Dialogues of the Dead

by Reginald Hill

Book Overview

Reginald Hill's "Dialogues of the Dead is a bridge that spans the classic English whodunit and the dark heart of contemporary crime fiction, the serial-killer novel....The fertility of Hill's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060528095
• ISBN13: 9780060528096
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Avon Books
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

A Memorable, Imaginative Masterpiece

Hill has lately written novels that seem to be searching for thematic depth, but end up being pretentious and fuzzy:Beulah, Woods, Bones, Arms. The one exception is Pictures of Perfection that comes off nicely, but can not in all honesty be considered a suspense/mysery novel. Nevertheless, Dialogues shocked this reader with its depth, fantastic plot and memorable characters. The prose glistens and the mood of the book, so hard to define, subdues the sensitive reader, squeezes the heart to its ultimate breaking point and produces the best ending of any suspense novel in many a year. The darkness of the human soul comes paradoxically alive in this novel. A great read

Clever, clever, clever

Reginald Hill is spoiling me. His Dalziel and Pascoe books have become the most consistently original mystery series being written today. In each book, he not only plays with the conventions of the detective novel, but experiments with the very nature of storytelling itself.There are only a few times in my life that immediately upon finishing a book, I've turned to the beginning and immediately reread it, but this book definitely warranted it. The puzzles within puzzles within puzzles were brilliant. The book begins with a librarian and his assistant reading the entries for a local writing contest. One anonymous writer's submissions claim that two recent accidental deaths were actually murders. The police are skeptical, but some a third death occurs which is undoubtably murder, and Dalziel and Pascoe know they have a serial killer at work, a killer whose obsession with word games prompts his readers to call him the Wordman.This is more than a simple mystery novel, but a wonderful exploration of words and meaning and storytelling. Even as the characters point out how words can twist and mislead, Hill twists and misleads us in those exact ways, even until the harrowing climax, and the wrenching unexpected twist that follows, and the brilliant last line that caps everything that has gone before. Hill is a master of words, and there is not one placed wrongly in this entire elaborate puzzle of a novel.

Jack or Jill?

Nobody knows if the short and crude letters to newspapers signed Jack the Ripper were really written by that maniac, but general consensus is that they were. (As were Son of Sam's) In any case that has become a tried-and-true gambit to use in mystery novels.Here it is carried to extremes beyond belief. But that doesn't matter unless you want all your mysteries based on nits, grits, and grunting cop work. Hill has developed his own style, combining really earthy police procedural novel with airy intellectual gamesmanship. In his case it works very well (better than it did with Michael Innes, for example). The fact that taunting dialogues are not normally sent to the investigators except on a primitive level like Jack, Sam, and Zodiac, does not detract from this really intriguing story. The methodology of the mad serial killer falls into the classic ABCformat of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, but practically no reader will ever suss out this gimmick.The identity of the murderer is easy enough to deduce from the plentiful clues (nicely spiced up with red-herring suspects who also fit the bill), but you will still be blown away by the epilogue, which ranks up with John Dickson Carr's "Burning Court" as a stunning ending. I hope I'm not giving too much away, but that only applies to people who haven't yet read the book but intend to.Some reviewers on this site knock the book (as they did the last one, "Arms and the Women") for having irrelevant or distracting interpolations from the thoughts or writings of an undisclosed character, or else when the source is known, just unimportant padding. Not the case! Hill's books are getting longer and longer (aren't most mystery writers doing that these days?), but they are not padded out. EVERYTHING is relevant, which is why he is such a master.On the other hand, many readers just don't like the style of this sort of book. The low-life Dalziel stuff is great, and the bathroom wit. But a lot of people don't want to put up with dealing in quotations from obscure poets or the use of obscure words like paronomasia. OK don't read it then. But if you want to stretch your mind a little bit beyond normal reading, then definitely books like this one have to be on your list.Remember what a fuss was made about "Name of the Rose" many years ago? Reviewers fell over backwards saying how great it was, and the public bought that snobby attitude to the extent of making it a best-seller. But nobody had any idea what the author was talking about. What is semiotics? Nobody knows, so everybody is impressed. What is Paronomania? Not even dedicated Scrabble players know (probably I will get dumped on by fanatic Paranomaniacs on the Internet for saying this). The point is that everything is perfectly clued in this mystery, and if you miss the solution, that makes it all the better, because that's what the genre is all about.Oh, and don't ever think that because Hill is 'academic' in his writing that nothing ever happens. There is b

Another great offering from Reginald Hill

This is a really ingenious little book that could drive you completely mad with its literary utterances if you didn't have the fabulous Dalziel and Pascoe to break things up a bit. I can't help but secretly suspect that Reginald Hill has been holding himself in check all these years and finally couldn't help but explode in words, word games, and "dialogues" so that we might appreciate what a fabulously literary sort he is. And he clearly is. For the truly literate amongst us, this book alone will do, but I needed a thesaurus and a really good encyclopedic dictionary to get through this. And yet, this is not a complaint! It was a good read, a fabulous twisty ending, and I learned a whole big bunch from this read ("whole big bunch" is almost certainly NOT in Hill's vocabulary!). For the true Dalziel and Pascoe afficionado, I recommend going back nearly 30 years and starting their series from the beginning. Hill's writing grows with the series and the characters, but they are fun from beginning...

Rare pleasure

I will not give a summary of the plot or teh characters--otehrs have done it, besides it is hard to do that without giving spoilers. What impressed me in this book (my first Reginald Hill mystery) was the following:I rarely find mysteries, in which unexpected plot twists do not insult readers' intelligence. In most cases, the author sacrifices logic and consequential reasoning for a quick (and often disappointing) thrill. In Dialogues of the Dead Reginald Hill manages to combine both and this makes the novel definitely worth reading. Intelligent and engrossing, his novels remind me of Ruth Rendell's, only more itneresting because Rendell's books are often told from the perspective of the criminal leaving little surprise for the reader.