required reading

It's been a while since I read any crime fiction. A small fascination with the rejacketed and re-released 1930s crime novels by Margery Allingham has faded, and I haven't yet been tempted by the new offering from Ian Rankin. I'm pretty selective when it comes to crime fiction, not because of read heaps of bad examples of the genre, but simply because I'd prefer to stick to what I know is good. So it's aforementioned Margery Allingham for Agatha Christie meets Nancy Mitford style murder mysteries, and Ian Rankin for Edinburgh-set grittiness, Susan Hill just because, and Reginald Hill for wit and cleverness. Reginald Hill is the kind of crime writer who seems to imagine that his readers don't spend all their time reading Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and plenty of other crime writers. No, Reginald Hill expects that you've picked up a little bit of Virgil and Dante in between his novels. He's an Oxford English graduate, so it shouldn't come as any surprise.

His last novel, The Stranger House, was a break from the Dalziel and Pascoe series (of which the TV series isn't even a shadow) that he has been writing for over 35 years. His latest is The Death of Dalziel, published in paperback this month. Worrying title, but with wikipedia revealing that the next in the series (2008) will be called A Cure For All Diseases it looks like there's some hope for Fat Andy yet.

I picked up The Last National Service Man a few days ago, when I was struggling to start a new book. This is actually a re-release, in a slim volume, of one of the four stories in Asking for the Moon, which was published in 2006, perhaps to bring the audience's attention back to the main show of Dalziel and Pascoe. Cheeky, but I didn't pay anything for it myself, and it doesn't have a price on the back so it was maybe a free giveaway.

Anyway, it's a great little read. It is probably best enjoyed by those who are connoisseurs of the series, and fascinated by the fat-common-Northern/slim-educated-Southern(er)  dynamic between Pascoe and his superior, but could serve as a good introduction to the series for a doubter. It has all the elements of farce: witty verbal play, Dalziel with his trousers around his ankles, and a fast-paced and rather exaggerated plot. It doesn't have the literary quality that characterises his later novels like Arms and the Women (spot the cunning pun!), and Dialogues of the Dead, but it does have warmth and humour a-plenty, with a clever little twist thrown in. And it reminds me of what I've been missing!