The mixing of genres can be interesting when it works, but when it doesn’t, it’s usually a disaster. The producers of the forthcoming CBS TV primetime series, Viva Laughlin, based on the BBC series Viva Blackpool, will see if they can avoid the shoals. The series will feature mystery-suspense plots augmented with musical-theater sequences, the network has revealed. USA Today explains:
J. K. Rowling, author of the mega-bestselling Harry Potter books, is writing a detective novel, according to the Sunday Times of London. AP reports: The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling’s, as saying the creator of the "Harry Potter" books is turning to crime fiction. "My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel," the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival. A mystery series selling in the hundreds of millions, as the Harry Potter series did, would certainly be good for the genre’s overall popularity—but is exceedingly unlikely. However, Rowling’s ability to bring imagination and some interesting ideas to genre fiction has been fully proven, and her effort could indeed be refreshing for a form of fiction that has become rather dreary in recent years.
The BBC TV program Mayo, now showing on BBC America as The Gil Mayo Mysteries, is an exemnplary TV mystery program. Based on a series of novels which I have not read, the show has engaging detectives and a little romance, and is light on blood and gore and explicit violence but strong on creating plausible suspects with interesting and revealing motives. It also has a nice central mystery: whether police homicide detective team leader DI Gil Mayo, an amusingly literate and in fact pedantic character played well by Alistair McGowan, will get back together romantically with his new subordinate, DS Alex Jones (Jessica Oyelowo), an appealingly good-natured, comely, and stylish detective who was Mayo’s first love many years before.
My fellow Golden Age of Detective Mysteries afficionado Mike Tooney has written an excellent review and summary of The Dead Sleep Lightly, a terrific collection of radio mystery scripts by the great detective story writer John Dickson Carr. Carr was the master of the "impossible crime," the murder that seems as if it cannot have been committed by a human being, and his narratives usually had a appeallingly creepy atmosphere and strong intimations of the preternatural. The Dead Sleep Lightly is out of print, but copies are available in used bookstores and through online search engines. It is well worth seeking out. With Mike’s kind permission, I am reprinting his review here for your enjoyment and edification:
A few weeks ago I eagerly purchased a copy of the new book Night of the Wolf, a collection of stories by the French writer Paul Halter. Halter writes mystery novels and short stories, and he follows in the grand tradition of John Dickson Carr, creating thorny "impossible crime" puzzles in modern settings fraught with surrealistic events and gothic-style tension. What makes Halter popular in France and in translation in several other countries is what has probably held him back from achieving popularity in the United States thus far: his thorough and unapologetic devotion to plot-driven fiction.
A regular visitor to this site, who goes by the mysterious name of Mike (not Linda), wrote a comical pseudo-review of a nonexistent Golden Age detective novel, which I asked him for permission to post in the comments section of my recent item on mystery criticism. Mike sent it to me for posting, but it’s really too good to hide in the comments section where many visitors might miss it. So here it is for your enjoyment. Mike is clearly influenced by the twentieth century American humorist S. J. Perelman in this item, and it’s a salutary influence indeed. I hope that you’ll enjoy it.
NBC-TV premiered an interesting and innovative new detective series last night. Jeff Goldblum stars in Raines as an L.A. police dept. homicide detective who sees the "ghosts" of the victims, but they are established as being not real ghosts but just his very vivid imagination creating hallucinations with whom he discusses the cases he’s working on. Yes, that is actually the concept of the show. There will be a quiz on this, so please reread the description until you understand it or begin to have hallucinations of your own. Some thoughts— Overall: Interesting concept, OK+ execution. Two, this is definitely one intuitive detective. Or, kind of. He’s certainly intuitive in that he has conversations with his own imagination. In dramatic terms the device is interesting, in that it allows us to see his thought process operating literally. This, however, puts him in the realm of the rationalistic puzzle solvers, if we take his conversations with the imaginary characters as his means of thinking things through. My head hurts. Three, in his reliance on intuition but also ratiocination, Raines resembles both hardboiled detectives and puzzle solvers, combining the two in an extraordinarily intelligent police detective. In this way the show duplicates
Your voice has been heard! A couple of months ago we asked your support in getting the great old TV show Banacek released on DVD. Well, it has finally happened, according to Hart Sharp Video. Season 1 of Banacek will be released on DVD on May 15, according to Hart Sharp. The 2-disc release will be the first in a series called TV Guide Presents, which will benefit from promotion in the magazine, on the TV Guide television channel, and the TVguide website. The set will consist of the first eight Banacek episodes (although not the pilot episode, as far as I can discern) and will retail for $29.95. The show ran for two seasons and constituted 16 episodes plus the pilot film, which ran in a two-hour time slot and was originally titled Banacek and later renamed Detour to Nowhere. In each episode, suave but tough Thomas Banacek (George Peppard) recovers stolen items that the insurance companies’ detectives cannot find, identifies the thief and any accomplices, and pockets double the percentage of value that is ordinarily offered. The neat twist is that each theft has been done in a way that seems impossible. As I wrote in my earlier
Matthew Bowman of Christendom College posted a very interesting comment on my article on Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy tales, which I think adds some value to the discussion. Matthew’s comment indicates some reasons why the stories are so interesting, and suggests that a renaissance of interest in them is possible. Here is Matthew’s comment: Well, I have to say you’ve got good taste in fiction. I only read Lord Darcy for the first time at the tail end of last summer, as I was getting ready for the new semester at college. I’d first heard about it from my father, thouh only iin very vague terms — basically just "alternate universe where magic is used to solve crimes." Years later, following some "you’d probably like this links" on Amazon, I came across a book that sounded good. Noticing it was a Baen book, I immediately switched over to Baen.com to read the sample chapters. The first story blew me away. It not only sounded like the story my father had alluded to years before but couldn’t remember the title of, it was also a fantasy story with a strong base in Roman Catholicsm. (I later found out that Randall Garrett
The USA Network mystery-comedy series Monk and Psych are both entering the season’s stretch run, with their penultimate episodes appearing tonight beginning at 9 EST. The season finales will premiere next week. Monk remains superb and inventive, and Psych has become a sold, entertaining mystery comedy program with real, enjoyably challenging puzzles. In my earlier comments on Psych on this site, I observed that the show was trying too hard to be quirky, and I pointed out that "the best thing about a mystery is the mystery." It seems that the producers discovered this timeless truth in the course of the season. The final episode of the first half of the season, which premiered last August, included a solid mystery and incorporated the central characters’ eccentricities into the story, instead of trying to do it the other way round (which never works). (See my review here.) The producers have continued this approach in the second half of the season. It is important, however, to acknowledge that the best mystery stories don’t just have interesting puzzles, characters, conflicts, and social implications. They also have very interesting detectives. Xavier Lechard, a French mystery aficionado, astutely observed that "the most famous and enduring
A commenter going by the cybernom of Pascal Fervor has made some interesting and provocative comments on my appreciation of the great film writer and director Billy Wilder. Fervor’s comments specifically refer to the thematic content of Wilder’s great mystery-comedy-drama Witness for the Prosecution. In my brief survey of Widler’s career I mentioned this film as a classic but said nothing specific about it. Mr. Fervor’s comments afford an opportunity to talk further about this excellent motion picture which was produced in 1957 film and starred Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, and Elsa Lanchester. Set in London and dealing with a murder trial, Witness for the Prosecution is a strong comedy-drama with numerous plot twists and interesting characters. First, I would suggest that everyone get a hold of a copy of this film, either the individual release or in the superb Wilder box set. Wilder is one of the greatest American filmmakers, and his movies are both entertaining and insightful. He has been characterized as cynical by most reviewers and critics, but as I demonstrate in my appreciation of Wilder and his work, his body of work is much more sophisticated than that simplistic characterization suggests, and much more
This is the last day in which I can decently mark the centennial of the birth of the truly great detection fiction writer John Dickson Carr. Carr flourished as a writer during the 1930s and ’40s and wrote numerous classic detective novels and short stories, continuing to write until the 1970s. With Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Queen, and Sayers, Carr is one of the greatest of all mystery writers. Carr was the master of the "impossible crime" story and its best-known subset, the locked-room mystery. Carr’s narratives are fiendishly deceptive and puzzling, yet he leaves the crucial clues right out there for the reader to see. Yet we never do, and the detective’s revelation of the killer nearly always comes as a big surprise. Carr’s stories tend to include a bit of overly cute romance between some young couple unique to each book or story, and he has a habit of piling on melodramatic language at times (primarily in the dialogue) and setting obviously artificial rhetorical cliffhangers at the end of some chapters, but these are minor inconveniences that detract only a little from the overall excellence of most of his books and stories. His achievement rests mainly on two series.
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