Nothing on TV rewards quite like a killer instinct.
Cable's Arts & Entertainment network starts another round of weekly mysteries Sunday, its newest batch, based on Caroline Graham's Inspector Barnaby novels, arriving as a five-program set titled "Midsomer Murders."
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday June 27, 1998 Home Edition Calendar Part F Page 4 Entertainment Desk 1 inches; 21 words Type of Material: Correction
Actress--In Friday's Howard Rosenberg column the name of the actress who has played mystery detective Miss Marple was misspelled. It is Joan Hickson.
Murders most pleasing, you might say, occurring in a sleepy English village in a county named Midsomer, where good old-fashioned evil lurks behind the kind of picturesque exterior you find in tour books. In the opener, the able Barnaby (John Nettles) and his thudding assistant, Troy (Daniel Casey), get to the bottom of a pair of slayings that shake up the quaint neighborhood. Very nice stuff. Better still is episode No. 2, when grisly murder visits Midsomer's coven of local mystery writers.
And more good news, for returning to A&E on July 26 is Samantha "Sam" Ryan, the Irish forensic pathologist deluxe of "Silent Witness," whose personal demons and talent for solving difficult homicides never cross wires. She's again played by the intriguing Amanda Burton.
These are imports, naturally, once more from the isle of stiff upper lips, affirming that no one does TV whodunits, or even whydunits, like the Brits.
Certainly not Americans.
Wrong genes, apparently.
Just as actual violent crime has transfixed a bloodthirsty U.S. and its media in the '90s, detective fiction is one of the most enduring forms of literature. We buy mysteries by the gobs and celebrate both amateur and professional sleuths as they try to bring order to chaos. And no wonder. As noted by P.D. James, the grandest dame of living British whodunit writers, whose own stories have resonated via British imports on American TV: A classic mystery offers "excitement, suspense and vicarious danger."
To say nothing of a story that's puzzling enough to challenge your noodle, all of these traits inevitably absent from the paltry number of mysteries produced exclusively for U.S. television.
It must be genes. "Barnaby Jones" we do, real mysteries we don't.
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A notable exception is next month's "Poodle Springs," a pretty fair little Philip Marlowe number on HBO starring James Caan as Raymond Chandler's famed detective (although the teleplay is from a Robert Parker novel). Although it's Marlowe lite, this is good fun. It's the 1960s, you see, and though Marlowe is years past his prime and a candidate for Grecian Formula, he still packs a heater and doesn't hesitate to give a smartass cop a kick in a spot where it could raise his voice three octaves.
