Harriet Waugh

Closely related deaths

Good Morning, Midnight is an excellent novel by that mistress of introspective sensitivity, Jean Rhys. Reginald Hill hijacks the title for his far less morbid new detective novel starring that trinity of beings, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe and Sergeant Wield. Good Morning, Midnight is, however, definitely Pascoe’s case. Dalziel plays an entirely subsidiary role displaying bellicose discomfiture as Peter attempts to wrongfoot him and prove that a clear case of suicide is murder. We know that it is suicide because we witness antique dealer Pal Maciver killing himself.

The novel is set a few weeks after the denouement of Reginald Hill’s previous novel, Death’s Jest-Book. It opens with a suicide straight out of John Dickson Carr (a 1930s novelist, the Houdini of crime fiction, who specialised in corpses found in rooms with no access from the outside). In this, however, we see Pal Maciver setting the scene of a suicide in a locked room but doing it in such a way that if one were to look for murder in a locked room one would, if very clever, find it. He also places his hated stepmother in the house within minutes of his death. Peter is, of course, very clever, but even though he suspects murder, he hardly has to prove anything very much as different characters unroll a sometimes contradictory narrative in a series of tapes and statements.

What makes Pascoe suspicious of Pal Maciver’s suicide is that it is an exact replica of Pal’s father’s suicide some ten years earlier. Both locked themselves into the study of the same family home. Both shot themselves in the head at the desk using their toe to pull a string attached to the trigger of the shotgun. Both left the same book open at the same poem.

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