Bloomsday Dead, On Beulah Height

I just finished a couple of books that made me think about the intersection of the readership for detective novels and "high art" books.  Adrian McKinty's Bloomsday Dead is a violent thriller that is riddled with references to Joyce's Ulysses, from the title and first line ("Stately plump Buck Mulligan") through the chapter titles, all the way to the closing line ("yes").

And these aren't just clever references; the theme of homecoming and wandering is woven through the novel.  Michael Forsyth finally comes back to Belfast, his Ithaca, after 10 years of wandering, to be reunited with Bridget Callahan and her daughter Siobhan, respectively his Penelope and Telemachus.  And the action takes place over a single day, just as Ulysses does.  Of course, the novel is not as schematic as that, just as Ulysses is not a copy of the Odyssey.  Rather, these thematic undertones add resonance to the sense of closure at the end of the book.  But I wonder, how many devotees of both hard-core modernism and hard-boiled noir are out there -- it seems like McKinty's is deliberately aiming at a very small audience.

On Beulah Height is another in the Dalziel/Pascoe series.  It was excellent, with Reginald Hill at the top of his form.  But, reading it at the same time as I was listening to Bloomsday Dead made me wonder again about that intersection of high and low art.  Hill throws in a number of references to the Aeneid (and, with the benefit of reading the novel 10 years after its original publication, I already know that the next novel is called Arms and the Woman).  Now, it's true that the Aeneid is not as obscure as Ulysses, but I can't help feeling that "Of arms and the man I sing" is not exactly a widely-known line, nor will references to Pascoe as "pious Aeneas" ring a lot of bells.  So, is the expectation that those who get it will be happy, and everyone else just ignore it, or what?

And, of course, while I get to revel in my smarts, I can't help wondering what references I'm missing elsewhere.  For example, anything that references, say, Tolstoy is going to go right over my head.