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On Beulah Height

On Beulah Height

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David Royle as Det Sgt Edgar Wield recurring from " An Autumn Shroud", " Ruling Passion", " A Killing Kindness", " Under World", " Child's Play", " Bones and Silence", " The Wood Beyond", " On Beulah Height", " Recalled to Life", " Time to Go", " The British Grenadier", " A Sweeter Lazarus", " Cunning Old Fox", " Foreign Bodies", " Above the Law", " Walls of Silence", " Home Truths", " Secrets of the Dead", " Truth and Consequences", " The Unwanted", " Mens Sana", " Sins of the Fathers" and " For Love Nor Money" A writer who shifts so easily between points of view risks leaving the reader feeling cheated: What would the little girl have seen, had we stayed with her just a minute longer? But Hill has chosen his characters carefully, given each a distinctive voice, and never cuts them short. I’ve got more, but I’ll leave my list here for now, except to say - biggest clue (and spoiler) of all - this is not the only time that Hill has had the police get it wrong! (it was in a later novel than ‘On Beulah Height’; keen Hill fans will know what I’m referring to here.) Betsy, even in her own accounts, can’t hide the fact she is jealous of the lithe and pretty little blond haired girls (those who disappeared). In particular she envies her doted-upon cousin with glamourous parents and comfortable life-style. Wishing you had someone else’s life is one thing, but Betsy actually takes her cousin’s place. Like Michael Innes and Edmond Crispin before him, Hill is a confident and playful novelist who has no qualms about taking the reader through complex and sometimes esoteric social and physical landscapes. He gently lampoons aspiring writers such as Pascoe's wife ("Ellie Pascoe was ready for fame") and treats us to the details of deliberate mistranslations of German lieder. His descriptions of the flooding of Dendale might enthrall a civil engineer, while a connoisseur of regional dialects would relish the scenes in which the farm girl-turned-diva lapses into her childhood Yorkshire accent to sass Dalziel ("How do, Superintendent. You being tekken care of or have you just brok in?").

Although the title of Haweswater is taken from the name of the reservoir itself, implying a sense of inevitability from the beginning of the novel, the sense of ‘woven’ and ‘infrangible’ bonding is certainly characteristic of the villagers’ relation to Mardale in Hall’s novel. Hill’s On Beulah Height and Mantel’s ‘The Clean Slate’ (from her 2003 collection Learning to Talk) both take a more sceptical approach to the ‘immanent unity’ paradigm rendered so cautiously by Nancy in ‘The Inoperative Community’. Hill’s novel, in particular, appears keen to undermine the pastoral stereotype of wholesome and altruistic connectedness: ‘“Closed places, closed minds, eh?”’ remarks a detective constable ( Hill 183) involved in the investigation of child abduction. He explains that the limit or edge of what constitutes community, or indeed the outward edge formed by community, traces an entirely different line to the one we might expect. This analysis offers a fruitful way to read Isaac’s naïve and joyful mistaking of the planned perimeter of the edge of Haweswater as the landing strip for Father Christmas: ‘And how could he guess that these are the markers of the new waterline, the estimated shore of the full reservoir?’ ( Hall 194). In light of Nancy’s argument, these ‘markers’ offer a line or moment of definition for this small, yet emerging, community of displaced people. This reading implies that the people are the community and, as with the Dendale/reservoir frisson, it is the space between the place of Mardale and the non-place of Haweswater where the community is precariously and temporarily situated in Hall’s novel.

Inside the box, a tiny, crafted village rests against a green valley and is held inside a half-bubble, in a womb of clear liquid. There is a tiny church with a weather vane and a blue river snakes down from the moulded hills. She shakes the glass. Flurries of snow swirl and descend slowly over the village. (197)

Dalziel and Pascoe investigate the murder of a young Asian woman, who is shot dead shortly after a heated political debate on the future of a community project for local teenagers. As the pair are forced to interrogate her tight knit community, they receive information from a witness who places one of the opposition's sons down by the river, disposing of a gun shortly after the incident. But when the witness is found dead in similar circumstances, Dalziel suspects that someone is playing him at his own game. Things turn from bad to worse when the initial suspect is lured to a factory owned by the Asian girl's father, shortly before it goes up in flames – taking him with it. As the dirty side of local politics begins to rear its ugly head, Pascoe is tied up with his new relationship with the local pathologist – although his initial fears of an affair prove to be the key turning point of the complex investigation. Dalziel and Pascoe investigate the murder of American tourist Nancy D'Amato, whose body is found by squaddies out on a training exercise. As her overbearing husband Gus, a homicide detective from Boston, arrives on the scene, Dalziel is forced to try to keep him in the dark whilst discovering who is responsible for Nancy's death. Meanwhile, an old flame of Dalziel's, DS Jenny Etric, is assigned to help out on the case. As Dalziel tries to rekindle old romances, Spike discovers that Jenny has been less than truthful – her ex-husband is Charlie Stubbs who, in fact, turns out to be one of the prime suspects. As the case begins to unravel, Dalziel is also forced to deal with a sergeant who has been accused of bullying members of his regiment – and suspects he may be responsible for the murder of two soldiers. However, a bigger twist arises when the body turns out not to be Nancy's. Similarly to On Beulah Height, but more explicitly and consistently, Haweswater creates a relationship between the geography and the physiognomy of its people. As Stephen Knight commented in his review of the novel for the TLS: ‘[Janet] is, like the other villagers, at one with her environment’. Men in the novel are frequently described as quiet and stone-like, and Janet’s father Samuel has hair like straw and considers his daughter to have an animals of the Savannah look about her. There is a touch of cliché to these descriptions, avoided in the wry tone of Hill’s novel, yet they are such a consistent touchstone for every character that the initially negative effect in Haweswater gives way to a surprisingly rich, cumulative sense of authenticity. Despite the apparently ‘tightly woven bonds’ of Mardale though, Nancy’s argument concerning the lost community paradigm remains pertinent here. In fact, it is the coming of the reservoir, or the moment of its announcement, that forces this group of people to become engaged in the process of community. It is the shared loss, the shared void that is, perhaps only momentarily, unifying rather than the apparently solid place of Mardale itself. Nancy writes of his view of the counter-intuitive relationship between community and society: This book kept me guessing right up to the end. Mr. Hill was a master of red herrings. The subplot of DI Pascoe's daughter developing bacterial meningitis and nearly dying may seem superfluous, but it's not. Hill weaves it right through the book in a surprising and clever way. The word nostalgia comes from two Greek roots, nostos meaning ‘return home’ and algia ‘longing’. I would define it as a home that no longer exists or has never existed. ( Boym 7)We also know that Betsy is a liar because of the false account she originally gave about escaping the clutches of poor Benny. The DVD release of this series contains the internationally broadcast versions of each episode, which remove twenty minutes of footage from each two-hour story, presumably to include adverts where required in international broadcast. This is Hill at the absolute peak of his considerable powers. The imagery of the drowned village gives a kind of mythical air to the story, which is magnified by the use of a children’s story about the Nix, a local legend involving a creature who steals children. Pascoe’s little daughter Rosie is seriously ill in hospital for most of the story, and her dreams and delirium add to this somewhat dark, otherwordly atmosphere. Featuring Amelia Curtis as Rebecca Stevens, Burn Gorman as Jerry Hart, Steve John Shepherd as Steve Pitt, Claire Price as Clare Higgins, James Thornton as Hugh Shadwell, Sophie Winkleman as Alice Shadwell, Paul Sharma as Imad Abdullah, Art Malik as Aahil Khan, Jennifer James as PC Kim Spicer, Wayne Perrey as DC Parvez Lateef, Simon Nagra as Hashim Kareem, Gillian Wright as Pat Richardson, Charlotte Longfield as Lecturer, Biddy Wells as Roberta James, Shane Zaza as Rayn Khan, Asif Khan as Ehsan Khan, Jennifer Daley as Receptionist, Paul Butterworth as Vicar, Marcus Romer as Ray Marsdon and Karen Henthorn as Claudine Griffin (Pathologist) As stated in the introduction to this essay, ‘The Clean Slate’ is very different to the other two texts under scrutiny here, not merely in terms of its shorter form, but also its elliptical content. Like much of Mantel’s other work, the story relishes its own ambiguity and from the beginning troubles the notion of stable origins, as well as the cause and effect relationship:

Keeley Forsyth as DC Carrie Harris in " The Unwanted", " Mens Sana", " Sins of the Fathers" and " For Love Nor Money" A New York Times Notable Book: A girl’s disappearance unearths old crimes for the Yorkshire detectives in this “multilayered masterpiece” ( Publishers Weekly). But the scuttling noise behind is very close now. She feels those bony fingers tighten round her ankles, she feels those rapier nails digging into her flesh. With modernity raising its ugly head in Yorkshire, the grand idea of the Water Board was to flood a local valley to make a reservoir. Of course they had to bulldoze the homes of Dendale, the farming town inconveniently situated in that valley, first, and relocate the families. That was when the children began to disappear.Joe Savino as Dr Frank Mason in " A Game of Soldiers", " The Price of Fame", " Heads You Lose", " Dead Meat", " Dust Thou Art", " Houdini's Ghost", " Wrong Time, Wrong Place", " The Cave Woman" and " Under Dark Stars"

The ensemble cast all feature in On Beulah Height. Edgar Wield is adjusting to his personal happiness as a gay man-in-a-relationship with wanting to be accepted as a brilliant detective. Shirley ‘Ivor’ Novello is struggling in this story not to become merely the tea girl and be sidelined from the important lines of investigation. Weaving their pain into his densely textured story of Dendale’s cursed past and haunted present, Hill creates a tragic tale of loss and regret and the persistence of grief” ( The New York Times Book Review). Years ago when Dalziel was a young detective, three little girls went missing from the village of Dendale. Their bodies were never found and no one was ever charged with the crime, although the locals felt they had a good idea of who had murdered them. Shortly after, Dendale was “drowned” as part of the development of a new reservoir. Now a long summer drought has emptied the reservoir so that the old village is re-emerging; and another little girl has gone missing… KAREN G. ANDERSON, editor of the Seattle-based magazine Northwest Health, writes frequently about crime fiction for January Magazine.

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The drowned village offers a metaphor for nostalgic community and longing par excellence. Jean-Luc Nancy has written of such modern day fetish for the unity of a ‘lost’ age:



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