Couldn’t get beyond about a third of the way into the book. Too many pointlessly eccentric characters who weren’t appearing to pull together in the direction of any plot.

Dalziel in Love
Review of the Grafton Books paperback edition (1987) of the Collins Crime Club hardcover original (1975)

De'il and Dalziel begin with one letter
The de'il's nae guid and Dalziel's nae better.
- Old Galloway Saying used as an epigraph for An April Shroud

This fourth in the Dalziel (pronounced Dee-Ell) and Pascoe series is almost a solo venture for the Detective Chief Superintendent as he sends his colleague Pascoe off on his honeymoon with writer Ellie Soper (who was introduced in 1971's book #2 An Advancement of Learning) at the start of the novel.

Dalziel is at loose ends and takes his own first vacation in many years. Stuck in the middle of a torrential rain and flood his car breaks down and he is forced to take refuge with an eccentric family who have recently suffered the accidental death of their head of household. Dalziel is immediately attracted to the widow, who suspiciously is not averse to his attentions. All is not as it seems though, as the family is juggling with the investment of a feasting / banquet hall, attempting to collect insurance claims and a suspicious runaway son. Then more disappearances and deaths occur. Will Dalziel puzzle it all out on his own or will Pascoe have to come to the rescue in the end?

Although the case eventually turns serious, An April Shroud takes a lighter tone for the most part with its observance of Dalziel among the civilians where he is more restrained about his otherwise regular public belching and scratching. It had the additional revelation about Dalziel's reading habits which were unveiled as:

Meanwhile, as he had done for many years now, he set about postponing the moment of switching off his bedroom light until he was on the very brink of sleep. He poured himself a carefully measured dose of scotch and put it on the bedside table. Next, clad in pyjamas suitable in pattern and size for the fitting of three or four deckchairs, he climbed into bed, placed his reading spectacles gingerly on his still throbbing nose and picked up his book. It was Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, which he had stolen from the hotel where he spent his honeymoon and had been reading and re-reading off and on now for thirty years.

See book cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/AnAprilShroud.jpg
Cover image of the 1975 Collins Crime Club hardcover edition. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

I re-read An April Shroud due to a recent discovery of my old mystery paperbacks from the 1980s in a storage locker cleanout. I was especially curious about the precedents for Mick Herron's Jackson Lamb in the Slough House espionage series in the personality of Reginald Hill's Chief Inspector Andy Dalziel, which Herron has acknowledged.

See photograph at https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FZkxI4CXkAAu2sG?format=jpg&name=large
Book haul of the early Dalziel and Pascoe paperbacks, mostly from Grafton Books in the 1980s. Image sourced from Twitter.

Trivia and No Link
An April Shroud was adapted for the long running TV series of Dalziel and Pascoe (1996-2007) as Episode 3 of Series 1 where it was renamed as An Autumn Shroud (1996). I could not find an online trailer or posting of the episode. ( )

I was definitely "meh" about this book. Has all the ists - racist, sexist classist and the mystery just didn't hold my attention. ( )

As "An April Shroud" begins, Detective Sergeant Peter Pascoe is celebrating his wedding to Ellie, and Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel decides to take himself off on a holiday, hoping that it will dispel the depression he has been experiencing. When his car is bogged down on a flooded road, he seeks help at a nearby house, which turns out to be full of very strange people indeed, all of whom are involved in a restaurant project that is attracting all the wrong attention: the attention of thieves, embezzlers and maybe a murderer, too…. I recently was feeling rather down on Reginald Hill’s books because of the inherent sexism of the times in which they were written, so I put off reading this fourth novel in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, but I found that I thoroughly enjoyed this outing, after all. It’s very funny, and there is a lot of pointed commentary on the British class system, which was a lot of fun. But wow, did people back then drink like fish! Recommended. ( )

This book turned out to be somewhat timely from a meteorological standpoint, being set in a very waterlogged, flood-ridden part of Lincolnshire. Pascoe has gone on honeymoon and Dalziel is at a loose end. After getting his car stuck on a flooded road, Dalziel witnesses an unusual funeral procession moving by boat instead of by car, meets the family and ends up rather more closely enfolded into the group than he was expecting. In this way he ends up starting to investigate the death of the person who had been honoured with the funeral procession.

This is the fourth book in the Dalziel and Pascoe series and is a more sedate entry than some I recall. Hill takes his time setting up the family dynamic and allowing the members to become accustomed to and confide in Dalziel. I liked watching Dalziel work, but it was also good to see Pascoe again when he finally got back from honeymoon (and their reunion is quite memorable). I would recommend this one only if you've read another book in the series first. ( )