Dialogues of the Dead: Part 2

The body count continues to rise. With the killings still following the letters of the alphabet and each one announced in writing before or soon after it happens, the investigation narrows to the Heritage Centre and the people who work there. The Radio Times synopsis for this part states that directly, describing the detectives focusing their investigation on the Heritage Centre and those who work there.

Detective Constable Hat Bowler's involvement with the librarian Rye Pomona has already tied him personally to the case, and the published synopsis for the story as a whole ends with the team working out the identity of the killer while racing to find Bowler alive. That is the shape of the ending: the identification and the rescue happen at the same time, and Bowler is the person in danger. David Lyttelton, the student killed in a car crash aged sixteen whose death the killings are connected to, is credited in this part, which is the strand Dalziel had reached by the end of the first.

The published summaries of the television version do not name the killer, and the solution they give for the novel is a different matter from the solution on screen. In the book the head librarian Dick Dee is believed to have been the killer and dies in a struggle during which Bowler intervenes, while the closing revelation is that Rye Pomona is the real killer, and that ambiguity is carried into the sequel. Whether the television version keeps that revelation is not established by any source consulted, and nothing is supplied here to settle it.

This is the second part of the first two-part story in the programme's history, transmitted on consecutive nights, and it is the point at which the series establishes the format that carries it through Series 9, 10, 11 and 12. The compression involved is severe, since the novel runs long and depends on wordplay, crossword clues and an elaborate structure of literary allusion, and the television version has about two hours across both parts. The published summaries of the television version present it as a serial-killer investigation with a written-clue device, while summaries of the novel emphasise the paronomania, the crossword-style clueing and the wider design.

Dervla Kirwan's Rye Pomona carries the story's connection between the library and the police, and the book makes the same character the centre of its closing revelation. The episode's interest for the series as a whole is that it gives a junior officer a personal stake in a serial case and then puts him in danger, which is a different use of the standing cast from the stories in which the leads carry the risk. It is also the last story of Series 7, and the run ends on the format that the later series adopt as standard.