UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Reginald Hill, A Pinch of Snuff (1978)

             In mystery fiction, the dynamics between a detective and the Watson or sidekick figure are very important. Edgar Allan Poe, who anticipated almost every other feature of successful detective stories, didn’t get this one right: his narrator is nameless and featureless. Doyle got it exactly right with Watson and ever since, authors have been experimenting with the right combination.

            An interesting example is Reginald hill’s pairing of Peter Pascoe and Andrew Dalziel (pronounced DEE-uhl). Pascoe, the character whose thoughts we follow in Reginald hill’s books, is junior to the older, cruder, but not necessarily dumber Dalziel in the Mid-Yorkshire Criminal Investigation Division—Hill isn’t any more specific about his north English setting. Pascoe is young, educated, and idealistic. Dalziel is middle-aged and cynical, with working-class origins and tastes.

            You can see the dynamics in one of Hill’s books from the late seventies, A Pinch of Snuff. Pascoe’s dentist, Jack Shorter, is accused of molesting a fourteen-year-old patient, Sandra Burkill. Pascoe hardly knows Shorter yet he defends him for complicated reasons. One of these is Dalziel, who is a drinking mate of Sandra’s father at the Westgate Social Club, a working-men’s club. Dalziel simply assumes Shorter is guilty. Pascoe’s idealism tells him everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence, but his advocacy of Shorter has more personal and doubtful motivation than this principle, which he frequently suspends in his police work anyway.

            Shorter has a militant feminist in practice with him—the book was written in the middle of the seventies’ feminist movement—and partly Pascoe is reacting against her blanket indictment of Shorter and all men as guilty. But Pascoe also knows this woman is too much like one aspect of his wife and probably too much like one aspect of himself—a side of Pascoe that his boss Dalziel scoffs and laughs at.

            Events prove Pascoe more or less right. The real investigation is not into Shorter’s case, but concerns a pornographic film company (for whom Shorter’s accuser has worked, by the way) and whether they are involved in making snuff films—that is, movies in which a person on screen is actually killed during the filming. Hence the punning title A Pinch of Snuff.

            Reginald Hill has written a couple of dozen books about Dalziel and Pascoe, beginning with A Clubbable Woman in 1970. The latest one came out in 2009. Some of the books have been filmed for a BBC television series in which Warren Clarke played Dalziel and Colin Buchanan Pascoe.