Good Morning, Midnight is an excellent novel by that mistress of introspective sensitivity, Jean Rhys. Reginald Hill hijacks the title for his far less morbid new detective novel starring that trinity of beings, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe and Sergeant Wield. Good Morning, Midnight is, however, definitely Pascoe’s case. Dalziel plays an entirely subsidiary role displaying bellicose discomfiture as Peter attempts to wrongfoot him and prove that a clear case of suicide is murder. We know that it is suicide because we witness antique dealer Pal Maciver killing himself.
The novel is set a few weeks after the denouement of Reginald Hill’s previous novel, Death’s Jest-Book. It opens with a suicide straight out of John Dickson Carr (a 1930s novelist, the Houdini of crime fiction, who specialised in corpses found in rooms with no access from the outside).
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