Prime Suspect

Masterpiece Mystery!

I'm a big fan of Mystery! on PBS. The 2010 season that starts May 2 brings back two of my favorite series. One series that I really, really want to like but end up being completely frustrated by. And a series that I am so-so about.

 

My two favorites are FOYLE'S WAR and POIROT. I am so excited that they are doing another Foyle's series. I was very sad when V-E Day was announced on the last episode. I thought for sure that was the end for the soft-spoken and intelligent Christopher Foyle, his wounded Sergeant and his plucky driver. The new series starts immediately after V-E Day and there are only three episodes. But three is better than none!

David Suchet is POIROT. In my view everyone else who tries to play Poirot is an imposter. There are 3 new mysteries for Poirot to exercise his little grey cells: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, THE THIRD GIRL, and APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH. I know I'll love them.

The series I really, really want to like but don't is MISS MARPLE. I find myself yelling at the screen, "No, no, no! That's not what happened at all!" I guess the "creative" people behind the series think that since their viewers already know the plot that they have to rearrange everything and throw in other Christie's sleuths to entice the viewers to watch (or worse, have Miss Marple show up in non-Marple mysteries like THE SECRET OF CHIMNEYS that they are doing this year).

Or they think that new viewers who somehow never heard of Miss Marple wouldn't want to watch a "boring" cozy mystery so they throw in all kinds of modern day twists and treats to sex it up a bit. As I told a friend who also doesn't like these new Miss Marples and refuses to watch them because the only Miss Marple (in his book) is Joan Hickson, "If one of the spinster women in the village is recast as a lesbian, she'll be the murderer even if that character was the victim in the original story!"

So the "creative" people have alienated me because their reconfigured Miss Marples make no sense and completely kills everything enjoyable about the books. And I wouldn't be surprised if new viewers come away thinking, "I don't get what the big deal is about Agatha Christie. The plot doesn't make sense and neither does the motive for murder." That is, I think, the saddest part.

Finally, INSPECTOR LEWIS is back with one new episode. I have to admit I was never a big fan of Morse. I thought he was too snooty, boring, and standoffish. I did like Lewis. But not nearly enough for me to want to watch him. It's only one episode so I guess I'll watch it.

Check out the Masterpiece Mystery website for more info. Or click here for a PDF download of the 2010 Season.

Richard Jury (Sleuth)

  

Martha Grimes 22nd Richard Jury Mystery THE BLACK CAT hit bookstores today. Like all previous Richard Jury Mysteries, THE BLACK CAT is the name of an actual pub in the UK.

In THE BLACK CAT, Detective Superintendent Jury of Scotland Yard intrudes on the turf of the Thames Valley police to investigate the death of an escort at the Black Cat pub. Along for the ride is Jury's aristocratic friend Melrose Plant and a menagerie of talking cats and dogs that have overpopulated Martha's books lately.

I have enjoyed this series from the beginning. But lately I've been less than thrilled with the novels. They are beginning to feel like they are trapped in an earlier time before modern forensic science and when amateur/civilian friends would help Scotland Yard solve a case. To borrow a British phrase, the books are becoming rather twee.

 

Richard Jury Mysteries

1. The Man with a Load of Mischief (1981)
2. The Old Fox Deceiv'd (1982)
3. The Anodyne Necklace (1983)
4. The Dirty Duck (1984)
5. The Jerusalem Inn (1984)
6. Help the Poor Struggler (1985)
7. Deer Leap (1985)
8. I am the Only Running Footman (1986)
9. The Five Bells and Bladebone (1987)
10. The Old Silent (1989)
11. The Old Contemptibles (1991)
12. The Horse You Came In On (1993)
13. Rainbow's End (1995)
14. The Case Has Altered (1997)
15. The Stargazey (1998)
16. The Lamorna Wink (1999)
17. The Blue Last (2001)
18. The Grave Maurice (2002)
19. The Winds of Change (2004)
20. The Old Wine Shades (2006)
21. Dust (2007)
22. The Black Cat (2010)

Publishers:

• Little, Brown, Boston. (1981-1991)
• Alfred A. Knopf, New York. (1993-1997)
• Viking Penguin, New York. (1998-Present)

Once A Spy (Review)

   

I just finished Once A Spy by Keith Thomson. The spy/thriller is the story of a 30 year old deadbeat gambling addict son who finds out that his Alzheimer-suffering father was one of the CIA's most legendary spies. When Drummond is targeted by a shadowy group in the CIA (are they the good guys? the bad guys? are they really CIA?) who wants him dead because they fear that he may blurt out secrets that would do untold damage, Charlie and Drummond go on the run.

Charlie nonchalantly takes this all in stride. After all, Charlie is already being hunted by the Russian Mafia for an unpaid gambling debt, so it's not much of a step to being targeted by professional assassins that aren't very good at their job if a civilian and a senior citizen with Alzheimer's can elude them quite easily. Even when something HUGE happens, Charlie sort of just shrugs it off.

As for Drummond, he goes in and out of lucid moments and it's hard to tell if he is faking his alzheimer's disease in order to fool the enemy.

The novel is darkly humorous. Thomson has fun playing with the conventions of the spy/thriller genre. But with the setup offered here, the story should have stayed within the land of the believable. Instead, we quickly go to the improbable with plot twists and gadgets straight out of the worst James Bond films (such as a Dr. Mengele-like torturer, the villain's secret island compound, underground secret laboratories, a sinister washing machine, and a nursing home for retired spies). 

The relationship between Chalie and Drummond is what holds the story together. It is bittersweet because as we see Charlie get closer and closer to his father, we also see Drummond retreating farther and farther into his disease. There's also a half-hearted attempt at a romantic storyline between Charlie and an NSA spy that doesn't really gel.

Overall, it was a fun story while I was reading it. But trying to mix a poignant father/son story against an improbable spy/thriller filled with mobsters, double agents, and complex fight scenes, just doesn't work.

Adelia Aguilar (Sleuth)

  

Ariana Franklin is the pen name of British author Diana Norman (pictured above). After writing a bunch of historical fiction and non-fiction, Diana turned to historical mysteries. This is when Ariana Franklin and her sleuth Adelia Aguilar were born.

Adelia Aguilar is a female pathologist living during the reign of Henry II of England. After four children are murdered in the medieval college town of Cambridge and with a religious war about to erupt between the Catholics and the Jews over the children's deaths, Henry begs his cousin, the King of Sicily, to send the best "master of the art of death" to solve the murders.

The Sicilian King sends Adelia. Since she's a woman who could easily be declared a witch in superstitious England, she is forced to act as an assistant to her true assistant and protector, Mansur, a Marsh Arab. Along the way, Adelia picks up a few travelers including Gyltha, an eel seller, and her urchin grandson, Ulf. Also, Adelia meets Sir Rowley Picot who charms Adelia and becomes very important to her. But you will have to read about it in the first book of the series Mistress of the Art of Deathto learn more about Adelia and all the interesting characters she meets in Medieval England.

The second book, The Serpent's Tale, finds Adelia trying to clear Eleanor of Aquitaine of the murder of her husband's (King Henry II) mistress, Rosamund Clifford. But instead of welcoming Adelia's help to clear her name, Eleanor promptly imprisons Adelia and her entourage in a nunnery!

After successfully resolving the murder in the second book, Adelia returns in Grave Goods. She is sent to Glastonbury after a fire has destroyed the beautiful Abbey and uncovered a pair of human skeletons. Could the skeletons possibly be King Arthur and Guinevere? Adelia must find out the truth before a Welsh rebellion threatens to topple King Henry II from the English throne.

The latest book in the series, A Murderous Procession, is released on April 1, 2010 in the US. King Henry II sends his daughter Joanna to Palermo to marry William II of Sicily. He needs someone he trusts to protect his daughter and to see her safely on her journey. Adelia is chosen for this onerous task and she doesn't like it one bit.

Ariana's books are fascinating. The historical details are interesting and at times astonishing. Ariana's grasp of the period allows us to explore the time period without feeling like we are reading a boring history text. The medical capabilities of the time are minutely explored. Ariana restricts herself to the medical knowledge that was available at the time. This helps keep the story rooted in it's time and keeps it from leaping into a fantasy world of CSI: Medieval England. Women were indeed educated as physicians in Sicily which at the time possessed the greatest medical training college in the Western World.

For readers who enjoy Ellis Peter's Brother Cadfael mysteries, Ariana Franklin's Adelia Aguilar novels are sure to delight.

To learn more about Adelia Aguilar and her creator, visit Ariana Franklin's Website.

  

Adelia Aguilar Novels

1. Mistress of the Art of Death (2007)
2. The Serpent's Tale (2008) aka The Death Maze
3. Grave Goods (2009) aka Relics of the Dead
4. A Murderous Procession (2010)

Publishers:

• Putnam, New York.

Bernie Gunther & Berlin Noir (Sleuth)

 

The latest Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr (pictured above) hit American bookstores last week (March 18, 2010). If The Dead Rise Not is the sixth Bernie Gunther novel but it is the prequel to the Berlin Noir Trilogy.

Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels give us readers an eyes-wide-open tour of Nazi Germany and all the evils (both big and small) that the Nazis inflicted on the German citizens and the world during WWII. Bernie was a police detective of the old Wiemar Republic. When he sees the Nazis begin to takeover, he leaves the official police to first become a hotel "house" detective at the famous Adlon Hotel in Berlin and later forced backed into the Nazi police force by Heydrich.

After the Berlin Noir Trilogy, Kerr continued to tell Bernie's story and the story of Germany following WWII in one novel. The next tells of Bernie's defection to Argentina where he soon finds himself investigating a murder that is eerily like a murder he investigated back in Berlin. The third and most recent post Berlin Noir novel, as I mentioned above, is set before the first novel of the triloby to fill in Bernie's backstory and relate how major characters first appeared in Bernie's life.

Bernie is a great sleuth. He isn't perfect. He tries to help people in need and often breaks the law to do so. His morals and values change according to new realities. The supportuning characters that pop up in the novels are interesting and feel real. And Bernie also runs into all the top Nazis even the Leader himself during his investigations and gives us bone-chilling descriptions of men that haunted and still haunt the dreams of those that lived through Nazi Germany and WWII. The writing is crisp and the dialogue snappy as in the best noirs.

Listed below are the Bernie Gunther Novels in publishing order. The year listed following the year published is the date in which the action of the novel takes place.

Bernie Gunther Novels

1. March Violets* (1989) - 1936
2. The Pale Criminal* (1990) - 1938
3. A German Requiem* (1991) - 1947
4. The One From The Other (2006) - 1949
5. A Quiet Flame (2008) - 1950
6. If The Dead Rise Not (2010) - 1934

*The first three novels are also refered to as Berlin Noir and are available in one volume.

Publishers:

• Viking, London.
• Quercus, London. (From 2008)
• Putnam, New York.