Martin Edwards's Blog, page 208

Harbour Street by Ann Cleeves - review

Harbour Street is the latest book written by Ann Cleeves and featuring DI Vera Stanhope. It's just been published, and one of my Christmas treats was to be given the opportunity to read a review copy. I've been a fan of Vera since her first appearance in The Crow Trap. In fact, I'd like to think that I was ahead of the crowd in recognising her tremendous potential as a character. Suffice to say that, since her debut, she's developed into one of the most interesting detectives in modern British crime fiction, and her appeal has been enhanced by the successful television series with Vera played by that fine actor Brenda Blethyn. I gather that a television adaptation of this book will reach our screens before too long.

The story is set in the run-up to Christmas, and gains from the seasonal backdrop. Newcastle is busy and Vera's sidekick, Joe Ashworth, and his daughter Jessie take a trip on the Metro after a choral performance in the Cathedral. Jessie screams when she discovers the body of an elderly woman, who proves to be Margaret Krukowski. Train-related crime stories have been popular for rather more than a century. But this is a very different kind of mystery from the cases of the railway detectives created by such diverse writers as Victor L. Whitechurch, Andrew Martin and Edward Marston, and certainly from Murder on the Orient Express.

Margaret seems to have been a thoroughly decent woman, although it appears that there is some mystery about her past, and also about her long-ago marriage. Why would anyone want to kill such a pleasant person? This is the sort of question that appeals to me as a writer, as well as a reader. I did not, however, correctly identify the culprit. Although this is a very different book from The Glass Room, which offered a sort of homage to the Golden Age (and which Ann turned into an excellent murder mystery event that I've seen a couple of times), there are a number of ingredients that will please fans of traditional detective fiction, including questions posed by the dead woman's will, and a puzzle hidden in the past

Ann Cleeves is a friend of mine,and it is only natural for me to enjoy her books. But I am confident that her many fans will like this one. It's a neatly crafted piece of work, and a reminder that the great success that Ann has enjoyed in recent years, both with these books and the Shetland novels starring another likeable cop, Jimmy Perez, is well deserved.

Miss Marple - Nemesis (1987)- ITV review

Nemesis was one of Agatha Christie's last books, and by common consent it falls some way short of being a masterpiece. Yet, such is the power of the Christie brand that it has twice been adapted for television. I missed both of the original screenings, including the Geraldine McEwan version (and may not have been a great loss , I don't know) but I've now caught up - very, very belatedly - with the 1987 version starring the marvellous Joan Hickson as Jane Marple.

The screenplay was written by T.R. Bowen, a screenwriter very experienced in adapting Christie. Bowen avoids the mistake of making changes just for the sake of them. He tweaks the story a bit, introducing a god-son of Marple who acts as a sort of Dr Watson, but the advantage of adapting a story that is by no means a classic is that it's possible to improve on some of the weaker elements, and this Bowen does.

The premise of the story is rather odd, in that a dead millionaire sends Miss Marple on a coach tour, visiting historic houses and gardens and hoping that along the way she will find out whether or not his son really was a murderer. The son's girlfriend was murdered, and he was the prime suspect, but never tried. The plot involves a rather unlikely mistaken identity and a motive with a suppressed sexual element. Not classic Christie, then, but Bowen turns it into something very watchable.

What struck me, not for the first time with the Hickson series, was the excellence of the cast. John Horsley, a professor here, was the lecherous and inept doctor in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin. Anna Cropper, a charismatic actor who was once married to William Roache (alias Ken Barlow), is among the suspects. And Peter Copley, once a constant presence in British television shows, made the most of a small part as a vague cleric.

Finally, regular readers will have noticed that I've deviated lately from my usual pattern of blogs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and that I've been slightly more active. This is partly due to the number of good TV shows that I've seen lately and on which I wanted to say a few words. In 2014, I'm planning to producee three posts most weeks,but occasionally more. I'm back on Monday -with a review of the new Ann Cleeves novel, Harbour Street.

Forgotten Book - Suspicous Circumstances

My Forgotten Book for today is one of the last novels to appear under the famous pen-name of Patrick Quentin. Suspicious Circumstances, written by Hugh Wheeler, was published in 1957. At this time, I suspect Wheeler was pursuing his keen interest in showbiz which eventually led to his writing with the legendary Stephen Sondheim - Wheeler wrote the book of that wonderful musical "A Little Night Music", for instance, and was involved with "Cabaret", although sources differ as to the extent of that involvement.

So Wheeler certainly loved the showbiz world, and this shines through in the novel. The story is told by Nickie, a 19 year old young man who is devoted to his mother, once a famous actress. While he is away in France, enjoying himself with a woman called Monique, he receives an urgent summons from her to return home. Is this connected with the recent death of his mother's rival, Norma Delanay, by any chance? The answer proves to be yes.

It seems that Norma died accidentally, but Nickie is not so sure, and neither are the police. His mother, along with a number of other people in her circle, may have been at or close to the place where the accident happened. Suspicion switches around from one person to another. Whom can Nickie trust? This question of trust, suspicion and betrayal is eternally fascinating and it formed the core of my own second novel, Suspicious Minds.

Unfortunately, despite the potential of the showbiz setting, I found myself unable to warm to Nickie, his mother or anyone else in the book, and unable to care how Norma met her end. It seems to me that Wheeler was losing interest in the crime novel when he wrote this book. It has a perfunctory feel, very different from the energy that drives most of his fiction. I'm sorry to say so, but this is by far the worst Quentin I've read. But everyone has an off-day, and the other Quentins I've read are pacy and enjoyable. Please don't let my disappointment with one particular book put you off Quentin"

Sherlock Holmes: The Many Faces of a Master Detective - BBC Timeshift documentary review

Sherlock Holmes: The Many Faces of a Master Detective proved to be a very informative and enjoyable documentary. One unexpected pleasure from my perspective was to discover, as the credits rolled, the identity of the narrator of the programme. He was an elderly man with a very distinctive vocal style, and I wondered who it might be. I didn't guess right - it proved to be Peter Wyngarde, a truly charismatic actor who starred both in that superb film The Innocents and, in his most famous role, as Jason King in Department S. It was good to hear him again. It isn't often that an unseen narrator comes close to stealing the show, especially when it's a good show.

The programme traced the portrayal of Holmes on screen, in television and film, and this provided an excellent excuse for a lot of fun - including amusing chat about the mask worn by the dog who featured as the eponymous The Hound of the Baskervilles in the Hammer Film version of the story. Among the contributors was Mark Gatiss, whose enthusiasm for Sherlock came over very clearly. He has real insight into popular culture, ranging from ghost stories and sci-fi to the great consulting detective.

I've been a Holmes fan since I was a young boy, when I came across the Basil Rathbone films and the Douglas Wilmer TV series at much the same time. The point was made by one contributor that our favouirte Holmes tends to be the one we encountered in youth, and I certainly rate Rathbone and the less renonwned Wilmer very highly, but Jeremy Brett and Benedict Cumberbatch are in their different ways also very good. Some would vote for Peter Cushing, a good actor but to my mind a notch below the top four. It was, by the way, great to see another screen veteran, Douglas Wilmer, talking very entertainingly here about his series in the Sixties.

Yet there's so much Holmes stuff out there that I realised I've missed quite a few good things over the years, including Billy Wilder's film starring Robert Stephens. Must catch up on that before too long. The mark of a good documentary is perhaps whether it makes you want to find out more about the subject, and I was delighted that this programme made it clear that there's still a lot more Holmesiana that I have yet to discover.

Death in Paradise - series three - BBC TV review

Death in Paradise returned to our screens tonight as this light-hearted BBC TV cop show began its third series. More than two years ago, I reviewed the first episode of series one and gave it a cautious welcome. I watched most of the episodes of that series, and found the plots enjoyable, but I continued to find some of the humour forced. I gave series two a miss, but a number of friends told me they found the show a refreshing change from Scandinavian serial killers, and so I decided to take a look at the new series.

Because I'd not kept up with news about the show, I was completely unaware that Ben Miller was being written out as the British detective who bumbles around a lovely Caribbean island solving apparently impossible crimes. So when he turned up at a reunion of some of his chums from student days, and was stabbed to death with an ice pick before the credits rolled, I was slightly taken aback.

I soon got over my sense of loss, mind you. Miller was replaced by another bumbling but clever British cop, played by Kris Marshall. Marshall's an engaging actor,and is well equipped for the light comedy (still sometimes a bit forced, it seems to me) that is one of the ingredients of the show. Sara Martins continues to provide stunning support as the detective sergeant, and the excellent Don Warrington, who was so good in Rising Damp many years ago, plays the senior officer with his customary suavity.

Death in Paradise is a very popular show, and the high ratings demonstrate the appetite of viewers for classic whodunits, brought up to date. Here, the clues were so generously supplied that it was easy to figure out the culprit, but it's decent light entertainment, perhaps a notch or two ahead of Father Brown. I still don't regard it as a must-watch, or as in the same class as Jonathan Creek, which was funnier and cleverer, but I'm glad that it this has done well enough to give us another glimpse of the sun in the depths of winter..

Sherlock: His Last Vow - BBC TV review

Sherlock's third series has just come to an end with His Last Vow, but those (like me) who fear withdrawal symptoms will be cheered by news that series four and five are already on the drawing board. This particular episode, despite the title, which alludes to "His Last Bow", was mainly based on "Charles Augustus Milverton". If my hazy memory is correct, the Milverton story was the first of the Douglas Wilmer versions of the Sherlock Holmes stories that I saw on TV as a small boy back in the Sixties.

Milverton was the king of blackmailers,and his modern equivalent is newspaper magnate Charles Augustus Magnussen, played by Lars Mikkelsen - a nice touch, this, combining Nordic noir with Baker Street. Lindsay Duncan, an actor who alwasy seems slightly mysterious (in a good way, I hasten to add), was his glamorous victim, Lady Smallwood. Steven Moffat's script began brilliantly, and I loved Mycroft's complaint that Sherlock's latest escapade with cocaine wasn't the first time that his substance abuse had wreaked havoc with his parents' line-dancing.

I did, though, feel that the story faltered after Sherlock was shot. Whilst I've really enjoyed this series, evidently some have been disappointed, and for me, the stories slip when the writer(s) go overboard on the sentimentality. We had some of that in this episode, and it is reminscent of the weaker parts of Doctor Who. Perhaps if the episodes were shorter, this kind of padding could be done away with in both these great shows.

All the same, I do love the clever and witty touches that abound in Sherlock. So I was intrigued to read today that a legal challenge has reportedly been launched by Conan Doyle's heir against the use of the Sherlock Holmes character in this way. Almost all of the original stories are now out of copyright, although the position has, I gather, been complicated by trade marks that have been registered.

There's a very interesting - and I think socially important - debate to be had as to who can and should be able to use fictional characters long after the death of the original creator. One argument is that the creations are property passed down to heirs, who are entitled to the benefit of them. Some say that, just as it's reasonable to remain entitled to,say, a house inherited from one's great-grandfather, so it is only fair to be allowed to inherit and profit from the intellectual property created by one's ancestors. As a creator myself, I don't dismiss these arguments out of hand by any means, and I'm certainly not in favour of deliberately nicking the intellectual property of the living. But there is also a very powerful argument that copyright lasts long enough, and that attempts to expand upon the substantial protection it already gives when the copyright period has elapsed are not in the wider public interest, and should be discouraged. Any views, on either side of the debate, would be of interest to me. So - what do you think?

The Bletchley Circle - ITV review

The Bletchley Circle, created and written by Guy Burt, earned acclaim on its first appearance in the schedules. I missed the whole of the first series, but have just caught up with episode one of series two. Was the praise justified? On the evidence so far, I think it was. This was a good period crime show, perhaps not of the highest calibre, but certainly very watchable.

The premise is a pleasing one. A group of women who were codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the war find themselves yearning for excitement in the austere monochrome Fifties. This story had its roots in a relationship that had flourished at Bletchley. A female codebreaker fell for a male colleague (played by Paul McGann). Years later, he is found murdered, and she is at the scene and the prime suspect. She refuses to defend herself and is tried for the crime and convicted. Even facing the death penalty, she remains silent.

Yet one of her former colleagues struggles to believe in her guilt and enlists the other women in a detective exercise that has the added factor of a race against time. Another suspect, a young girl, emerges, and by the end of this episode it seemed that a conspiracy is in play.

It was a clever idea to build on the legendary activities at Bletchley in this way, and to focus a storyline on a group of talented and determined women (with Anna Maxwell Martin, fresh from Death Comes to Pemberley,,prominent) rather than men. The Fifties setting also seems to me to be well done. Burt is a good story-teller (I gather he published his first novel at the age of 19 - wow!) and this is solid entertainment.

Forgotten Book - A Dagger in Fleet Street

My Forgotten Book for today is R.C. Woodthorpe's second novel, A Dagger in Fleet Street, first published in 1934, and applauded at the time, but now neglected and very difficult to find. In fact, I owe my copy to a kind person who supplied it to me when all other attempts came to nothing. And, as usual with Woodthope, the book boasts a number of attractive features.

This is, like Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, a workplace mystery. Woodthorpe had set his debut novel, The Public School Murder in a fictional version of the place where he used to teach. He moved from education to journalism with the Daily Herald, which in the novel becomes the Daily Hope. And Woodthorpe's knowledge of newspaper life makes his portrayal of it more powerful and authentic than Christopher St John Sprigg's entertaining Fatality in Fleet Street, published at much the same time.

Woodthorpe is good not only at describing the nature of journalistic life, but also at capturing the uncertainty faced by working people in the aftermath of the Slump. No job was safe, and one character says, "Thank God for the National Union of Journalists." That isn't the sort of sentiment that is generally associated with Golden Age detective fiction is it? An illustration, I suggest, of how the Golden Age is frequently misunderstood. Woodthorpe's writing regularly reflected his political views. The same woman turns out to be a communist; she is portrayed positively throughout, though she is smart enough not to reveal her political views to the newspaper's proprietor, or the acting editor, who is a "petty Mussolini," and who finishes up with the titular dagger in his throat.

Woodthorpe supplies some very good lines, and sharp social comedy. The only snag is that he is obviously uninterested in his plot. He was a writer, I think, who used the detective form as a peg to hang his writing on, but he was not very good at constructing a mystery. The puzzle, involving a rather insipid and ridiculous campaign by the newspaper against a pretty young woman, is third rate at best. But I'm really glad I read th book, because it gave me an insight, albeit quite light-hearted, into life in Fleet Street at a fascinating time of our history.

Father Brown - BBC TV review (second series)

Father Brown is back. The daytime television update of G.K.Chesterton's stories featuring the little priest who is one of fiction's great detectives has returned for a second series. The first series provoked very mixed reactions. When I wrote
The fact that a blog post about a relatively obscure show can prompt such discussion, some of it long after the post originally appeared, never ceases to fascinate me. In fact, that particular post is, to this day, one of the ten most visited posts to have appeared on this blog; quite notable, given that there have been about one thousand eight hundred of them.

Mark Williams returned as a Fifties version of Father Brown in an episode, The Ghost in the Machine, which was not based on one of the original stories. The mixture is very much as before - picturesque settings, multiple suspects and a sort of winsome low-budget charm. The result will again set purists' teeth on edge, but I continue to find this show a sort of guilty pleasure.

I don't care for the term 'cosy' when it is applied to detective fiction. It's often applied to books that are far from cosy. But even I must admit that there is a cosinesss about Father Brown which is part of its appeal. A good watch if you are suffering from poor health, I imagine. Undemanding but light, entertaining fare. The fact that a second series has been commissioned suggests to me that plenty of viewers enjoy it. We're not talking cutting edge crime fiction here, and the connection with Chesterton's original is (and I regret this) remote. But there's room in the world for shows like Father Brown, as well as for more ambitious projects such as Broadchurch.

Gravity - film review

Like ghost stories and horror fiction, sci-fi is one of the genres I enjoy dipping into from time to time. I have published one futuristic short story, for an anthology co-edited by Maxim Jakubowski, but I certainly wouldn't describe myself as a sci-fi expert. But I was recommended to watch the new Sandra Bullock film Gravity, and I'm very glad I did.

The first thing to say about this movie is that it's the first I've ever watched in the cinema with 3D glasses, and I don't think there' s any doubt that this film, more than any other I know, benefits from being watched in 3D. The visual effects are absolutely stunning - the debris flying through space, for instance, seems to be heading right for the audience. This is not just a gimmick - it's very involving.

Sandra Bullock plays Ryan Stone, a scientist with an unhappy past, who is at work out in space with an affable colleague played by George Clooney. All is going well until news comes from Houston of an accident in space that may complicate life for the astronauts. So it proves. Soon Bullock and Clooney are the only survivors of the mission, and face a desperate race against time if they are to survive.

Sandra Bullock has a very engaging personality, but more than that, she is a terrific actor, and I doubt if she's ever performed better than in this role, which must have been very demanding. I was expecting the action in space to be inter-cut with scenes in Houston as the tension mounts. Apparently, the studio expected this too, but director Alfonso Cuaron resisted the pressure. This was an excellent judgment - the result is a very strong piece of work that benefits (as so many films, like books, do benefit) from being fairly short. I very much enjoyed Gravity. Watch it in the cinema, though, if you possibly can.