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Joe Sixsmith #4
Singing the Sadness
'Few writers in the genre today have Hill's formidable intelligence, quick humour, compassion and a prose style that blends elegance and grace' Sunday Times Joe Sixsmith is going west. But only as far as Wales where they keep a welcome in the hillside and the Boyling Corner Choir has been invited to the Llanffugiol Choral Festival. Trouble is, no one seems to have heard of Llanffugiol, and all they find on the hillside is a burning house with a mysterious woman trapped inside. Soon Joe is surrounded by a whole bevy of suspicious characters, not to mention the kind of criminous confusion that turns into utter chaos when confronted with the famous Sixsmith detection technique. Joe is no quitter, though. Doggedly, aided by little more than that instinct for truth which is his unique talent, he moves forward over the space of a single weekend to uncover crimes which have been buried for years.
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First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Reginald Hill
154 books504 followersReginald Charles Hill was a contemporary English crime writer, and the winner in 1995 of the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement.
After National Service (1955-57) and studying English at St Catherine's College, Oxford University (1957-60) he worked as a teacher for many years, rising to Senior Lecturer at Doncaster College of Education. In 1980 he retired from salaried work in order to devote himself full-time to writing.
Hill is best known for his more than 20 novels featuring the Yorkshire detectives Andrew Dalziel, Peter Pascoe and Edgar Wield. He has also written more than 30 other novels, including five featuring Joe Sixsmith, a black machine operator turned private detective in a fictional Luton. Novels originally published under the pseudonyms of Patrick Ruell, Dick Morland, and Charles Underhill have now appeared under his own name. Hill is also a writer of short stories, and ghost tales.
After National Service (1955-57) and studying English at St Catherine's College, Oxford University (1957-60) he worked as a teacher for many years, rising to Senior Lecturer at Doncaster College of Education. In 1980 he retired from salaried work in order to devote himself full-time to writing.
Hill is best known for his more than 20 novels featuring the Yorkshire detectives Andrew Dalziel, Peter Pascoe and Edgar Wield. He has also written more than 30 other novels, including five featuring Joe Sixsmith, a black machine operator turned private detective in a fictional Luton. Novels originally published under the pseudonyms of Patrick Ruell, Dick Morland, and Charles Underhill have now appeared under his own name. Hill is also a writer of short stories, and ghost tales.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 13, 2024
This is a book written by an author who really loves the sound of their own voice and sees no reason to edit a first draft.
It's good, I mean it has very likable main characters, but everyone else is either a cartoon Welshman or a slutty hot vixen looking to jump poor Mr Sixsmith. I will insist that a novel written in this age in which a majority of the significant action takes place in and around a boy's boarding school is impossible to spoil on a major plot point. So take that as a given.
Then there is the problem where Sixsmith is one of those PIs whose main talents are being in the right place, meeting the right people in order, overhearing the important clue whispered across the room, and snooping in the right corners at just the right time.
It moves the story along, but there is no doubt that the conclusion has to be quick and under explained so as to hurry you past the plot holes. This is a sloppy novel, but genial. I can't hate it, but I was bored by it often.
It's good, I mean it has very likable main characters, but everyone else is either a cartoon Welshman or a slutty hot vixen looking to jump poor Mr Sixsmith. I will insist that a novel written in this age in which a majority of the significant action takes place in and around a boy's boarding school is impossible to spoil on a major plot point. So take that as a given.
Then there is the problem where Sixsmith is one of those PIs whose main talents are being in the right place, meeting the right people in order, overhearing the important clue whispered across the room, and snooping in the right corners at just the right time.
It moves the story along, but there is no doubt that the conclusion has to be quick and under explained so as to hurry you past the plot holes. This is a sloppy novel, but genial. I can't hate it, but I was bored by it often.
January 18, 2013
It was a good read but Joe Sixsmith just doesn't hold the place in my heart that Pascoe and Dalziel does. I like Joe, himself, well enough but his Aunt and the girlfriend make me crazy. Give me Fat Andy and Wield any day!
June 30, 2009
This is the fourth Joe Sixmith book I've read and with each book I've fallen more and more in love with Joe. Reginal Hill is the best!
June 24, 2016
Reginald Hill has a beautiful way with words and when he's not giving you those sentences to savour he's throwing in sly humour. Love this series, love R. hill.
December 31, 2025
It’s a book I was given as a present by a friend, who found it in a book-exchange cabinet in Italy. In an atmosphere that never strays far from Midsomer Murders, a singing choir travels to Wales. After getting lost and suffering a bus breakdown, they come across a house on fire. The protagonist, Joe Sixsmith, saves the day by rescuing a girl from the bathroom of the inferno at considerable risk to his own life.
From that point on he is a hero in the village where the festival is taking place — but a vast number of intrigues slumber beneath the surface. There are two police officers, the head of the boarding school where the choir is staying, a gay former teacher, a festival director, assorted politicians, a police chief, various married couples and their children, garage owners, brothers and other family members, a pub landlord, regulars, a handful of love interests… But I’ll stop there. If it isn’t obvious yet, this book suffers from far too many characters, and the fact that very little actually happens to any of them.
Above all, the protagonist himself is a rather passive private detective who does little more than blunder his way through the various situations he is dragged into. After the initial fire, it takes hundreds of pages before anything noteworthy happens. And yet there were opportunities. The two police officers, for instance, could just as well have been a single, formidable yet respectable adversary. The girl from the fire spends ninety per cent of the book in a coma, only to disappear almost entirely at the end — even when her identity is finally revealed.
Nothing is really done with any of this. For most of the book, we know absolutely nothing; it is a succession of intrigues that constantly say “A” but never move on to B, C, D, E or F. At the end there is a sort of dénouement that genuinely no one cares about. A great deal of inflated nonsense and much ado about nothing. When Joe and his love interest Beryl finally cross the border back into England on their bus, you might wish them all the best — but the characters are so shallow that above all you hope never to hear from them again.
From that point on he is a hero in the village where the festival is taking place — but a vast number of intrigues slumber beneath the surface. There are two police officers, the head of the boarding school where the choir is staying, a gay former teacher, a festival director, assorted politicians, a police chief, various married couples and their children, garage owners, brothers and other family members, a pub landlord, regulars, a handful of love interests… But I’ll stop there. If it isn’t obvious yet, this book suffers from far too many characters, and the fact that very little actually happens to any of them.
Above all, the protagonist himself is a rather passive private detective who does little more than blunder his way through the various situations he is dragged into. After the initial fire, it takes hundreds of pages before anything noteworthy happens. And yet there were opportunities. The two police officers, for instance, could just as well have been a single, formidable yet respectable adversary. The girl from the fire spends ninety per cent of the book in a coma, only to disappear almost entirely at the end — even when her identity is finally revealed.
Nothing is really done with any of this. For most of the book, we know absolutely nothing; it is a succession of intrigues that constantly say “A” but never move on to B, C, D, E or F. At the end there is a sort of dénouement that genuinely no one cares about. A great deal of inflated nonsense and much ado about nothing. When Joe and his love interest Beryl finally cross the border back into England on their bus, you might wish them all the best — but the characters are so shallow that above all you hope never to hear from them again.
October 17, 2022
Very entertaining. I didn't realize until halfway through the book that the hero, Sixsmith, is black. I had to revise my picture of Aunt Mirabelle to see Aunt Esther (Sanford and Sons) instead of Aunt Prudence (Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries). After he rescues a woman from a burning farmhouse, Sixsmith's voice is ruined by smoke and he can't join his chorus for the singing contest in Wales. But he's curious about who he rescued and why the building was set on fire so he starts poking his nose into the town gossip to find out. Everything seems to revolve around the boys' school where the choir is staying and the town elites who control the flow of wealth and power. After a couple of days in the hospital (in the next town) he gets a room in the boys' school with the rest of his choir. He's in the infirmary and the locker next to his bed has names and afflictions scratched into it by students who occupied his bed in the past. He's intrigued by 'Simon Sillcroft-sadness'. The famous town poet mentions Welsh sadness, too. Gradually he uncovers the hidden crimes that split the town apart, for decades. There's sex and drugs but no rock 'n' roll. - Covid is only raging in Massachusetts but starting to resurge in other countries. Ukraine looks like a cyclone hit it and news of mass murders are coming out. No rain in Northern CA but unseasonal daily fog. Can't predict the weather anymore. And there isn't any crab fishing in the warming Bering Sea because the crab population dropped by 90%.
October 11, 2020
I'd never read anything by Reginald Hill before, nor had I ever read a mystery/investigative novel, so picking this one up was a great way to get to know a new author. The dryly humorous blurb on the back cover got my interest, and I have to say I enjoyed Joe Sexsmith's adventures in the wilds of Wales, solving the mystery of an accidentally-discovered house fire (rescuing the lady therein on the side), and uncovering the seamy side to life in a small town.
Joe is a likable and flawed everyman who honestly wants to do the right thing, and I'll be looking for the other books in the series.
Joe is a likable and flawed everyman who honestly wants to do the right thing, and I'll be looking for the other books in the series.
July 31, 2018
Read some of this series a couple of years ago...picked this one up from library as a holiday read and bizarrely found it was set in Wales where we were heading!
If read in quick succession with others you might miss some characters and setting but I didn’t.
If read in quick succession with others you might miss some characters and setting but I didn’t.
August 27, 2017
3.5 stars
January 17, 2023
I wish more of the series had made into audiobooks. This is the No. 4 (of 5) and only the first that I can locate that's been recorded, and ably by narrator Christian Rodska. Great fun.
December 4, 2025
Ironic humour
August 23, 2013
I found this one in a library sale. It was a surprisingly slim volume (about 250 pages) and it’s by the author of Dalziel and Pascoe. I do love them, though occasionally those books ramble on a bit. I figured with a shorter book that wouldn’t be a problem so I look private eye Joe Sixsmith home with me. If I had read the blurb before reading the book, I would have seen this was the fourth book in the series (not really an issue here) and that Joe was Black. You don’t learn that until a hundred pages in. It’s like, huh? He’s Black? Not that it matters one whit, mind you. I just struck me then that we’ve gone a hundred pages without a single description of our protagonist and it’ll be nearly fifty more before we learn he’s short and balding too.
Joe getting involved in anything is very coincidental this time. He, along with his formidable aunt and his sort of girlfriend, a nurse called Beryl, are on a church bus driven by his rather dodgy friend, Merv, on their way to an eisteddfod in Caerlindys, Wales. It’s a vocal challenge that they quickly learn isn’t supported by everyone who didn’t like the idea of inviting foreigners (and worse, the English like Joe and company). But before they can get there, they are lost in the wilds of Wales (and having been in some of the rural parts of Wales which were beautiful, I can say it would be easy to get lost there) and they happen across a cottage on fire and there’s a woman inside.
Joe rescues her, though she is burnt. He suffers smoke inhalation, taking him out of the singing, and a lot of deep bruising and muscle complaints as he jumps with her from the second story. The young lady is in a coma and no one knows who she is as Joe finds out once they’re ensconced in the school that’s hosting the eisteddfod. The Lewises run the school, the snobbish head master, his wife and his pale disaffected son, Wain. Joe quickly meets Williams, the caretaker and Bronwen, his sexually teasing young daughter.
In the school’s sick bay, Joe is intrigued by some of the names scratched into the lockers ‘Loomis – sights, Sillcroft-sadness.’ He wondered about those ailments and before long he’s pulled this way and that as he meets the Haggards, the rich English couple who own the burnt cottage and both hire him unaware the other has, Fran the Man Haggard to find out who the woman was, Frannie his wife to see if the girl was her husband’s mistress. Even Wain Lewis throws money at Joe to find out who that girl is, money Joe suspects comes from dealing drugs after finding some in the boy’s bathroom.
As Joe mostly just talks to people, debating on which if any client he will really serve, he learns to avoid the detective Ursell and learns there is a group of corrupt politicians and businessmen running things in Caerlindys. He is also taken to a bar and witnesses some anti-English talk (I couldn’t figure out at the time why they would have talked in front of him but later, finding out he was Black, I assume they figure he has a minority’s dislike of the establishment) and Joe has to wonder if they are the ones trying to sabotage the eisteddfod or if they are the ones who burnt the cottage knowing it was owned by the English. As he goes on, he learns of a gay teacher who was let go from the school and scandal of a sexual nature that may or may not have happened at the school. When he finds hidden cameras in the school, things go from bad to worse.
I liked this a lot. I wasn’t too keen on Beryl in this mostly because she didn’t feel very fleshed out (to be fair maybe she is in the first three books and I’m expected to know her). I like Joe. He’s honest and nice if a bit flawed. The mystery is well laid out and interesting. I’ll be looking to find more of Joe.
Joe getting involved in anything is very coincidental this time. He, along with his formidable aunt and his sort of girlfriend, a nurse called Beryl, are on a church bus driven by his rather dodgy friend, Merv, on their way to an eisteddfod in Caerlindys, Wales. It’s a vocal challenge that they quickly learn isn’t supported by everyone who didn’t like the idea of inviting foreigners (and worse, the English like Joe and company). But before they can get there, they are lost in the wilds of Wales (and having been in some of the rural parts of Wales which were beautiful, I can say it would be easy to get lost there) and they happen across a cottage on fire and there’s a woman inside.
Joe rescues her, though she is burnt. He suffers smoke inhalation, taking him out of the singing, and a lot of deep bruising and muscle complaints as he jumps with her from the second story. The young lady is in a coma and no one knows who she is as Joe finds out once they’re ensconced in the school that’s hosting the eisteddfod. The Lewises run the school, the snobbish head master, his wife and his pale disaffected son, Wain. Joe quickly meets Williams, the caretaker and Bronwen, his sexually teasing young daughter.
In the school’s sick bay, Joe is intrigued by some of the names scratched into the lockers ‘Loomis – sights, Sillcroft-sadness.’ He wondered about those ailments and before long he’s pulled this way and that as he meets the Haggards, the rich English couple who own the burnt cottage and both hire him unaware the other has, Fran the Man Haggard to find out who the woman was, Frannie his wife to see if the girl was her husband’s mistress. Even Wain Lewis throws money at Joe to find out who that girl is, money Joe suspects comes from dealing drugs after finding some in the boy’s bathroom.
As Joe mostly just talks to people, debating on which if any client he will really serve, he learns to avoid the detective Ursell and learns there is a group of corrupt politicians and businessmen running things in Caerlindys. He is also taken to a bar and witnesses some anti-English talk (I couldn’t figure out at the time why they would have talked in front of him but later, finding out he was Black, I assume they figure he has a minority’s dislike of the establishment) and Joe has to wonder if they are the ones trying to sabotage the eisteddfod or if they are the ones who burnt the cottage knowing it was owned by the English. As he goes on, he learns of a gay teacher who was let go from the school and scandal of a sexual nature that may or may not have happened at the school. When he finds hidden cameras in the school, things go from bad to worse.
I liked this a lot. I wasn’t too keen on Beryl in this mostly because she didn’t feel very fleshed out (to be fair maybe she is in the first three books and I’m expected to know her). I like Joe. He’s honest and nice if a bit flawed. The mystery is well laid out and interesting. I’ll be looking to find more of Joe.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 22, 2020
By the sentimental end of the book, I wanted to award it all five stars, but I reined myself in by recalling that the rescues (at least 3!) are all far-fetched and there is some rambling narrative in the middle that doesn't really advance the plot very much.
All that aside, I am a sucker for Joe Sixsmith and his self-deprecating, laid back manner! I get the feeling that author, Reginald Hill, wrote these books for relaxation and personal enjoyment. This one was a good, solid mystery, but exuding the kind of pathos one can only get away with in Wales! It touches some very grim depths of human behavior, yet manages to acknowledge that, while still keeping it upbeat. Quite a feat!
Here we have the full cast of ongoing characters from the series, of which this book is number 4, but Hill adds in some powerfully intriguing new people who make a lasting impression on Joe ( and the reader.) Setting aside some contrived heroics and wild-goose chasing, this is still a clever and challenging story that is satisfying on a surprisingly emotional level.
All that aside, I am a sucker for Joe Sixsmith and his self-deprecating, laid back manner! I get the feeling that author, Reginald Hill, wrote these books for relaxation and personal enjoyment. This one was a good, solid mystery, but exuding the kind of pathos one can only get away with in Wales! It touches some very grim depths of human behavior, yet manages to acknowledge that, while still keeping it upbeat. Quite a feat!
Here we have the full cast of ongoing characters from the series, of which this book is number 4, but Hill adds in some powerfully intriguing new people who make a lasting impression on Joe ( and the reader.) Setting aside some contrived heroics and wild-goose chasing, this is still a clever and challenging story that is satisfying on a surprisingly emotional level.
January 17, 2016
#4 in the Joe Sixsmith, PI, mystery series. Joe is going west to Wales, where his local choir has been invited to compete in the Llanffugiol Choral Festival. Instead of a welcome in the hillside, all that he finds is a burning house, with a mysterious woman trapped inside. Soon, Joe is dealing with a strange and suspicious group of characters: a drug-dealing student, a supercilious headmaster and a deeply antagonistic policeman. Toss in some humor and this is a very enjoyable mystery.
May 18, 2020
I am always appalled at the atrocities some evil people perpetuate on others, none worse than those involving children. Joe Sixsmith is drawn into the area's evils as he visits with his church group, and he works to sort out the sordid truth from the half truths and lies that abound. A very good read.
April 22, 2015
This one sat on my iPod for quite a while and I just couldn't get into it somehow. I don't even quite rememer what it was about, although I think there was a group of people traveling to Wales on a bus.
I'm reading several others now and just don't see myself going back to this unless I finish everything. Which never happens.
I'm reading several others now and just don't see myself going back to this unless I finish everything. Which never happens.
October 26, 2009
Once again, Reginald Hill manages to put the mystery read up a couple of classy notches. I enjoyed the book as a mystery at about a 3 but I had to give him 4 stars for the quality of his writing style. It was a pleasure to read.
July 28, 2011
Enjoyed this book a great deal. Especially so was we were living at the time in Western England, preparing to travel to Cardiff. Joe Sixsmith is a terribly likeable hero - having no overt heroic qualities. Someone to relate to! :-)
August 24, 2013
I really enjoyed this P.I. story by the author of Dalziel and Pascoe (whom I really like). Joe Sixsmith was a likable guy and I'm a sucker for a Welsh setting (even if Joe is a visiting Englishman).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 27, 2020
Not Book of the Year, but kept enough interest to read to the end.
July 26, 2015
Interesting tale of a fish out of water, solving mysteries everywhere. Well told, as always.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews