23 Jan 2012 04:22:08
Hill charted the ups and downs of his two contrasting sleuths in more than 20 novels published over four decades after his debut, A Clubbable Woman (1970) alongside a substantial body of other crime fiction and thrillers. He won the Crime Writers Association's Golden Dagger in 1990 for Bones and Silence, and the Diamond Dagger for the series as a whole in 1995.
Writer Ian Rankin, who won the Diamond Dagger himself in 2005, paid tribute to Hill's great good humour, the intelligence of his writing and the generous advice he gave to young authors.
"I didn't read crime fiction until I was in my 20s," Rankin said. "Hill was one of the first British writers I read. His plotting was elegant and his characters were larger than life – once you read about Andy Dalziel he's never forgotten. I daresay there are shadings of him in my Inspector Rebus – they're both bolshie and maverick and they don't look after themselves."
According to Rankin, Hill was seen as a "traditional crime writer, but with a modern sensibility".
"He had a lot of fun with his characters," he added, "there was even a story where he sent Dalziel into space. But he allowed the real world to be part of his stories, letting his characters age in real time."
For the crime writer Mark Billingham, news of Hill's death was "tragic, not only because he was an amazing writer, still working at the height of his powers, but also because he was one of the most lovely men you could ever meet. He was someone I looked up to enormously as a writer and a man."
Born in West Hartlepool in 1936, Hill wrote "for fun" from an early age, ending up with "a bottom drawer of first chapters". It was at the age of 30 when he began taking his writing a little more seriously – the first Dalziel and Pascoe novel was published four years later.
Fuelled by the success of the BBC television adaptations, with Warren Clarke playing the curmedgeonly Dalziel and Colin Buchanan his university-educated assistant Pascoe, Hill went on to find a worldwide audience. A series of five books set in Luton featuring a black private investigator called Joe Sixsmith followed, with a host of other novels published under other names, including a series of thrillers as Patrick Ruell.
