Dalziel and Pascoe
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Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel (usually known as Andy) and Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Peter Pascoe are two fictional Yorkshire detectives featuring in a series of novels by Reginald Hill and a BBC television series.
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Characters
In the tradition of apparently mismatched detective duos, the characters are divided by attitude, class and generation.
Andy Dalziel (pronounced ) is a fat Detective Superintendent, who likes to get the job done. He is a hard-talking, politically incorrect person, who is known to wind up suspects (and his colleagues) and crack jokes at what others would consider inappropriate moments. Dalziel prefers the old school way of policing, which goes against everything Peter Pascoe is about, although he is a progressive in other ways. In recent episodes Dalziel has had to face up to his unhealthy lifestyle, when he suffers severe health lapses.
Peter Pascoe is the complete opposite of his partner Dalziel. He is polite and professional, a university-educated Detective Inspector. In the second TV series Pascoe separated from his wife, with whom he has one child. The split came about because of his dedication to his job, rather than to his family. He faced the prospect of his wife and daughter going to live in America.
The novels
The first Dalziel and Pascoe novel was A Clubbable Woman (1970). The series now runs to 19 full-length novels and four short stories.
- A Clubbable Woman (1970)
- An Advancement of Learning (1971)
- Ruling Passion (1973)
- An April Shroud (1975)
- A Pinch of Snuff (1978)
- A Killing Kindness (1980)
- Deadheads (1983)
- Exit Lines (1984)
- Child's Play (1987)
- Underworld (1988)
- Bones and Silence (1990)
- One Small Step (novella) (1990)
- Recalled to Life (1992)
- Pictures of Perfection (1994)
- The Wood Beyond (1995)
- Asking for the Moon (short stories) (1996)
- On Beulah Height (1998)
- Arms and the Women (1999)
- Dialogues of the Dead (2002)
- Death's Jest-Book (2003)
- Good Morning Midnight (2004)
One Small Step is included in Asking for the Moon.
Hill's mysteries often breaks with storytelling tradition. The novels employ various structural tricks, 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 (nee Soper). The novella One Step Beyond is even set in the future and deals with the detectives investigating a 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 what Dalziel and Pascoe dismiss as a series of unrelated accidents actually included at least one undetected instance of murder.
TV series
The novel A Pinch Of Snuff was filmed for a 1993 ITV serial starring the comedy duo Gareth Hale and Norman Pace (in what seems to have been an attempt to replicate the success of another such duo, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in Jeeves and Wooster), but this remained a one-off.
A more successful series of adaptations began on the BBC in March 1996 with an adaptation of the first novel A Clubbable Woman. Produced by BBC Birmingham, it starred Warren Clarke as Dalziel, Colin Buchanan as Pascoe and David Royle as DS Edgar Wield. Susannah Corbett appeared as Ellie in the first full series later that year. Later seasons introduced Jo-Anne Stockham as DC Shirley Novello and Katy Cavanagh as DS Dawn Milligan, the latter characters swiftly nicknamed "Ivor" and "Spike" by Dalziel, never one to let the most obvious joke pass him by.
The show has won much critical acclaim from newspapers such as The Daily Express and The Sunday Times
The TV and novel continuities are separate, therefore both Ellie and Wield still appear in the most recent books despite having been written out of the TV series.