#1976 Club: Another Death in Venice by Reginald Hill

Since the time I finished my first Reginald Hill at the beginning of the year, I had been planning to read another book of his but somehow never got round to it. The 1976 book club, hosted by Simon @ Stuck in a Book and Karen @ Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, has now given me the opportunity to read another Hill though a stand-alone this time: Another Death in Venice.

Sarah and Michael, an English couple, are vacationing in Rimini, Italy from where they plan to proceed to Venice. Michael teaches cinema at a polytechnic and has the habit of passing sexist and racist remarks. I would hate such a person in real life but in the book, I enjoyed his acerbic wit immensely. Also to be noted is that he passes such remarks in order to get a rise out of his wife who is what I would categorise as a woolly socialist. She is on a number of social-service committees and has the unfortunate habit of collecting people who she feels have been dealt a bad hand.

Also holidaying are wife-beater Wilf and his gypsy-wig wearing wife,Wendy, and the solid-wall-of-muscles Bob Lovelace and his diminutive wife, Molly. As they are also English, the three couples are thrown together much to Michael’s chagrin who doesn’t want to be involved with other people while Sarah is always inviting them. The antics of the English under the Italian sun were so engrossing that half of the novel had passed before I realised that there had been no death that the title promised.

But then death did occur and the suspicion fell on Michael. Is he guilty or is it one amongst the others? And what role do two homeless vagrants, whom Sarah had picked up, have to play in all this death drama?

The novel starts brilliantly and I had rollicking fun till the last quarter of the novel when everything started sliding south. The comic situations became repetitive and the murder mystery was a total let-down with a completely unsatisfying end.

However, more than the unsatisfying last part what I regret most of all is that Reginald Hill never wrote about the British Raj: on the Sahibs wearing their sola topees and venturing out under the Indian sun carrying the white man’s burden and their memsahibs, burra or otherwise, sipping their gin and lime and calling out “Koi hai? while the Indians pulled the punkah. That colonial engagement needs a chronicler who could declare: “The function of natives had always been to eat missionaries”.

*

First Line: During the night, the plump woman in the gipsy wig cried again in the next bedroom.

Publication Details: NY: Signet, 1987

First Published: 1976

Pages: 221

Source: Open Library

Other books read of the same author: A Clubbable Woman