John Lennard, Reginald Hill: 'On Beulah Height'

Reginald Hill is an acknowledged modern master of crime, winning a CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 1995. On Beulah Height is the 15th of his superlative Dalziel-&-Pascoe novels. In this book Reginald Hill himself has provided some previously unpublished comments and glosses—a must for fans of Dalziel-&-Pascoe and a treat for all.

The Book

The Notes cover three general issues—Reginald Hill’s life and work, the Dalziel & Pascoe Series, and Police Ranks in England and Wales; and five issues specific to this novel—Beulah in the Bible and in Bunyan, Rückert’s and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, Thatcherism and Water Privatisation, Serial Killing and Paedophilia, and Meningococcal Meningitis. The Annotations pay special attention to the Northern English culture Hill portrays, dialect language, and the folklore about child-stealing ‘nixes’ on which the novel draws, as well as to the many literary allusions. The Essay, called ‘Singing the Sadness of On Beulah Height’, compares this 15th Dalziel-&-Pascoe novel with Hill’s 4th Joe Sixsmith novel, Singing the Sadness, published less than a year later and equally concerned with abuses of children and childhood. The Bibliography provides the most complete available listing of works by Reginald Hill, including short stories, non-fiction, and work originally published under the pseudonyms ‘Patrick Ruell’, ‘Dick Morland’, and ‘Charles Underhill’. It also has sections detailing works about ‘Reginald Hill and Crime Writing’ and ‘Useful Reference Works’.

John Lennard

John Lennard is now Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (2002), and the Literature Insights Hamlet (2007). He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Genre Fiction Monographs series, and has written several Sightlines titles, as well as a critical collection, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (2007).