EXIT LINES BY REGINALD HILL

Exit Lines
Reginald Hill
Harper £7.99
First published 1984


I came fresh to Dalziel and Pascoe .

I'd never read any of the previous books and apart from catching the odd clip of the long running TV series, I knew nothing about the crime-busting duo. I'd always intended on trying one of these books, (well you see them referenced in genre magazines, always accompanied by a few glowing quotes.) but there's so many others out there to read that I'd never gotten around to it. It was only seeing this book on the shelves at ASDA for the silly price of £1 that forced me to take the plunge.

I enjoyed the book and will most certainly be trying out some of the others - hey, maybe these give away prices do encourage people to try writers but then its mostly only the big names, those not short of a reader or two, that you see on these give-away offers, which, if this is intended to lure new readers, kind of defeats the object.

Still that's nothing to do with the book which I enjoyed immensely - for the most part of the book Pascoe is operating independently of Dalziel who is under investigation for a possible drink driving charge. And you do get the feeling of the police work going on around the main narrative which involves the death of several old age pensioners. There seems to be a lot of characters popping in an out that are part of the series and, I suspect, I missed much by not being familiar with the series as a whole but this doesn't spoil the main thrust of the narrative. And this is a great crime/mystery thriller and each time Dalziel is on the page he becomes the driving force - this fat, rude copper really is a wonderful creation. A little research into the book reveals that it won the CWA Gold Dagger Award. It's certainly left me gagging for more - I'll have to try and get hold of a few of the TV episodes too - Amazon DVD section, here I come.

"Three old men die on a stormy November night: one by deliberate violence, one in a road accident and one by an unknown cause. Inspector Pascoe is called in to investigate the first death, but when the dying words of the accident victim suggest that a drunken Superintendent Dalziel had been behind the wheel, the integrity of the entire Mid-Yorkshire constabulary is called into question. Helped by the bright but wayward DC Seymour, hindered by 'Maggie's Moron', the half-witted Constable Hector, Peter Pascoe enters the twilight and vulnerable world of the senior citizen -- to discover that the beckoning darkness at the end of the tunnel holds few comforts."