An Advancement of Learning

By Reginald Hill

The “master of . . . cerebral puzzle mysteries” sends his Yorkshire detectives back to college to be taught a lesson in murder (The New York Times).
 
Reginald Hill “raised the classical British mystery to new heights” when he introduced pugnacious Yorkshire Det. Inspector Andrew Dalziel and his partner, the callow Sgt. Peter Pascoe (The New York Times Book Review). Their chafing differences in education, manners, technique, and temperament made them “the most remarkable duo in the annals of crime fiction” (Toronto Star). Adapted into a long-running hit show for the BBC, the Gold Dagger Award–winning series is now available as ebooks.
 
If Alison Girling, former principal of England’s Holm Coultram College, died in an avalanche in Austria, why has her skeleton been unearthed on campus? While no love is lost between conservative detective Andrew Dalziel and the entirety of Liberal Arts, his attention to the grim discovery must be paid. But when he and Peter Pascoe scour the ivory tower for answers, they discover that the shady faculty and creepy student body have more to bury than just one corpse. Try two—and counting. As Pascoe is sidelined by an old college flame, Dalziel’s suspicions of academia are becoming dire. Because the deeper he digs for secrets, the dirtier they get in this “steadily, edgily amusing . . . dark comedy” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
An Advancement of Learning is the 2nd book in the Dalziel and Pascoe Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781504057813

Reginald Hill

Reginald Hill, acclaimed English crime writer, was a native of Cumbria and a former resident of Yorkshire, the setting for his novels featuring Superintendent Andy Dalziel and DCI Peter Pascoe. Their appearances won Hill numerous awards, including a CWA Golden Dagger and the Cartier Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award. The Dalziel and Pascoe stories were also adapted into a hugely popular BBC TV series. Hill died in 2012.

Reviews for An Advancement of Learning

[lsh63 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is my first in this series , but it is actually the second book, with A Clubbable Woman being the first.I found the witty repartee between Dalziel and Pascoe to be quite entertaining. A dead body is found on the grounds of Holm Coltram College. After finding two more bodies within the academic confines, solving the case becomes more and more complex. Are all the murders connected to each other in some way?Filled with secrets, debauchery, and Dalziel's bad attitude, this book was a delight to read and I look forward to continuing with the series.

[vlcraven_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When a statue is moved and the body of a woman who was supposed to have died in Austria five years before appears Dalziel and Pascoe are called to the scene. I’ve always liked books set in college or similarly cloistered settings and this one has the usual array of oddball academics. Quite excellent if you enjoy that sort of thing (which I do).

[annbury_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Clever, amusing Brit policier, with many a sideswipe at academe. My first in the Dalziel/Pascoe series, and I look forward to reading the rest.

[jonesli · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is my first in this series , but it is actually the second book, with A Clubbable Woman being the first.I found the witty repartee between Dalziel and Pascoe to be quite entertaining. A dead body is found on the grounds of Holm Coltram College. After finding two more bodies within the academic confines, solving the case becomes more and more complex. Are all the murders connected to each other in some way?Filled with secrets, debauchery, and Dalziel's bad attitude, this book was a delight to read and I look forward to continuing with the series.

[abbottthomas · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was my first try of the much-recommended Dalziell and Pascoe series and I came away disappointed. The action takes place in the 1980s at a time when colleges of further education and the like were growing towards university status. Holm Coultram college of Liberal Arts and Education had been a small teacher training college for women which became co-educational and offered degree courses. The tensions in the common room arising from this change are central to the story.Dalziell is a standard, curmudgeonly old-school copper with the stereotypical misogynistic and class-conscious attitudes of his ilk. His subordinate (and, in this book, dogsbody) Pascoe is better educated and more liberal-minded. Somehow I couldn't really generate much liking for the pair, nor believe in their relationship.The plot is clever enough and the denoument reasonably unexpected. I can't fault the procedural aspects of the book. I do have an irrational prejudice against the name Franny for a central character but lack of empathy with the policemen is my main reason for abandoning this series.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reginald HIll died earlier this year so there are no more Dalziel and Pascoe books to come. However, since I've only read one other (Death Comes for the Fat Man) and there were 24 in all I will have quite a few to keep me going. This is the second in the series and, as luck would have it, I picked up the first, A Clubbable Woman, a few months ago.The duo are called to a post-secondary institution after a body was unearthed when a statue was removed to make way for expansion. It is soon discovered that the body is that of Miss Girling, the head of the college five years before. It was thought that she had died in an avalanche in Austria while on her annual skiing holiday. Dalziel and Pascoe both take up residence at the college while trying to sort the crime out. That puts them in close proximity to the students and staff, many of whom also live on campus. In fact, one of the people that is now an instructor is a former classmate of Sargeant Pascoe. He and Ellie take up where they left off in college, namely in bed.Soon they have a second murder on their hands. A student, Anita Sewell, was found dead in the sand dunes near the golf course. Anita had accused one of her instructors of having an affair with her and when he was tired of her falsifying her grades so she was suspended from school.Now Dalziel and Pascoe have to decide if the two murders are linked and who committed them.This book was published in 1971 which, coincidentally, was when I started University. Either Hill embellished college life quite a bit or a prairie university doesn't offer the scope that a college in nothern England does because I don't remember seeing much in the way of Ouija boards or Wiccan practices. And, although there was a lot of experimenting with drugs and sex, we wouldn't have been doing it with members of the faculty. Even then faculty mingling with students was frowned upon.However, it makes a good story and I'm going to keep my eyes open for more Dalziel and Pascoe books.

[laura400 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was very surprised by the flatness of this book. Both A Clubbable Woman (the first of the series) and Dialogues of the Dead (the 19th) contain much more verve and atmosphere and are much more absorbing. This one feels rushed, perhaps, and perfunctory -- like a first draft, or a television script. Even Dalziel's dialogue lacks the character it usually has. This second novel is a step backwards, not an advancement.But perhaps I was especially struck by the difference because I read this one immediately after the far superior Dialogues of the Dead. It's a perfectly decent mystery. It's just unlikely to captivate anyone. I would recommend it to fans only.

[dubaireader · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A blast from the past.I'm sure that, if it weren't for the TV series of Dalziel and Pascoe, I would not have been listening to this abridged version of a crime story that was originally published in 1971. This audio version was narrated by Warren Clarke, which was great for the voice of Dalziel, but confusing when Pascoe spoke.I've only ever read one other Daliziel and Pascoe story, which was set in a beer swilling rugby club, where Dalziel felt at home. This time Pascoe and I were both more comfortable on a university campus, where the ex-principal's remains are found under a statue that is to be removed in the wake of modernisation. Members of staff and students are all suspects when not one, but two further murders occur.I thought I was going to rate this higher, but the denouement was disappointing and the murderer(s) seemingly selected at random from the choices available. Possibly this lost something by being abridged, no doubt some clues had been omitted, but there seemed little evidence to allow Dalziel and Pascoe to arrive at their conclusion.I would listen to another abridgment from this series, if one came my way, but I doubt I would be inclined to read a full length book. They are now very dated in comparison to crime novels currently available.

[cassandra2020 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the fourth of the Dalziel & Pascoe books that I've read & I've been dotting backwards & forwards in time, so the relationship between them & between Pascoe & Ellie has been a little disjointed. Revisiting my thoughts when I read the last one...

I read the first in the series 'A Clubbable Woman' and really disliked both leads. I then read 'Ruling Passion' and it totally turned me around in that both Dalziel and Pascoe were more rounded characters and more sympathetic. 'A Pinch of Snuff' had me back at square one in that I didn't like either of them (and the subject matter even less!!) but I had more on my TBR pile (they were all given to me by a friend) and so turned to the next, cronologically, in my possession which was Underworld - I really enjoyed that one.

This time I'm back near the beginning as this is the 2nd in the series. In spite of that, I found this one very enjoyable. I'm starting to suspect that it's not the maturity of the writing or of the characters and their relationships, but the subject matter and adjusting to the era. This book, like all the others I've read so far, is a period piece, written and set in the 1970's and the language and attitudes are all perfectly pitched for that time: sexism is rife, feminism is in it's early stages & ridiculed by 'working men' but supported by academics, smoking in the workplace, drinking and driving, drinking at lunchtime are all socially acceptable.

The setting is a college campus. When a memorial statue is moved to make way for expansion, a body is found and our two leads arrive to investigate. They find a mixed bunch of academics: old stagers set in their ways and old fashioned, mixed in with a younger more progressive generation including Pascoe's old girlfriend Ellie. The students are stereotypically long haired hippie types with the odd left wing radical, mixed up in a cult of personality led by Franny Roote the head of the Students Union and Stuart Cockshut the chief rabble rouser.

Relationships between staff and students are reasonable, but the presence of the Police, and in particular Dalziel, is like the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons. We move through the investigation, the inevitable second corpse, and the equally inevitable denouement and apprehension of the killer.

Yet another nice easy read, a few evenings saw me through it without effort (and once again was an antidote to yet another difficult chapter of The Almost Moon - will I ever finish it!?). Coincidently, as I logged my completion online, I noticed that the author had passed away the day before.

[infjsarah · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Written in the early 1970s and it shows cos it's dreadfully sexist. But it was still very readable. It's interesting that I didn't write this review until I'd finished another crime book written recently and this one is far better written despite the sexism.

[julesjones_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

[2006-04-04] The second Dalziel and Pascoe novel sees the pair at a college of higher education after the discovery of a corpse under a statue's foundation block. Naturally, life gets even more complicated, and not just because they have to wade through both student and staff politics in their pursuit of the truth. Fresh corpses are provided, and it's up to Dalziel and Pascoe to decide which were murder and which were suicide, ideally without becoming corpses themselves.Dalziel has no time for students, and the feeling's mutual. But Dalziel doesn't let his dislike lead him into underestimating his opponents, while the students make the mistake of thinking that Dalziel's a fascist pig and therefore stupid. Pascoe's feelings are more ambiguous, as he was a graduate recruit to the police force. His former university friends don't approve of his choice of his career, and his liberal sympathies don't always endear him to his colleagues, but this case reassures him that being a copper was the best way for _him_ to change the world for the better. The pair's different experiences and views combine to form a formidable team in this setting, something they'll need to deal with the criminal they're trying to pin down. Even near the end, it seems that it may be a case of knowing who and how without having quite enough evidence to prove it...This early entry in the series is a relatively simple police procedural, rather than the complex literary game to be found in some of the later novels, but still has Hill's characteristic style and wittiness. It's one for all fans of the series, whether your taste runs to the shorter novels or the long, psychologically complex ones, as it sets up some of the series background. Apart from developing Pascoe's character, it introduces two of the recurring non-police characters. Pascoe is reunited with old university friend Ellie Soper, whom he later marries: and this is the first appearance of Franny Roote, who reappears much later in the series as a major character in a story arc spanning several books. And it is, of course, an entertaining book in its own right.

[darrol_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A good continuation of this great series.