I suspect that, when Reginald Hill wrote Pictures of Perfection, he was taking a deep breath before plunging back into darkness. Most of his books are dark, dark, dark. Autoerotic asphyxiation. Disappearing and murdered children. Protests at – and murders in – special forces training facilities. They are humorous, yes, Inspector Dalziel’s crass practicality, Pascoe’s intellectual blindness, but they are dark.

This book is a departure from that, a sort of midsummer’s night eve of detective fiction.

The book opens on the Day of Reckoning with a spree killer shooting up all the main characters. Dressed in a balaclava and fatigues, he makes his way through the lanes and byways, poking his head into houses and shops, taking out character after character, finally using his final shot to take out one of what he labels “the good, the bad, and the ugly” – the three detectives: Dalziel, Pascoe, and their sergeant, Wield. It’s a particularly unique way of introducing all the main players and their dominant characteristics, by showing how they face down death.

The book then jumps back two days earlier to set the stage. It turns out that the Day of Reckoning is a local festival, the day when the village inhabitants must pay their feudal squire the rents for the homes they live in on his beautiful property. The squire is a traditionalist: he likes the emotional reward of having people pay him in person, and he makes a bit of a day of it, with crafts and a feast and all. This year’s feast is overshadowed by a problem: the village is in debt, the local school is at risk of closing, developers are eyeing the village green.

But the cops are in town because the constable has complained that his village bobby has gone missing. When Pascoe goes to investigate, he finds himself drawn into a robbery – a missing painting. Wield follows him down, sent by Dalziel, who soon joins them (more for the beer and pastries than anything else, one suspects). There are certainly plenty of suspicious things going on: a farmer and a sister not speaking to each other after she discovered his sin yesterday. A young man in fatigues with a strange look in his eye and an armory of weapons in his bedroom. A vanished statue. Missing garden keys. Circling buzzards. Two pairs of mismatched boots. Streakers.

It isn’t until Dalziel arrives that the clues start to sort themselves out, most having prosaic explanations. But, as the detectives creep closer to the answer, so does the massacre from Chapter 1.

I enjoy Hill’s books and this one is a nice departure from his usual gloom and gore.¹ Even Arms and The Women, which had me laughing aloud at parts, is lashed with rain and darkness and ends with a spooky hunt through a house haunted by the memory of war. This one is a glorious summer of Yorkshire day, with high blue skies, blooming flowers, delicious cakes, hanky-panky lurking behind every rhododendron, and a happy ending for all but one.

I’ve noticed that British mystery writers often do this: they pick a beautiful location and describe it with love, then set a murder mystery in it. It’s like they want to show the worm in the apple of the Garden of Eden. Agatha Christie does it in Halloween Party². Sayers in Busman’s Holiday. Allingham in The Estate of the Beckoning Lady. You see this again and again, the urban detective lured down to a beautiful locale, the heart of England, where the days stretch long and glorious, and the village life seems untouched by the dirty hand of man – and then, page by page, they reveal the evil that lies beneath.

I’ve been listening to a lot of the podcast, My Favorite Murder, recently and I’ve come to the conclusion that we have something similar here: a feeling that there was once an ideal suburban neighborhood where no one every locked their doors, women walked safely after dark, and children ran free – and then something happened and it all changed. But even in the 1800s, people stole children off their front lawns in suburbs, lured them away with the promise of candy. I remember reading a story online once – I can’t give them credit because I was rabbit-holing at the time and can’t remember where I read it – about a small town which was lovely except there was a man there who felt he had the right to assault any woman he encountered, at will. He was finally stopped by the writer’s aunt, who hid an axe up her copious sleeve and, when the man approached her, let him have it, right on the noggin. After that, he felt less inclined to attack women. (Or do much of anything else, one supposes.)

The point not being that women should carry axes to defend themselves from sexual assault but that, even back then, even in small town heart of America, where no one locked their doors, bad things happened. The Killer of Little Shepherds killed young women and boys in pastoral southern France, in the 1700s. Cain killed Abel. Where there are humans, there is assault and murder.

The question is not, how do we get back to a time that never really existed, but how do we encourage the time we want to live in now?

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1. From the cover of my edition (not pictured above): “A mystery without a murder, a thriller without violence.” The San Diego Union-Tribune ↩︎
2. The book not the movie, obviously. The movie had nothing to do with the book, other than the title, Poirot, and the faintest whiff of Ariadne. If Jacoby wants to make great movies where he gets to wear a funny moustache, I wish he would stop bastardizing Christie’s characters to do it. Fine, Murder on the Orient Express, not one of my favorites anyway. But Halloween Party? He completely ripped it from what made it a great book. ↩︎