Jonathan Creek Revisited

For me, as for many people, the lockdown has (among other things) meant more time for writing, reading, and, to a lesser extent, watching television. As far as TV is concerned, I've caught up with a few recent series and also had another chance to enjoy some old favourites. I found, to my surprise and delight, that Ian Carmichael's Lord Peter Wimsey series from the 1970s held up much better than I'd expected, but the greatest pleasure has come from revisiting David Renwick's brilliant series Jonathan Creek.

I've rhapsodised about Renwick's writing and this series in particular on this blog in the past, but what strikes me on a second viewing is just how strong and tightly written the scripts are. One recurrent feature of many series nowadays is that they are excessively long and tend to drag. This is true even of strong series that I've watched lately, such as Sharp Objects, based on Gillian Flynn's novel, and The Hour (which I hope to blog about shortly). But with Jonathan Creek, there's never (or almost never) any padding.

The care with which Renwick writes is evident from the early episodes to the recent shows, such as The Curse of the Bronze Lamp, which I watched again last night. I'd forgotten the story, but on looking back at this blog, I see that I gave the episode a rave review on its original showing, more than six years ago. If anything, I enjoyed it even more the second time around, which is saying something.

I've found that I've forgotten the detailed plots of almost all the stories (except the brilliant Miracle in Crooked Lane) but that doesn't indicate a failure on the writer's part. Rather, I think that Renwick's command of detail is such that it compels attention at the time of viewing while not distracting from the overall pleasure of the character of Creek and the bizarre and deftly handled scenarios - and it's that overall sense of satisfaction and indeed delight that lingers in the memory.

I've been thinking about locked room mysteries a lot recently, partly because of the arrival of a new anthology (I'll talk more about this shortly), partly because I've been reading some more John Dickson Carr, and partly because I've been toying with an idea for a new locked room mystery of my own. Watch this space... 

Miraculous Mysteries

Today sees the UK publication of Miraculous Mysteries, my collection of classic locked room and impossible crime mysteries for the British Library. I've always had a love of this paradoxical type of puzzle, and this book is dedicated to the memory of Bob Adey, the greatest expert on the subject, who guided me to so many hidden gems prior to his untimely death.

The first locked room detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Poe, was a short story, and I feel that the short form is best suited to the locked room puzzle, because of the necessarily fantastic nature of most of the plots. Of course, there are some fine novels featuring impossible crimes, and John Dickson Carr wrote a bunch of them. But I see these mostly as exceptions to the general rule.

As ever, I've tried to include a range of familiar and unfamiliar authors. We all know Conan Doyle, but Grenville Robbins is long forgotten. And so too is Marten Cumberland, even though he had a long and relatively successful career. I'm very pleased too that I've been able to include a little known story by Christopher St John Sprigg that I found highly enjoyable.

I'm delighted by the initial reaction to the book, including this splendid review. It would please me enormously if this book were to sell well, since there are plenty of good classic impossible crime stories around, and I'd love to put together a follow-up volume. But that lies far in the future. Right now, I'm celebrating this book, and I hope that it provides thousands of readers with plenty of entertainment.

Forgotten Book - Terror at Staups House

Now, this is an obscure one. Hands up, those of you who have read Frank King's Terror at Staups House....not too many of you, I suspect, well-read though readers of this blog definitely are! It's another book, signed by the author (and dated 1927, the year of publication), which I acquired from the collection of the late Bob Adey, and it's a locked room mystery.

I bought it less than a fortnight ago, and it was my major purchase at a book fair in York. I managed to limit myself to buying four books, mainly because quite a few others that I fancied were a long way out of reach financially. This book, in excellent condition but lacking a dustwrapper, was at least affordable.

I say 'lacking a dustwrapper', but it was pointed out to me that the book is very unusual, in that the publishers, Bles, were experimenting at that time with the concept of having front endpapers which reproduced the cover. It's an experiment they didn't persist with, perhaps due to cost, but from a book collecting perspective, it's a very interesting feature. (And it's rather different from the more common, and less pleasing, sight of a dustjacket that has carefully been cut up and pasted over the endpapers; I have a few of those; they can look nice, but the element of vandalism is unappealing.) I'd be glad to hear from anyone who knows more about the Bles experiment, or anything similar.

So is the book itself any good? Well, to begin with, I feared the worst. The victim is one of those loathsome old misers who were so often properly dispatched in Golden Age fiction. There's talk of voodoo, Tula knives, the Aztecs, a curse, and vengeful foreigners, and there's a manservant who speaks in excruciating dialect. But although it's a melodramatic story, it's much better than many of its kind. King wrote with pace and some verve, and although the cast of suspects is small, he keeps one guessing pretty well. And pleasingly, the manservant abandons the dialect after being unmasked as a career criminal. (Obligingly, he continues to serve meals to the other suspects after the death of his unmourned master; talk about the lower orders knowing their place.!) Tolstoy it ain't, but it's good fun.

 

Locked Room Mysteries

Detective fiction began with a "locked room" murder mystery. Most people agree, I think, that Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" marked the start of the genre as we know it, though some make claims for earlier stories - and even these include a story by the estimable Sheridan Le Fanu that has a "locked room" element. Ever since, detective fans have enjoyed locked room and impossible crime mysteries. Yes, they are often outlandish and sometimes highly artificial, but when done well, they supply very good entertainment. Look at the success on recent years of TV series like Jonathan Creek which often play games that the likes of John Dickson Carr, supreme master of the locked room mystery, would have relished.

All this is by way of preamble to news that I've just received my contributor copy of The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries, edited by the legendary Otto Penzler, and sub-titled "The most complete collection of impossible-crime stories ever assembled." There are no fewer than 68 stories here, starting with Poe's story, and suffice to say that I find myself in very illustrious company - fellow contributors incldue Chesterton, Carr, Lord Dunsany, Conan Doye, Wilkie Collins, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Margery Allingham, Cornell Woolrich (writing as William Irish), Dorothy L. Sayers and even P.G. Wodehouse.

Otto Penzler contributes a snappy intro and biographical notes about all the contributors, and divides the book into nine sections. The final section has just one story in it - "Some stories simply can't be categorised", he says - and this is my "Waiting for Godstow". Otto has been quoted recently saying nice things about it; very gratifying. I wrote the story originally for another impossible crime anthology, edited by Mike Ashley, more than a decade ago, and reader reaction to it has delighted me over the years. It's a tricky story, an example of the game-playing that, for me, works more effectively in the short form than in a novel. Another example is "Acknowledgments", which I mentioned the other day; the new ebook also includes my very first published short story, another game-playing piece called "Are You Sitting Comfortably?"

I've written three short stories in all that fall into the "impossible crime" sub-genre, and although I've no plans to write a locked room novel, it's likely that I'll write another short story of this type before long. Meanwhile, if you're a locked room fan, I can strongly recommend a wonderful and definitive book on the topic, Locked Room Murders by Robert Adey. Bob is a great expert, and when I had the pleasure of visiting his home the summer before last, I found his massive collection of rare books absolutely stunning. His magnum opus is hard to find either the first or second edition, but if you manage to track down a copy, I'm sure you'll love it as much as I do. Great fun, just like locked room stories themselves.

Jonathan Creek - The Letters of Septimus Noone - BBC One TV review

Jonathan Creek returned tonight, and joy of joys, The Letters of Septimus Noone is not a one-off, but the first episode of a short series. Jonathan Creek's investigations, devised by the witty and clever David Renwick, revived interest in the locked room/impossible crime story in the nineties, a remarkable as well as welcome feat, at a time when the form seemed long past its sell-by date. It's a marvellous example of how a gifted writer can breathe fresh life into a traditional and apparently old-fashioned form, making it seem topical and great fun all over again.

Renwick has - wisely, I think - decided that he simply could not ignore the passage of time since Jonathan Creek first appeared on our screens. So Alan Davies, as Creek, still has a female "Dr Watson", but this time he's married to her: and the dynamic is very different to the tantalising relationship he had with Caroline Quentin in the early shows. Polly Creek is the most glamorous of Watsons, played by Sarah Alexander. The job as magician's assistant, the duffel coat and the windmill-house have gone too.

Renwick's sharp humour, and love of classic detective fiction, were very much in evidence. So we had a musical based on Gaston Leroux's once-celebrated locked room mystery, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (an excellent choice bearing in mind that Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera was immortalised by Andrew Lloyd Webber) and there were several neat word games, as well as sly nods to the success of Sherlock, a show written with the same appealing blend of playfulness and intelligence.

It's very, very difficult to write a locked room mystery that translates well to television, a point which I think some of those who have criticised recent one-off Creek stories tend to overlook. Here, Renwick offered a handful of small puzzles, rather than an over-arching mystery. This meant the story felt a little fragmentary, but it didn't matter too much. Jonathan Creek remains a show that has great appeal to all fans of classic detective fiction..

(By the way, there have been some excellent comments on this post but you may wish to avoid them until you have seen the show as they include observations on the plot.)

Jonathan Creek: The Clue of the Savant's Thumb: BBC TV review

Jonathan Creek returned tonight on BBC 1 with The Clue of the Savant's Thumb, a brand new episode written by David Renwick and starring Alan Davies as Creek and Sheridan Smith (whose acting career has been hitting the heights since we last saw her in this series) as his "Watson", Joey Ross. The supporting cast included Joanna Lumley, Nigel Planer and Rik Mayall, which indicates the focus of the show on "feelgood" television. And there's nothing wrong with the feelgood factor, especially after the winter we've had.

This story presented us with two mysteries. Fifty years ago, in a strict convent school, a young girl died in bizarre circumstances. Her death has haunted her old schoolfriend, played by Lumley, ever since. Now, Lumley is married to a terminally ill man (Nigel Planer) and is having an affair with her husband's GP. Her husband's blood-stained body is found by their adopted daughter. Lumley takes a photograph of the apparent crime scene. But by the time the emergency services arrive, the body has disappeared...

Meanwhile, Jonathan Creek has married and moved into the glitzy world of marketing along with his glamorous and wealthy wife. Joey tracks him down and persuades him to take an interest in the case, which is being investigated by Mayall, a brilliant detective in his own right, who is now confined to a wheelchair. There are plenty of clues, and even more red herrings, before first the old mystery is solved and then the puzzle of the disappearing corpse is explained, before a slightly cartoonish finale borrowed from a political conspiracy thriller.

David Renwick is a witty and clever writer, and his enthusiasm for the work of John Dickson Carr - which I share - is the key to what is most enjoyable about the Jonathan Creek storylines. Of course, you have to suspend your disbelief, but with Jonathan Creek, as with the Dickson Carr stories, the breezy writing means this is no hardship.

One of the great things about the success of Jonathan Creek is that it has shown that the classic elements of the traditional detective mystery can be adapted with great success for modern readers and audiences, if the writer is good enough, and shows respect for the form, rather than merely attempting pastiche (though I'd add that there have been a number of parodies and pastiches of Golden Age detective stories that I've really enjoyed.) This latest episode was entertaining, although I didn't think it was quite as effective as the last, The Judas Tree, but it may be that others will take a different view..

Impossible crime stories have long appealed to me, and I've written several over the years; short stories rather than novels, though. Just as Jonathan Creek tends to work better in a one hour episode than a ninety minute episode like this one, so do locked room tricks tend to be easier to pull off in short stories rather than novels. One of those stories, suitably adapted, forms the basis of my Victorian murder mystery event, "Who Killed George Hargrave?" This was performed a couple of weeks back at Holywell, in North Wales, by an excellent cast of library volunteers.

What interested me about this event (and another, at Knutsford a fortnight earlier) was that it was a sell-out, gaining much larger audiences than I find conventional talks or writers' panels tend to attract. In fact, I gave a talk about the locked room story as part of the event, and during the questions, again I was struck by the extent of people's enthusiasm for this type of story. As reaction to my Friday Forgotten Books posts shows, there is still a huge amount of interest in classic detective fiction - in fact, I'm certain there's more interest in it today than there was a few years ago. Jonathan Creek shows that this is not simply a matter of nostalgia. We still love a mystery, and there's plenty of room for the elaborate puzzle today, alongside all those relentlessly dark stories about autopsies and serial killers.

Sherlock: The Blind Banker - review

The Blind Banker, second episode in Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson, was my first encounter with the 21st century version of Conan Doyle’s classic detective duo. I missed A Study in Pink last week, but reviews were very positive, and I can see why.

The idea of updating the characters but retaining key elements from the originals was the brainchild of Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss, two very good TV writers. Purists might wince at the idea, but it seems to me that, crucially, the series respects the aspects of Conan Doyle’s stories that made them so memorable. The Blind Banker, certainly, was much more than capable pastiche. The story was written and acted with a great deal of flair.

The story kicks off with the appearance of a mysterious cipher at a City bank. Shortly afterwards, one of the senior bankers is found dead. A journalist dies in similar circumstances. Both men, it turns out, had recently travelled to China. What is the connection, and how can the cipher be decoded?

The story contained various elements of Golden Age detective fictions – locked rooms, ciphers, mysterious foreigners – and the script was full of witty asides. The two leading men are splendidly cast and I love the idea of Una Stubbs as Mrs Hudson. Sherlock is different from Jonathan Creek, but not totally different. Again, we have the updating of traditional crime fiction, done with wit and ingenuity. I really enjoyed this episode. Recommended.

Death Wore White

Is the ‘impossible crime’ story making a comeback? Fracture, a brilliant film of the recent past, was a masterly example of the genre. The Grinning Man was a splendid new episode of Jonathan Creek aired at New Year, and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo describes part of the plot as a ‘locked room mystery’, though ‘closed circle mystery’ would be more accurate. And now we have Death Wore White by Jim Kelly, introducing a new detective duo, Shaw and Valentine. The publishers describe it as ‘the most ingenious thriller in years’ and the tag-line speaks volumes: ‘Nine people trapped in a blizzard. One brutal murder. Eight suspects who couldn’t have done it.’

And there’s more: ‘The crime scene is melting. The murderer has vanished. The body count is on the rise.’ Who could resist such a set-up? Certainly not me. Even the title of the book has a pleasingly traditional feel. And to cap it all, there’s a map of the crime scene!

I haven’t read Jim Kelly before, and the first thing to say is that he is a very talented writer. There are lots of good lines and neat similes in this book. His literary style appeals to me a lot. And he is very good at evoking place – the area around King’s Lynn.

The challenge he has set himself is to weld a classic whodunit scenario with a highly contemporary police investigation and an important sub-plot. It’s a very bold and ambitious concept, because of course, the ‘impossible crime’ story works most easily when it is far removed from the cold light of forensic science and painstaking police procedure.

I was impressed by the novel, although I felt slightly overwhelmed by the number of characters and the convolutions of the plot. Reading the book in short segments, due to pressure of work, I did find myself losing track at times, which was a pity. A cast list would have been very useful, as well as a further nod to the traditional whodunit. However, in the latter stages of the book the momentum was regained, and the disparate story-lines were pulled together rather cleverly. I shall certainly be reading more Jim Kelly.

The Grinning Man

No question about the highlight, for me, of the holiday season television schedules. It was last night’s episode of Jonathan Creek, a two-hour humdinger called The Grinning Man. It’s the first new Creek show for five years, but David Renwick, the brilliant writer who created Creek, has lost none of his flair for combining sharp wit with baffling murder mysteries. I’ve watched every Creek case, and I felt this was the best ever.

Alan Davies, of course, reprised the title role, but there was no sign of either Caroline Quentin or Julia Sawalha, his previous co-stars. No matter – he was soon involved in a complex puzzle involving the Nightmare Room in a spooky old mansion. Back in 1938, when the house was owned by one Jacques Futrelle, a Harvard professor spent the night in the Nightmare Room, which was duly padlocked and rendered totally inaccessible – but he disappeared, never to be seen again. It’s a classic set-up, which John Dickson Carr would have loved. Renwick also nods to one of the early masters of the locked room mystery by using the name of Jacques Futrelle – as fans of classic mysteries will know, the real Futrelle wrote a number of celebrated impossible crime stories featuring a cerebral sleuth known as ‘the Thinking Machine’.

The eponymous Grinning Man is a painting by Bosch, which hangs in the Nightmare Room. But even when the mystery of the fate of the professor (and of others foolhardy enough to overnight there) is solved, there is another apparently impossible puzzle to be unravelled.

For a 21st century television writer to display such mastery of the craft of the classic detective puzzle is in itself deeply impressive. But Renwick’s skill extends far beyond the technical – he knows how to entertain a modern audience and to keep viewers hooked from start to finish. This cunningly contrived story deserves to be recognised as a modern classic.

Merry Christmas!

I’d like to wish all visitors to this blog a merry – no, a criminally merry – Christmas. It’s always been a favourite time of year for me, usually made all the better by the fact that despite the tinsel having appeared in the shops for months in advance, I never quite seem to realise that the big day is approaching until it is almost upon me.

Over the Christmas and New Year break, posts on this blog will be continuing to appear on a daily basis, thanks to the advance scheduling function of Blogger.

And since there’s a lot of debate at this time of year about seasonal mysteries, I should say that there’s little doubt about my own top choice. It’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, a complex and skilfully plotted novel by the one and only Dame Agatha. If by any chance you are a fan of the traditional mystery who has somehow managed to miss out on this one, you will enjoy it. Classic setting, excellent clueing, a touch of the ‘locked room mystery’ and a neat solution combine to make it one of the best Golden Age whodunits.