the uninspiring covers. I was in the café of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester where I used to hide from my newsroom colleagues so I could read instead of drink during my lunch break.

As I read, I realised I was smiling. But not because of the sly wit that permeates Reg’s writing. I was smiling because I had in my hands that rare thing – a crime novel that demonstrated that it’s possible to write a detective novel in good prose. Well-made sentences, felicitous choices of words, and the ability to create deft shifts of mood all revealed a level of literary craft that was unusual in British crime fiction back in the mid 80s.

For me, a fledgling crime writer struggling with her first novel, it set the bar high. And as Reg developed his skills through an impressive series of novels, he continued to provide me with a target to aim at. I always felt he was several steps ahead of me, and as well as enjoying his work, I learned from each of his novels. How to mislead the reader. How to draw on other writers’ work to enrich my own. Not to be afraid to invest real emotion in the work. How to allow characters to carry the weight of their past. To have the courage to be complicated.

A Personal Memory: Reginald Hill

By Ann Cleeves

My first memory of meeting Reg Hill was at a CWA Northern Chapter Symposium in a hotel in Grasmere in the late eighties or early nineties.  He’d organised the weekend and it represented him perfectly: extremely comfortable, very sociable and quite unpretentious.  The food was wonderful and there was plenty to drink.  I was new to the association and Reg made me feel welcome.  He even bought one of my early books.  Even then I knew that the novel was dreadful and I was mortified.  Reg must have realised that after the first page, but typically never mentioned it again.  Tall and quietly spoken, a perfect gentleman, he could have been a hero in a classic detective story.  Except perhaps for his wicked and irreverent sense of humour.

Reg was one of the greats of British crime-writing, but he didn’t become a star overnight.  I first came across his work through a Radio 4 Woman’s Hour adaptation and even then his books weren’t widely available.  He kept his day job as a lecturer and perhaps because he bumped into people of all ages at work, his observational skills were brilliantly sharp.  He understood people’s frailties and petty jealousies and was one of the few writers in any genre who could make me laugh out loud.  Some authors can craft words well on a page but are less confident when they speak.  Reg was a superb speaker.  At one award ceremony he followed a writer who was somewhat long-winded and self-congratulatory.  In a few sentences Reg had the audience in stitches and cheering in admiration.

The delights of re-reading Reginald Hill never diminish

By Pauline Rowson

Link to Amazon for re-issued PB in the UK.

I first discovered Reginald Hill in 1978. I was ill and my husband, home on leave from the armed forces, bought A Clubbable Woman (first published in 1970) to cheer me up.  From that moment on I was hooked not only on Dalziel and Pascoe but on everything Hill wrote. As soon as a new novel was published I’d be there buying it in hardback.

Reginald Hill is without doubt one of my favourite crime writers and a major inspiration behind my own crime writing career.  Clever and witty, you only have to read his Bio on his web site to get a glimpse of his style, “The year of my birth was 1936 and not long after the event, the king abdicated. Despite the rumours, the two events were probably not related”.

Although best known for his Dalziel and Pascoe novels I also love his thrillers, particularly The Long Kill, published in 1986 written under his pseudonym of Patrick Ruell, which features a retired hitman, Jaysmith, who soon discovers that retiring is not an option.

Reginald Hill – a personal memory from N J Cooper

By Natasha Cooper

I first met Reginald Hill in the late 1990s when we were on the same panel at Dead on Deansgate in Manchester.  Reg had just published On Beulah Height, which is not only a wonderful crime novel but also an exploration of the nature and meaning of fatherhood.

My nerves were jittering because this was my first experience chairing a panel and I had admired Reg’s novels for years.  He instantly put me at my ease, telling me he was rather hungover.  I asked whether I should address him as Mr Hill on the panel or Reginald.  He laughed and said ‘Reg’.

Years later, I was invited to interview him at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate and I leapt at the chance.  We were on first thing on Saturday morning, but I had no fears about the size of the audience.  Reg was always one of the most popular speakers.  Because of the time, the organisers provided us with coffee and croissants, but we had so much to talk about that neither of us took a single mouthful.

Reg’s interests ranged so widely that there was never any subject on which he could not be both informative and funny.  And he was always deliciously funny.  However serious his novels, and a lot of them were very serious indeed, there were always jokes.

His brilliant creation of Superintendent Andy Dalziel provided a lot of the laughs.  Fat Andy, with his grotesque personal habits, scratching his backside on the corner of a desk, farting, swearing, addressing young women with the most outrageous sexism, could not have been further from the man Reg revealed himself to be.  And yet Fat Andy came out of Reg’s imagination.  I had this fantasy that one day I would find the question that would unlock some hidden chamber in his mind and he would come out with a wicked Dalzielism.

The Friday Walkers

By Jane Holmes

For more than twenty years we have been walking on the Cumbrian Fells with Reg almost every Friday.  We were known as ‘geriatric b’.   I was never sure who ‘geriatric a’ were.   We must have been on nearly a thousand walks.  It is very hard to summarise that.  Reg hoped the group would continue but how could it without our resident story teller.

The group began when David & Janet walked with Teresa and then Liz.  Then all four walked together led by David.  Some time later Pat & Reg joined them followed by the rest of us in ones and twos. Many of us met in 1988 at a WEA music class in Gosforth, taught by another David, who often joined us on birthday walks, in recent years.  Of course everyone in West Cumbria knows everyone else anyway but it underlies our shared interest in classical music.  Fifteen of us walked regularly at different stages, including Jack who isn’t mentioned elsewhere and who died in his 80s.  Our children and siblings would occasionally join us when visiting.  Some of the group, including David & Janet eventually stopped walking, and then Reg and Allan led the walks on alternate weeks.   David was a tough leader and the group memory might have embellished some early walks when David led us down into valleys late in the evening.  He refused to stop at non-Jennings pubs until eventually the evening meal was a pint and a packet of peanuts.

In the summer we walked till late and then went to the nearest pub to eat but in the winter we finished by four and then met at a local pub to gossip and eat.  Some of the group became diners rather than walkers and for many years there were 12 of us eating and talking.  How annoying we must have been with our great shouts of laughter.  On the last Friday before Christmas, for many years, we met at Fangs Brow at 10 and walked along the coffin trail and down through Holm wood to Loweswater and along to the Kirkstyle for Christmas lunch.

The photo was taken on one of these walks.  We are: Brian, Pat, Margaret, Jane, Reg, Liz, Teresa and Allan with Polly in the front row.  We are on our way to meet Emmelien, John, Mary and Peter at the Kirkstyle.

Janet Rudolph – Interview with Reginald Hill

By Janet Rudolph from the USA

Introduction

There are always a few authors whose new books you wait for patiently– or impatiently. When that new one is finally published, you put aside whatever you’re reading. This is the case for me with Reginald Hill’s books. I love his series mysteries, especially the 24 Dalziel and Pascoe novels, as well as the other series books, and the espionage novels he wrote as Patrick Ruell, and I think his 30 stand-alones are awesome. It came as no surprise that he won the CWA Gold Dagger and the Cartier Diamond Dagger.

Reginald Hill is also an author whose books I collect—books that I have read more than once. My favorite in the Dalziel and Pascoe series is Dead Heads. I wonder if it wasn’t an incentive for my own cultivation of roses. I think of Reg Hill every time I deadhead, and I have over 80 bushes, so that’s fairly frequent in the spring and summer.

What I particularly like about Reg Hill’s books are that even his series books stand alone with their own themes, philosophy and different styles. Such a versatile writer. These are some of the reasons I am so sad that there will be no more Reginald Hills novels. It seems a bit of a selfish reason, I admit, but maybe one that his fans and readers will understand.

However, there’s a personal reason, too, that I’m sad.

I really admired Reginald Hill. I had heard him at conferences a few times, but I had never really ‘met’ him until the CWA Conference during the Agatha Christie Centennial in Torquay in 1991. You can imagine my astonishment and awe when I was seated at his table at dinner one night. What could I say to him? And, really, would I be able to say anything at all or would I be too tongue-tied? Well, Reg quickly put me at my ease. What a delightful conversationalist. Would I have expected less? He engaged everyone at the table and then throughout the meeting. It was definitely one of my most memorable ‘mystery’ experiences. I was so saddened by the loss of this man. 75 is way too young. So many more books to write.  Luckily for all of us mystery readers, he was a prolific writer, so now I’ll begin to reread them all—again. I think I’ll start at the beginning.

Reginald Hill: Doncaster Man Pens Another

By Andrew Taylor

I first encountered Reginald Hill thirty-five years ago. Not that I knew who he was.

At the time I was dabbling in the freelance shallows of publishing. One of my jobs involved writing cover copy. Two of the books that came across my desk were Urn Burial and Death Takes the Low Road, a pair of intelligent thrillers by ‘Patrick Ruell’ – which I learned only later was one of the three pseudonyms used by Reginald Hill, author of the Dalziel and Pascoe series.

I met Reg in person at a CWA conference a few years later. By this time I had become a writer myself; he and Peter Lovesey took pity on my innocence and gave me glasses of wine and much needed advice on agents and other writerly topics involving money. That was typical: he was a very kind man, and he knew the value of hard cash to professional authors.

The following year our paths crossed again. I was still working for a paperback publisher and I’d been commissioned to write a detailed assessment on Reg’s work in general and on the Dalziel and Pascoe series in particular. I read the series up to date, including what was then the new book; many of his short stories; and – another new novel – his wonderful (and unfairly forgotten) World War I novel, No Man’s Land. I’m glad to say that the publisher decided to take the series. No credit to me, though. The books spoke, and speak, for themselves. They are like the man: witty, generous and unfailingly intelligent.

Link to PB on Amazon UK.

On behalf of the same publisher, I asked Reg for some biographical and critical material that could be used to promote the books. He replied immediately and in admirable detail. That, too, was typical – he was always efficient, which is not a quality one always associates with authors. He enclosed a short monograph, entitled ‘Reginald Hill: A Brief Life’, which made me laugh as I read it, as did so much of his work. (And that’s why I still know, for example, that Reg did his national service in the Border Regiment, rising to the dizzy height of Acting Lance-Corporal [unpaid].)

He also enclosed a selection of reviews. It was clear from these that he had a pleasing sense of the absurdity of the exercise on which we were jointly engaged. Pride of place went to a review of An April Shroud in the Doncaster Evening Post, a rarely quoted journal of record. The banner headline went straight to heart of the matter: DONCASTER MAN PENS ANOTHER a phrase that still glitters in the memory.

There are two sorts of crime writers: the solitary and the sociable. Reg belonged to the latter category, which is why we coincided often in years that followed. The last time I spent an evening with him was in London. There was a dinner involving crime writers, as there so often is.

Reginald Hill: a personal memory

By Iwan Morelius

I would like to add some words and this photograph to honour the memory of my friend the late Reginald Hill.

In the early 1970s I was one of a couple of lucky people / mystery fans / authors who for the first time met Reginald Hill, just as he had made his debut as a mystery writer.

We met up in lovely Harrogate where a Crime Writers’ Association meeting was being held. I dare to say that that first meeting was a success. We all found each other at once and from that date we had a lifelong connection. We met in England in different places at CWA meetings, in New York at Mystery Writers of America meetings and we met in Stockholm at the Swedish Academy of Detection’s World Congress.

Personally, I have known Reg as a warm and very, very nice person as well as one of the best mystery writers I´ve ever read. His great, and I mean great, humour was excellent and so were his plots. When he and his lovely wife entered a room everyone was happy. Reg’s smile came from his heart and we really miss him.

Scarborough 1988

This picture, from the private collection of Iwan Morelius, was taken at a CWA conference in Scarborough in 1988, shows Reg with some of his best English friends:

Back row: Duncan Kyle, Reg Hill, Julian Symons, June Thomson, Peter Lovesey, Michael Hartland.

Front row: Margareta Morelius, Joan Bagley (widow of Desmond Bagley), Colin Dexter.

Iwan Morelius was born in Stockholm in 1931 and served in the Swedish army from 1950 to 1981. In 1968 he founded the long-running DAST Magazine dedicated to his life-long passion for crime fiction. He became an enthusiastic expert on the international crime-writing scene and although retired and living in Spain, with his wife Margareta, still writes a monthly column in Swedish online.  The edition reporting the death of Reginald Hill can be seen here.

With thanks to Iwan Morelius for the comments and the picture; and to Mike Ripley for ‘go-between’ assistance.