When it comes to procedural mysteries, I’d rather watch ‘em than read ‘em, although there was a time when I read quite a few of them. I had a good long run with Ed McBain more years ago than I can remember, and I think that around the same time I read one or two of Reginald Hill’s amusing procedurals about the team of Superintendent Dalziel and Inspector Pascoe. But tastes evolve, due to time and circumstances. 

Now, though, thanks to the machinations of my Book Club, which has decided we read altogether too much “old traditional mystery stuff,” I’m returning to Hill once again with 1987’s Exit Lines, the eighth adventure featuring Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe. 

“On a cold and storm-wracked November night, while Peter and Ellie Pascoe were still celebrating with wine and wassail the first birthday which their daughter Rose had greeted with huge indifference, three old men, who felt far from indifferent, died.

That is a corker of an opening sentence, and it promises at least a well-written procedural. Pascoe is settling in for the night and hoping for a bit of romance with his wife when a call comes in asking him to take the lead on a homicide. 73-year-old Robert Deeks has been found bruised and battered in his bathtub by his hysterical daughter. He mutters a dying message – an “exit line,” if you will – consisting of one word: “Charley!” before he expires in the ambulance. 

Pascoe discovers that Charley is the name of Deeks’ beloved grandson, who is currently a soldier stationed in Germany. At the victim’s autopsy, however, Pascoe runs into a pair of distractions in the form of two more elderly men lying on slabs next to Mr. Deeks. The first, Thomas Parrinder, 71, had wandered from a senior holiday center, tripped and hit his head at a nearby playground, and died from exposure, muttering with his final breath his own exit line – “Polly.” The problem for Pascoe is that the fall seems to have fractured Parrinder’s right hip, and yet there is a massive bump on his forehead – on the left side. Could his death be something other than a tragic accident?

The third corpse, Philip Westerman, age 70, was struck down by a car outside a posh restaurant on Paradise Road. His dying message was longer: “Paradise! Driver . . . fat bastard . . . pissed!” This suggests that he believes the person responsible for his accident was driving drunk. And of the two people in that car, the only one answering such a description is none of than – Andy Dalziel! Although the other person in the car takes responsibility for driving it, a witness in the restaurant claims to have seen Dalziel behind the wheel as the car took off. And so begins a quiet investigation into whether or not the Superintendent might be covering up an act of manslaughter, as well as other possible crimes connected to the bookmaker with whom he was sharing the ride. 

It all sounds lovely to this long-time Ellery Queen fan: three corpses, each uttering a dying message at the moment they expire. This, however, is not a traditional Queenian whodunit, and I can’t say that any of these exit lines ultimately counts as a clue so much as an emotional ping in the end. One should also not expect a novel like one of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books, or a Harlan Coben mini-series, where seemingly disparate events begin to link into a complex single chain of mystery. That’s not to say there aren’t some connections between the cases in Hill’s novel. What’s more compelling here is the overarching theme that draws an emotional net over these three cases and more: the plight of old age. 

The point is made that people are living longer lives, but this mostly means they are old for a much longer time. Ailments, both physical and mental, render a citizen incapable of independent living – and then where are they? For all but the wealthiest, this means expensive care and, more often than not, accepting the burden of caring for a parent in one’s home. This is why “holiday camps” like The Towers in Exit Lines have sprung up: people long to “get away to Costa Brava without Gran” or “need a break in their own homes without having the old person on their backs twenty-four hours a day.” And sometimes, as the matron of The Towers explains to Pascoe, 

“ . . . it can be very awkward for us . . . when it comes to going home time. Sometimes the family ring up and say it’s not convenient, could the old person stay here another day or two? Or very occasionally they just don’t turn up at all to collect them, and when they’re contacted, they say that’s it, they’ve had enough, the state can look after them now! But worst of all is the old folks who don’t want to go back themselves. That’s really heartbreaking.”

This is something I think all of us can – or certainly will – relate to at certain moments in our lives, and it lends the whole book a certain tragic power. Even the police are not immune to these problems: Pascoe’s wife Ellie rushes to visit her parents out of concern for her father’s increasingly failing memory. At least, in true detective story fashion, this domestic issue reaches a crisis that gives Peter a lead to one of his cases. And while at least two of the three storylines carry with them plenty of sad moments, Hill’s sardonic style leavens the tragedy with enough humor to help us along. 

I managed to watch the TV adaptation that was part of the Dalziel and Pascoe series. (Hey, what’s the point of having My Year with Britbox if I can’t take advantage of its content this way?!?) In order to fit the novel into a ninety-minute format, the writers cut one of the victims, Mr. Parrinder, whose storyline may have been only tenuously connected to the others but was, for me at least, the most emotionally affecting. The least satisfying strand, both on the page and on screen, concerns Dalziel’s involvement in the hit-and-run. There’s not a moment in the novel that causes serious worry that Dalziel is a killer, and because he is present in the TV adaptation a lot more than he appears in the book, his innocence is pretty much assured from the start, and his playful lack of protestation over his guilt even more annoying. As certain facts were gathered, it was easy to fit them into a certain picture and come up with how the whole thing would end. (ROT-13: Jvgu nyy gur curnfnag uhagvat tbvat ba, rira gur uvqvat cynpr bs gur urebva jnf fb boivbhf rira n oveqoenva pbhyq svther vg bhg!) As for the central murder of Mr. Deeks, it made for good drama if not much of a mystery.

Fellow Book Club member Kate Jackson did not get on well with this book at all, and one of her problems had to do with the maddeningly sexist thoughts churning in the head of the male characters. Sadly, I must concur with this: as much as I dislike Dalziel’s boorish ways, I have a fondness for handsome family man Peter Pascoe, and his fantasies over one or two of the comelier witnesses were perturbing. I mean, the guy’s wife was away and everyone is entitled to their fantasies, but these were almost disturbing. 

In the end, I liked the book more than Kate did, but it’s still a procedural through and through. The constant movement from one interview to another began to grind on me early in the proceedings, and I can’t say that Exit Lines inspires me to continue this search by Book Club for “anything but” the traditional-styled whodunits we all seem to crave. Still, if someone wants to direct me to better examples, I’m all ears.