HarperCollins £12.99 pp470

With his new novel, Reginald Hill takes a sabbatical from Dalziel and Pascoe, and in doing so frees himself from the requirements of a police whodunit. The Stranger House contains no recent crimes, and hence no police investigation — in fact, there are no cops at all, apart from an eccentric retired detective. The setting (Cumbria rather than Yorkshire) and the use of much younger protagonists add to the sense of a writer seizing an opportunity to jettison as many of the accustomed features of his fiction as possible.

The titular village pub plays host to two students linked only by academic brilliance and their pursuit of historical quests. Sam Flood, an Australian mathematician, arrives to find out more about her grandmother, who grew up in Illthwaite before being shipped to the antipodes in 1960 in the now-infamous Child Migrant scheme. She was already pregnant with Sam’s dad when the boat left, it seems, so who was his father? Could it have been the village curate, also called Sam Flood, who apparently committed suicide at around the same time? Miguel Madero, a Spanish doctoral student once destined for the priesthood, is studying Catholic families in the reign of Elizabeth I, as well as hunting for traces of an ancestor who sailed with the Armada; and Dunstan Woollass, the local grandee, warily allows him to see the journal of a 16th-century Woollass who may have sheltered a Jesuit fugitive.

The two quests initially unfold separately, as contrapuntal narratives, before the pair — prickly towards each other at the outset — become friends and collaborators. As they probe events that took place 40 years ago, it becomes clear that serious crimes were committed, and that at least one of the locals they meet is being protected by a collective cover-up.

Once they have established successful series characters, crimewriters rarely risk novels without them — in Britain, Ruth Rendell is almost alone in being prepared to experiment. Hill sets himself this challenge in The Stranger House, and several others: to put a duo four decades younger than him at the centre of a novel; to make plausible the coming- together of two figures very disparate in personality and background; and to imagine a relationship between them. If the exercise can sometimes seem artificial (do Sam and Miguel need to be quite so polarised?), this only fleetingly mars the exhilarating experience of watching a master story-teller testing himself.

Dalziel and Pascoe’s suspension has interesting liberating effects. The author’s learned side is given fuller expression, with the two academic investigators reinforced by Woollass’s daughter Frek, a Cambridge don specialising in Viking myths. The dialogue is just as entertainingly abrasive as in the police novels, but its humour is more diverse because it comes from a variety of characters — not just Dalziel’s put-downs. If this is what results when Hill enjoys a holiday from the habitual, he should take a break from his Yorkshire double-act more often.

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