Pascoe Snorts
I was quite pleased to discover on Monday night (typically "library night" around our house — more on that someday) that the Bowie Library had a copy on its shelves of the latest book by Reginald Hill, because I'm very fond of Reginald Hill's writing, particularly his decades-long series of Dalziel & Pascoe detective novels, of which there are now 22.
Hill is an author whose writing, in my opinion, started out pretty good and has steadily improved as he has produced books over the years, both stylistically and narratively. He can be very arch and almost self-conscious at times, but it never quite goes over my irritability limit.* In other words, I can read his stories and accept his authorly interjections without feeling that the narrative has been disrupted, because it's all part of the narrative voice somehow, which is not an easy accomplishment.
All of this means that he often digresses a bit with narrative glosses and rhetorical flourishes. This is one that I encountered today and, well, it made me snort:
He snorted. His wife was a very good snorter, Dalziel could snort for Denmark, even Wield who rarely let any uncensored emotion escape had been known to aspirate expressively, but the snort hadn't figured much in the sonic range of a man sometimes referred to by his fat boss as Pussyfoot Pascoe, the Tightrope Dancer.
[Reginald Hill, Death Comes for the Fat Man (New York : HarperCollins, 2007), p. 107.]
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*Unlike, say, Michael Dibdin whose writing I had mostly enjoyed until his latest book, which finally went over my limit for acceptable clever-dick, nudge-nudge, look at the size of my vocabulary and the cleverness of my metaphors writing. Then there's someone like Marcia Muller, whom I very much liked in her earlier books but who seemed to me to become ever more glib and best-sellery as her popularity increased and, I suspect, the pressure to churn out best-sellers increased. However, she never suffered from over-archness.