The Murder Room - P.D. James on TV

The Murder Room is novel that P.D. James published in 2003, and it was brought to the television screens a couple of years later. Unaccountably, I neither read the novel (though a copy is to be found in my tottering TBR pile) nor saw the television show; I suppose the reason is that I was very preoccupied with my day job as well as my own writing at the time.

I was kindly given a DVD set at Christmas which contained the TV version (as well as that of Death in Holy Orders) and I've just caught up with it. Both shows feature Martin Shaw as Adam Dalgleish, rather than Roy Marsden, who made the role his own. But I felt that Shaw gave an excellent performance. He is an actor who made his name in tough guy roles, but he's very expressive, and a single glance counts for a thousand words.

I was equally impressed with the show as a whole. The script, by Robert Jones, was sharp, with some excellent lines (I'm not sure how many of them come from the book, which I'm now very keen to read). And the acting generally was of  a high standard, with Samantha Bond, Janie Lee, Anita Carey, and Jack Shepherd exceptional.

I loved the storyline, which focused on a museum with the eponymous murder room devoted to classic real life cases of the Golden Age - Wallace, A. A. Rouse, and so on. This is a subject I'm exploring at present in my work-in-progress, and I was fascinated to see what was made of it in the context of a twenty-first century whodunit. First-class viewing for mystery fans.

The Lineup

Poetry and crime fiction may seem to be strange bedfellows, but there are plenty of poets who have written crime fiction (or crime writers who have tried their hand at poetry). More surprisingly, there are quite a few poems with a crime fiction theme.

Fellow blogger Gerald So recently sent me a pdf of The Lineup, a collection of poems about crime. He has put it together along with Patrick Shawn Bagley, R. Navaez and Anthony Rainone.

Gerald says in his introduction: ‘Before I ever thought to write poetry, I was a fan, editor and writer of crime fiction. I especially enjoy how every paragraph, every sentence, every word has purpose: to plant clues, reveal character, move towards resolution. I’ve come to appreciate the same purpose in poetry…’

Suffice to say there is some powerful material here from a range of contributors, including Gerald himself, and Sandra Seamans, whose blog I found (via David Cranmer’s excellent blog) a few days back, and which I’ve now added to the blogroll.

There is, of course, one famous detective who is also a poet – P.D.James’ Adam Dalgleish. I once heard James say in an interview that the late W.H.Auden (a fan of the classic detective story) had offered to write a poem for Dalgleish to be included in one of her novels; she thought she might have had much mischievous pleasure from people who criticised her poetic skills, only to find that the verse was the work of one of the greats. A lovely story, I think. A pity it never happened. We still await sight of Dalgleish’s work.