"A Clubbable Woman" by Reginald Hill

The first Dalziel and Pascoe murder mystery.

Veteran rugby player Connie gets a knock on the head and goes home early to crash out. Later that evening he reports discovering his wife murdered. 

Set in and around a rugby club, most of whose members seem to be having affairs with the wives of their friends. There's adultery, poison pen letters and voyeurism but minimal forensics. There's domestic violence and sexism and very few police procedures. This murder mystery written in 1970 is set firmly in its period.

It also introduces Andy Dalziel, the fat superintendent, whose first appearance is recorded thus: “Superintendent Andrew Dalziel was a big man. When he took his jacket off and dropped it over the back of a chair it was like a Bedouin pitching camp. He had a big head, greying now; big eyes, short-sighted, but losing nothing of their penetrating force behind a pair of solid-framed spectacles; and he blew his big nose into a khaki handkerchief a foot-and-a-half square. He had been a vicious lock forward in his time, which had been a time before speed and dexterity were placed higher in the list of a pack’s qualities than sheer indestructibility. The same order of priorities had brought him to his present office.” (Ch 2) There is less focus on equally new debutant Peter Pascoe: “He seemed a highly educated kind of cop. The new image. Get your degree, join the force, the Yard’s the limit.” (Ch 3)

The narration is from multiple perspectives, each in the third person (fairly close) and the present tense.

It's an interesting and well-written debut novel but not nearly as good as the only other one in the series that I have read, the golden dagger winning Bones and Silence.

Selected quotes:

• “He shook his head, remembering when Mary had used to come down on Saturday afternoon. The catering like everything else had been more primitive then. Once they became wives they stopped coming. Then they tried to stop you coming. Then they even stopped that.” (Ch 1)
• “Antony talked eloquently, interestingly, without strain; with none of those changes of direction, grammatical substitutions, syntactical complexities, whose existence her linguistic lecturer assured her was the real framework of the spoken language.” (Ch 1)
• “Jenny grinned. She had tried to stop grinning. She thought it made her face fall apart in the middle, and she still had to count her teeth to assure herself she had not got twice as many as other people. But she kept on forgetting” (Ch 1)
• “Dalziel’s wife, now divorced, had gone off with a milkman fifteen years before. At least, she had gone off. The milkman might have been malicious invention.” (Ch 2)
• “The sky was cloudless, its blue more thinly painted than the blue of summer but the sun was too bright to stare in the eye.” (Ch 3)
• “the real triumphs were never boasted of, but remembered in secret; first with reminiscent delight, but soon with fear and cold panic.” (Ch 3)
• “He wanted sand which rose and fell like the sea, but so slowly that it was only when it drowned his own civilization that a man recognized its tides.” (Ch 3)
• “Buses and trains both set you thinking, she thought. But not in the same way. Trains gave you a rhythm, sent you into dreams, cut you off from reality. Buses were always stopping and starting; traffic, roadjunctions, lights; and of course, bus-stops. The world you passed through was observable. And real.” (Ch 3)
• “Death doesn’t change things, then. It merely petrifies things for those who go on living.” (Ch 5)
• “It is only by going too far sometimes ... that we know we have gone far enough.” (Ch 5)
• “People need more money at Christmas, even crooks. And there’s more about. In the shops; in the wagepackets; moving to and from the banks ... And it’s darker. Gloomier. Half the bloody day. Makes it all seem easier. Darkness encourages other things too. Children have to come home in it. Women in lonely places are there more in the dark than at any other time of the year. Or if you want something else, the weather’s rotten as well.” (Ch 6)
• “Things happen just because it’s Christmas. Life showing its arse at the universal party.” (Ch 6)
• “Nothing’s so important that it won’t keep. Or if it is, and you keep it too long, it stops being important, and that’s much the same thing.” (Ch 7)

January 2025; 232 pages (according to kindle)

First published 1970

My kindle edition was issued by HarperCollins in 2015.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God 

Dalziell and Pascoe books in order:

• 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 (1990), novella
• Recalled to Life (1992)
• Pictures of Perfection (1994)
• The Wood Beyond (1995)
• Asking for the Moon (1996), short stories
• "The Last National Service Man"
• "Pascoe's Ghost"
• "Dalziel's Ghost"
• "One Small Step"
• On Beulah Height (1998)
• Arms and the Women (1999)
• Dialogues of the Dead (2002)
• Death's Jest-Book (2003)
• Good Morning, Midnight (2004)
• The Death of Dalziel (2007), (Canada and US Title: Death Comes for the Fat Man)
• A Cure for All Diseases (Canada and US title: The Price of Butcher's Meat) (2008) Shortlisted for Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2009.
• Midnight Fugue (2009)

Also by Reginald Hill: Joe Sixsmith (Luton PI) books in order:

• Blood Sympathy (1993)
• Born Guilty (1995)
• Killing the Lawyers (1997)
• Singing the Sadness (1999)
• The Roar of the Butterflies (2008)