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    A Clubbable Woman
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    A Clubbable Woman
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    A Clubbable Woman
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    A Clubbable Woman

    Written by Reginald Hill

    Narrated by Warren Clarke

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel investigates a murder close to home in this first crime novel featuring the much-loved detective team of Dalziel and Pascoe.

    ‘So far out in front that he need not bother looking over his shoulder’ Sunday Telegraph

    Home from the rugby club after taking a nasty knock in a match, Sam Connon finds his wife more uncommunicative than usual. After passing out on his bed for a few hours, he comes downstairs to discover communication has been cut off forever – by a hole in the middle of her forehead.

    Andy Dalziel, a long-standing member of the club, wants to run the murder investigation along his own lines. But DS Peter Pascoe’s loyalties lie elsewhere and he has quite different ideas about how the case should proceed…

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2011
    ISBN9780007460939
    Author

    Reginald Hill

    Reginald Hill is a native of Cumbria and former resident of Yorkshire, the setting for his novels featuring Superintendent Dalziel and DCI Pascoe, ‘the best detective duo on the scene bar none’ (‘Daily Telegraph’). Their appearances have won him numerous awards including a CWA Gold Dagger and Lifetime Achievement award. They have also been adapted into a hugely popular BBC TV series.

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    Reviews for A Clubbable Woman

    3.5/5

    217 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Very quaint, small regional rugby club, pubs, mid-sized town police. This book would be improved by 33% reduction. The middle was a hard slog.Denouement required objects and people that had not appeared prior to that time. Neanderthal depictions of men's reactions to women, but secondary characters have loving relationships where women are valued.
    • 4/5
      I read on EYEJAYBEE's thread a while ago that this was the first of the Dalziel and Pascoe police procedurals, and as I loved the TV shows, I thought I'd give it a try. The reprint I received through paperbackswap was put out by felonyandmayhem.com, the imprint that grew out of one of my favorite bookshops, Partners & Crime, now, alas, closed. But the publishing imprint remains, and it looks like they are building their list. Hooray.This first in the series is quite good, with lots going on and more hinted at, although Hill states he had no thought of a series when he wrote it. I learned a (very) little about rugby, a bit more about the inevitable and disruptive building booms in the British Isles, and a lot about how people can be nasty by nature. If a hint of misogyny puts you off, this isn't a book for you, but I think it might accurately represent a smallish community centered on a game like rugby with its masculine biases set in a class-conscious society. The denouement is quite original.
    • 3/5
      Over the years I have read, and enjoyed, many of Reginald Hill's series of crime novels featuring Superintendent Andy Dalziel and his protégé Detective Sergeant (later Inspector) Peter Pascoe. As a pairing they formed a powerful fictional partnership: the gruff, often almost Neanderthal (and determinedly unreconstructed) Dalziel, raised in the 'school of hard knocks' complementing the younger Pascoe's university education and essentially liberal views. That contrast was, paradoxically strengthened by the odd occasion when their roles seemed to be reversed, with Dalziel showing uncharacteristic sensitivity and emotional acuity, while Pascoe suffers lapses into Dalziel's capacity for caustic coarseness.The initial books translated well to the small screen, with Warren Clarke admirably capturing Dalziel's extravagant grotesqueness, capably assisted, or as frequently resisted, by Colin Buchanan as Pascoe. Unfortunately, as so frequently happens with television adaptations, the embarrassing, and all too often politically incorrect, aspects of Dalziel's character were ironed out, no doubt with a view to protecting the worldwide sales where that aspect of British humour might not play so well. The later books, however, retained their glorious rumbustiousness. I came to the series in mid-flow, so to speak, first encountering the partnership probably five or six novels on from their debut. Reginal Hill had, by that stage, found his stride, and I was captivated straight away. A Clubbable Woman is the first in the series, set around the local rugby club in the unnamed mid-Yorkshire town (represented by Leeds in the subsequent TV version), and mired in the rivalries and aspirations of the members. Sam Connon is nearing forty and had thought that his playing days, in which he had once looked set to play for England until untimely injury intervened, were over. Against his better judgement, however, he is persuaded to turn out for the club's fourth team one Saturday afternoon, and sustains a blow to the head in a scrum. Dazed and confused, he withdraws from the game, and, after a quick 'medicinal' dram at the bar, he heads home, aware that he is already late for the evening meal with his wife. When he returns home, his wife is sitting in front of the television, and ignores him when he calls through a greeting to her. Still feeling ropey, he goes upstairs to lie down for a while, waking up a few hours to find that his wife is still downstairs, but closer inspection shows that she is dead, having been clubbed with a blunt instrument.Dalziel, himself a member of the rugby club, and Pascoe end up investigating, and it soon emerges that there are a number of bruised and sensitive egos within the club, and that any semblance of team unity is merely a brittle carapace concealing seething and violent passions and hatreds. This all contributes to an overwhelming sense of gloom from which even Dalziel's gallows humour is powerless to rescue it. Even the plot lacked the watertight quality that came to characterise later books in the series.While I was interested to discover the genesis of Dalziel, I was left feeling relieved that this had not been my first encounter with the series. If this had been the first Dalziel and Pascoe book that I read, it would also have been the last, and I would have missed out on a lot of fun.
    • 3/5
      This was OK , although I found the outright sexism of the early 70s uncomfortable to read. I'll try a few more as I enjoyed The Woodcutter so much and apparently he experiments with different ideas in later books.
    • 4/5
      The first in the Dalziel-Pascoe series, introducing Fat Andy in one of his natural habitats -- the local rugby club. Humor, atmosphere, characters, plot -- this book has it all, and is a good introduction to Hill's series. Later on, he does a lot of experimentation with the form, but at this point he was writing in the classic mystery form. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      Mediocre.I originally read this back in 2000 and I only gave it 2.5 stars then. When the abridged audio CD came my way I thought I'd give it a go, not realising my repeat. It was not a problem, however, as there is not much about this novel that is memorable.The murder victim is the wife of one of the local rugby team's main players and the whole team is suspect in some way or another.The senior detective investigating the crime is Dalziel, a sloppy hulk of a man who is at home amongst the beer swilling rugby crowd where this crime is set. His younger side-kick, Pascoe, is less comfortable; he comes from a more middle class background and does not identiy with the rugby scene. The play-off between the two becomes well developed in later novels but at this stage it is in its infancy and does not provide much entertainmant value.The various characters are interviewed in a fairly routine manner and I was quite glad that my audio CD was the abridged version.One aspect of this audio CD that did lift it above the run-of-the-mill though, was the fact that it was read by Warren Clarke, himself. He has a highly recognisable voice that instantly launched me into the British TV series that I had enjoyed many years ago.This is the first book in the Pascoe and Dalziel series and it set the scene for future investigations featuring the two detectives. Written back in 1970, it is decidedly dated, but more recent books by this author have received good ratings so I may give him another go in the future.
    • 4/5
      This was a recommendation from a patron, actually, who knows my taste in stuff and I was actually surprised by how much I liked it. The characters involved in the murder are truly interesting and the two detectives are likable, almost instantaneously, in their own unique ways. I think my enjoyment of this first book was based on the fact that the story revolved around rugby, which isn't a sport I'm familiar with, but it's a sport all the same. That started the novel off on the right foot and it just got better from there. I quite liked Dalziel and Pascoe -- especially the way they ended up playing off each other as the novel went on. The plot was interesting, I kept trying to guess who the killer was (and got close a few times and figured out, then was like, no that can't be ... and then it was). I will definitely attempt to read more of this series. It definitely fits into my obsession with things created before I was born (aka in the 60s and early to mid 70s).
    • 4/5
      This is the first time I’ve picked up one of Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe books because there’s simply too many writers of good crime fiction out there to cover them all, and I tend to arrow for the newer ones; if I haven’t started a series at the beginning, I won’t relish tackling the dated feel, the scenarios that have been rehashed in crime telly episodes every week. I don’t know why I continue to carry this prejudice, because it’s been blown out of the water several times, most recently by A Clubbable Woman, the debut of Reginald Hill’s disparate duo, written in 1970 and marvellously readable today (or, more accurately, most evenings this week).One of the wives of the players at Dalziel’s rugby club has been murdered. Despite knowing the crowd and finding an abundance of motives, he and Pascoe seem to be getting nowhere except on one another’s nerves.I’ve heard from people who’ve recommended the series that these books stray a little from the norm of detective fiction (sometimes they don’t get the guy, or even notice the odd crime, or there’s something added to the novel’s structure)… this one follows the basic rules, though, with an interesting if not staggering twist towards the end; but what impressed me most was that, for a first-in-the-series book, the relationship between the Detective Superintendant and his Sergeant is wholly formed and antsy, and the unfolding of the plot feels unforced, organic… I also enjoyed the rabidly misogynistic and lustful atmosphere of the rugby club, untempered by the political correctness of later decades; yes, maybe it’s a bit dated, but it’s also utterly true-to-life for the time and location. Even the better-educated Pascoe, believed by both of them to be a different creature from Dalziel, finds himself far with more on his mind than the case.I’ll probably have to read one or two more of Hill’s books before deciding whether he’s a ‘full collection’ author for me, but this was a very enjoyable beginning.
    • 3/5
      As several others have said, this is a perfectly good detective story by anyone's standards, unless you happen to have read the author's more recent work, in which case it becomes a bit of a disappointment. The story isn't as complex, there aren't as many jokes and literary sleights of hand (though the book gets at least half a star extra for the clever title), we only get two detectives instead of the whole team, etc. As far as I can remember, there's not much they had to miss out when they made the TV version, which is a bad sign in a novel. But it's worth reading, just to see where it all started. And there are some surprises - not least when a character is charged 2/6 for a whisky in the opening pages, and you realise that D&P have been together since before the introduction of decimal currency. If Dalziel was already a superintendent in 1970, what age would that make him in 2008? Fortunately, there's no law that says that fictional characters have to age at the same rate as the rest of us...
    • 3/5
      First in one of the best series I have read. I have read only a few scattered numbers in this series, and all were very good. I am now out to read them all in order.
    • 4/5
      The first of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels is not as complex or thoughtful as some of the later books in the series, but it's still an entertaining mystery that lays the foundations of the relationship between two very different men who together form a formidable detective team. Even this first book displays Hill's witty style and elegant prose, if not to the same high level as later books.The book is based around the goings-on at a rugby club that may or may not be connected with the murder of the wife of one of the players, but no knowledge of the game is required to enjoy the book -- it's a study of the social interactions in such a venue rather than the sport itself. The main problem readers are likely to face is that the book was first published in 1970, and as such is recent enough not to be immediately obviously a period work, while still being old enough for the culture and mores to feel somewhat odd to the modern reader. It's important to be aware of the period when reading the book, as many of the potential motivations for the characters revolve around sexual jealousy and flouting of mores. Hill draws a detailed picture of life in a relatively small Yorkshire town in the 1970s, with its web of social obligations and friendships that can be exploited by both the police and those they're pursuing.Not my favourite of the series, and the characters aren't yet fully developed, but well worth reading both in its own right and as an introduction to the series.