Recalled to Life: Dalziel & Pascoe Middle Years

Recalled to Life by Reginald Hill

published 1992

 

 

I’ve worked my way through rereading all the Dalziel and Pascoe books – I explain all in this post

Dalziel & Pascoe, an Overview: the Early Years

and give a rating for the first 11 books.

That brings us to Recalled to Life, which at the moment (and this may change) is my favourite in the series. Over a couple of years he did three masterpieces: this one, Pictures of Perfection, and On Beulah Height

I’ve already looked at Pictures, in the onslaught of blogposts on village fetes earlier this year.

Villages, Reginald Hill, and Pictures of Perfection

I have a feeling that for most people they might choose one of these three as the best – although there was still a lot of great work coming later. Share a different opinion in the comments.

Hill was always an adventurous writer, changing the styles of the books along the way, not constrained by the overall genre of police procedurals, and this one is different from those that came before.

It’s unusual in that Hill often has upmarket characters amongst his very varied casts of characters, but he does not write what would be thought of as country house mysteries, and this one kind of is – but only just.

It’s also a very intriguing cold case, and very modern in feel for something written more than 30 years ago.

Recalled to Life looks back at a crime at a country house party in 1963, with very strong echoes of the Profumo scandal of that era – it’s mentioned in the text. Dalziel was a young copper working with a much-admired superior, Walter Tallentire. The question now arises – was there a miscarriage of justice? It’s a fantastic setup: the crime is being re-investigated from outside, but Dalziel has parallel sleuthing to do.

BUT we know that Dalziel cannot have been corrupt or careless, and nor was the man he admired so much, so one whole raft of possibilities is ruled out – which limits things, you would think. But Hill of course finds other options…

Savour this conversation between Dalziel and Pascoe to give you an idea:

 ‘All I’m saying is, I’m not going to sit back and let them make out Wally got it wrong.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘Dig a few old bodies up. Talk to them.’

‘And how do you propose getting them to talk back? By holding a seance?’

‘Sarky! Nay, lad, you’re the clever bugger. Yon foreign fellow who went drifting around the Med after the Trojan War, what was his name?’

‘Odysseus? Or Aeneas?’

‘The one who went down to hell to talk to the dead. Remind me, how did he manage to get them to talk back?’

‘I think they both went,’ said Pascoe. ‘And if I recollect right, they both used a similar method. To get the ghosts to speak, they had to dig a trench and fill it with blood.’

‘I knew I could rely on you, lad,’ said Andrew Dalziel. ‘That’ll do very nicely.’

You couldn’t have paid me to stop reading it after that. A trench full of blood!

The book mixes up true crime and what we’d now think of as  podcast style, but also harking back to the golden age in a post-modernist way. It gives a very good picture of an era when life in the UK was changing, with the loosening up of life in the 1960s.

It’s very compelling, and has enough fake solutions to leave Christianna Brand (the Queen of this trope) standing.

The top picture is (look at the car) American, but still had that look of poshos arriving at a country house at the correct time, ready to cover up murders and other crimes and stick to their own kind. It is by the ineffable Toni Frissell. (And there is plenty of American content in the book, one way and another)

B/W picture is of a 60s pop singer called Donna Loren.

The title, epigraph and chapter headings all come from the Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities, and there is a character nicknamed Pimpernel. More on all this  -including the phrase Recalled to Life - in my French Revolution posts of 2024.

I am definitely keeping Recalled to Life, and will surely read it again.

 

Next on the chronological list is Pictures of Perfection, already done, see link above. After that:

 

The Wood Beyond 1996 Looking at Peter Pascoe’s great grandfather who died in the First World War – intensely awful story.

 

Very slight SPOILER but revealed early on:

 

The GGF was wrongly executed for cowardice (and even if he had been guilty…) Ties up with modern day case in a most unlikely way. Too sad, hard to read.

Contains this wonderful quote as the police attend a crime scene in bad weather:

‘Watching Dalziel getting into oilskins and Wellies through the streaming glass, Wield was reminded of a film he'd seen of Houdini wriggling out of his bonds while submerged in a huge glass jar.

 

And after that the next book is On Beulah Height, post coming soon.

 

Fashion: Mrs. Winston Guest (LOC) | Frissell, Toni,, 1907-19… | Flickr

File:Donna Loren 1964.jpg - Wikimedia Commons