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Reginald Hill biography

Hill

 

 

Reginald Hill

(1936 - )

Reginald Hill was born in Hartlepool, England in 1936 and was brought up in Cumbria, where he has returned after many years spent in Yorkshire. He earned a BA from Oxford and taught at secondary school and college level before he decided to take up writing full-time in 1980. He writes historical adventures under the pseudonym Charles Underhill, science fiction as Dick Morland, and mystery and adventure as Patrick Ruell. He has received the Golden Dagger Award for the Dalziel and Pascoe books, which have also been turned into a successful TV series, and has been given Britain’s most prestigious mystery award - the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for Lifetime Achievement. On Beulah Height was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book in 1998.

Hill is best known for his more than 20 novels featuring the Yorkshire detectives Andrew Dalziel (pronounced [diːˈɛl]), Peter Pascoe and Edgar Wield. The characters were used by the BBC in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, in which Dalziel was played by Warren Clarke, Pascoe by Colin Buchanan, and Wield by David Royle. He has also written more than 30 other novels, including five featuring Joe Sixsmith, a black machine operator turned private detective in a fictional Luton. Novels originally published under the pseudonyms of Patrick Ruell, Dick Morland, and Charles Underhill have now appeared under his own name. Hill is also a writer of short stories, and ghost tales.

Hill's novels employ various structural devices, such as presenting parts of the story in non-chronological order, or alternating with sections from a novel supposedly written by Peter's wife, Ellie Pascoe (née Soper). Clues may also be provided in such a way that readers sail past them, only realising at the end how their own assumptions have been exposed. He also frequently selects one writer or one oeuvre to use as a central organizing element of a given novel, such as one novel being a pastiche of Jane Austen's works, or another featuring elements of classical Greek myth. In a different kind of tease, the novella One Small Step (dedicated to "you, dear readers, without whom the writing would be in vain, and to you, still dearer purchasers, without whom the eating would be infrequent",[3]) is set in the future, and deals with the EuroFed Police Commissioner Pascoe and retired Dalziel investigating the first murder on the moon. In another departure from the norm, the duo do not always "get their man", with at least one novel ending with the villain getting away and another strongly implying that while Dalziel and Pascoe are unable to convict anyone, a series of unrelated accidents actually included at least one unprovable instance of murder.

Information source: wikipedia