Dialogues of the Dead by Reginald Hill
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A few days ago, when I was reviewing--not enthusiastically--Reginald Hill's On Beulah Height, which was my first contact with the Dalziel and Pascoe series, I expressed hope that gaining some familiarity with the principal characters will help me appreciate further novels in the series. Well... it didn't work at all. Reading Dialogues of the Dead turned out to be a chore, an unpleasant chore, and I don't wish to read any more installments of the series. I do not blame the author; it is just that I am totally uninterested in this particular type of mystery novel.

Two young men die in apparent accidents in a Yorkshire community. But when the local paper announces a writing contest, the Mid-Yorkshire Short Story Competition, and two of the entries happen to describe the details of the deaths and clearly indicate they were murders, Dalziel, Pascoe, and a young Detective Constable Bowler get involved. Alas, the two murders are just the beginning! There are more. Many more! There are many, many more! We are dealing with a mystery genre trope of an archvillain playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the police. This master criminal is soon named the Wordman, because the descriptions of the consecutive murders seem to show that he is obsessed with word games.

It does not help that Detective Superintendent Dalziel seems to be completely incompetent in his work, and were it a real-life case, he would be out of his job well before the middle of the novel. While I do not want to read about DS Dalziel ever again, Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe, DC Bowler, and Rye, the librarian, are portrayed with sympathy, and they almost seem like real people, which saves the novel from a one-star rating. I also liked the Yorkshire owt, nowt, yon, any road, and she were a smart lass.

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