A Clubbable Woman

Wetherton Rugby Football Club's Fourth XV are playing, and Sam Connon is taking a beating. A former club golden boy whose England career ended with an ankle injury, Connon goes down in a loose maul from a blow delivered by his own captain, Arthur Evans. He comes home early, mud-caked and sick. His wife Mary is watching television and pays him no attention. He gags his way upstairs and passes out. At about half past one he comes down and finds her still in her chair, with a hole in the middle of her forehead.

Dalziel and Pascoe arrive as a new team. Dalziel is a member and vice-president of the club and has been given Pascoe, a graduate recruit, as his sergeant. The two methods are set immediately: Dalziel goes at the club directly and loudly, Pascoe accumulates detail. The club is a closed community with several motives running through it at once. Evans, who kicked Connon in the same match, is violently jealous of his own wife Gwen, whom he believes is sleeping with Connon. Gwen is in fact having an affair with Marcus Felstead, and Mary Connon knew about it. Mary had also been blackmailing Stanley Curtis, a shy young man who could not talk to women. She exposed herself at her bedroom window as he ran past, encouraged him to write obscene letters and make obscene telephone calls, and kept the letters as a hold over him. She had told her husband that his daughter Jenny was not his child. Jenny's own relationship with a university boyfriend gives the story a second household against which the club's loyalties can be played, and when the letters surface the neighbourhood's reading of the case hardens against Connon.

The solution turns on the murder weapon, an old air pistol of the spring-bolt type, and on the fact that two separate intrusions happened in the same hour. Stanley Curtis broke in to recover his letters, wearing a stocking over his head and carrying his father's useless old air pistol. Disturbed by Connon waking, he threw the pistol at Mary and fled. Marcus Felstead was in the house at the same time, trying to persuade Mary not to expose the affair. She sneered at the pistol, asked whether he meant to kill her to shut her up, put the barrel against her own head and pressed his finger down on the trigger. The spring bolt shot out and killed her. Connon then concealed what his friend had done.

This is the second screen adaptation of Reginald Hill's detectives and the first for the BBC. A three-part ITV serial made by Yorkshire Television in 1994 had cast the comedians Gareth Hale and Norman Pace as Dalziel and Pascoe; Hill was unhappy with it and blocked further ITV adaptations, after which BBC Worldwide approached him. Alan Plater dramatised the first novel, updating a 1970 book to the mid-1990s. Ellie Soper, who belongs to the second novel, is brought in here as a short scene so that the next film does not have to spend time introducing her. Dalziel's coarser behaviour is heavily reduced.

Warren Clarke arrives fully formed in manner, loud and physically intrusive and at home in the club, while noticeably more restrained than Hill's creation. Robert Hanks in The Independent raised the qualification that persisted through the run: a marvellous actor who projects all Dalziel's surliness without trouble, but is he big enough. Colin Buchanan plays the graduate recruit as the second half of a double act rather than a subordinate. The working method the first case establishes is the one the rest of the series repeats. Dalziel throws a boulder into the pool and watches what floats up. Pascoe assembles times, places and contradictions, which Dalziel holds in contempt until it produces the answer.