- Mass Market Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins; (Reissue) edition (6 Sep 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0586218513
- ISBN-13: 978-0586218518
- Product Dimensions: 17.2 x 11 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 34,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
‘Splendid moments in this entertaining mystery’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A thoroughly engaging investigator’
TLS
‘Few writers in the genre today have Hill’s gifts: formidable intelligence, quick humour, compassion and a prose style that blends elegance and grace’
Donna Leon, Sunday Times
‘Reginald Hill’s novels are really dances to the music of time’
Ian Rankin
‘The best crime novel of the year’
Natasha Cooper, The Times (of On Beulah Height)
Product Description
‘Reginald Hill stands head and shoulders above any other writer of homebred crime fiction’ Observer
PI can mean many things, but can it really mean a balding, middle-agd redundant lathe operator from a high rise in Luton, Beds? Joe Sixsmith thinks it can. His Aunt Mirabelle thinks you’d have to be crazy to hire him, and Joe’s current clients certainly fit the bill. One seems to be confessing to the brutal murder of his whole family; another thinks she’s a witch. Alongside them, the two heavies who believe Joe is hiding their illicit drugs seem almost normal.
In the past Reginald Hill has brought wit, style and compassion to police investigation. Now he does the same for the private sector, and – in perhaps his greatest feat of creation – reinvents Luton in the process.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
The first novel introducing a new hero. Blood Sympathy contains all the fun you would expect from a Dalziel and Pascoe novel with plenty of comments on Politics and Luton(!). Joe Sixsmith is not quite up to the best of Dalziel and Pascoe (as in The Wood Beyond or Pictures of Perfection). Never the less the book is well plotted, contains a sympathetic hero and includes some well aimed digs at contemporary Britain. The two sequels (Born Guilty and Killing the Lawyers) are both good (but a bit the same). The books are best read apart (interspersed with D & P perhaps?).
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Perhaps it isn't politically correct for a white author to have a black protagonist, but for the millions of detective fiction fans who read Reginald Hill's first in a series, Blood Sympathy, the correctness won't matter. What will matter is the masterly way Hill portrays the loveable ex- machinist turned private investigator, Joe Sixsmith. With his cat, Whitey, his auntie Mirabelle and his minute flat on the Rasselas estate in Luton, Joe is like no other p.i., white or black. When he is asked to retrieve a stolen locket, trace some missing heroin and solve who has murdered an entire family, Joe thinks he's finally going to be making some money. However, since Joe is far from the efficient God-like male p.i's of the 1930's what occurs is a series of highly amusing near escapes from the villains. Hill's novel is also fascinating for the way he mingles some serious social criticism along with his intriguing plot. Not only does he paint a frightening picture of life on a high rise estate, but he also examines the fears of a Pakistani corner shop owner when confronted by gangs of white youths. Of estate life Hill claims, 'Here is the original urban black hole into which all social subsidy and welfare work is sucked without trace . . . Here there are none so poor they cannot be robbed, none so insignificant they cannot be reviled, none so inoffensive they cannot be hated' (163). When Mr. Nayyar's shop is burned and the insurance company refuses to give him full compensation but tells him instead that his premiums will be raised, he states, 'I am in the right but I suffer. I pay my premiums but they will not pay me. We know who the criminals are, but they are set free. So I decide if the law cannot help me, I must help the law'(198). If you enjoy Blood Sympathy, read the other Joe Sixsmith novels and of course all of Reginald Hill's other books.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Black PI, Joe Sixsmith shares a Luton council flat with his cat, Whitey. Since he's been made redundant from his factory job, he's taken up trying to be a PI. The cases that come his way in this story seem a bit strange, but he's not a man to turn down requests for help. But as PIs do, he soon finds himself up against the police and some scary bad guys.
How he deals with this is just part of an affectionate take on the PI novel - comparisons made by his friends with the likes of Sam Spade just highlight the fact that Sixsmith is a rather unlikely character for PI fiction. But he gets there, his way.
There's also a really appealing cast of characters, apart from Joe - Whitey the cat, his friends the taxi driver and the law centre worker, his aunt Mirabelle, and the woman his aunt is trying to fix him up with. And the retired army guy who runs the local tenants' association.
I'm glad to have the other three to look forward to as I want to spend more time with these people.
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