What Remains and the modern whodunit

What Remains maintained to its fourth and final part the appeal that I wrote about in my review of
The claustrophobic shared house setting was brilliantl captured, and although the last ten minutes or so were pretty melodramatic in comparison to the subtle tension-building that had gone before, overall I very much enjoyed the story. While watching it, I was prompted to reflect on the strength of the whodunit as a narrative form, because despite its highly contemporary mood and subject matter, What Remains was a genuine whodunit, with added value in terms of characterisation and, above all, the compelling portrayal of how desperately lonely life can be in the heart of bustling metropolitan London.

Stripped of the moody and dark photography, the storyline was reminiscent of the Golden Age. Almost all the occupants of the shared house nursed dark secrets. Possible motives were lightly sketched (a slight plotting weakness, perhaps?) but almost everyone seemed capable of having murdered the luckless young woman whose body had been found in the attic two years after she was last seen - a disappearance to which hardly anyone paid attention. There was even a "least likely culprit" in the Christie tradition.

If analysed carefully, I'm not sure that - despite its superficially very "realistic" take on modern life - What Remains was much more plausible than many a Golden Age mystery. But on the whole,that didn't matter. It was good entertainment, and offered a story that will linger in my mind for quite a while. This is something that a good whodunit can do -whether it's a modern TV drama, such as Lewis or Vera or Broadchurch, or an older story,such as the better 'forgotten books' that I cover on Fridays. The combination of a mystery to solve, coupled with interesting people and a well-evoked setting has just as much appeal today as it did eighty years ago..