TV detectives - new series

The new year has seen a flurry of new detective series, including the return of a number of old favourites. These include Endeavour, which is written by the excellent Russell Lewis. At the end of the last series, I did wonder how the cliffhanger situation would be resolved. The short answer is that it wasn't addressed very fully at all: Morse spent a bit of time in prison before being freed once the truth was revealed, and then found himself lured back into police work. Not totally satisfactory, but I must say that in other respects the first two stories in the new series have been well-plotted. The error was that end-of-series cliffhanger, which was simply over the top.

Endeavour is a two-hour show in the finest Inspector Morse tradition. Shetland, which returned on Friday, is split into a sequence of two-part one-hour episodes. The new story was, I felt, the strongest so far of those not based on the original novels by Ann Cleeves. A great location can do wonders for a TV show,but it's not everything - above all, you need a good story, and this tale of a young man who meets a grisly fate after travelling to Shetland by sea got the series off to an excellent start.

I'd not seen the first series of The Young Montalbano, but I caught the first episode of the new series. The setting in Sicily is again very attractive, and a lot sunnier than Shetland, while the story was pleasingly convoluted. However, I felt that the tone of the episode was rather uneven, a mix of jokey and serious that jarred a little. There's not much doubt about the tone of Death in Paradise, which has returned with more stories which combine Golden Age style plot devices with an exotic tropical setting. It's very light, undemanding entertainment.

I've stayed with Dickensian, which is a sort of soap opera bringing together lots of characters from Dickens, and held together by an ongoing murder investigation (that of Jacob Marley) conducted by Inspector Bucket. The cast is superb, but the story (20 episodes of 30 minutes each) is starting to drag, while the jaunty background music is an example of too much of a good thing. With this one, I think less would have been more. But what a fine actor Anton Lesser is. He plays Endeavour Morse's prissy boss and, in Dickensian, Fagin, with equal conviction.

And then, away from cop dramas, there's War and Peace. I've never read Leo Tolstoy, and I don't watch many historical dramas, but I do admire Andrew Davies' storytelling skills, and I must say that I am really enjoying this series. Some people tell me that it's dumbed-down, but if that's true, it's dumbed-down very well indeed.

Quirke - BBC One - TV review

Quirke, which began with the first of three episodes tonight, has an impeccable pedigree. The original books about the character, an Irish forensic pathologist working in the Fifties, are written by Man Booker prize winner John Banville (using the name Benjamin Black.) The screenplay came from Andrew Davies, one of the most notable writers of television scripts of the past forty years. And the cast, led by Gabriel Byrne as Quirke, was very strong, and included Michael Gambon.

Even so, on a wet Bank Holiday Sunday, Quirke wasn't exactly feelgood viewing. In fact, it made noirish old Hinterland (the fourth and last episode of which was excellent, by the way) look like sun-soaked Death in Paradise. The depressing mood didn't just come from the story, a grim affair about child trafficking. It was reinforced by the background music and, most of all, by the relentlessly dark lighting. All very gloomy.

But was it good television? Well, the story was based on Christine Falls, the first Black book, and one I enjoyed reading. I'm not sure how easy it would have been to follow for anyone who hadn't read the book. The pace seemed rather uneven, with quite a lot of action near the end, when the scene shifted from Ireland to Boston in the US, after some rather sluggish and borderline dull periods. The quality of those involved in producing this show guaranteed that I paid attention, but I think I'll reserve judgment on its success for another week.

There's been a lot of debate about Banville's attitude to crime fiction. His comments have been interpreted as being rather disrespectful towards genre fiction, although you can argue that he's right to be sceptical about the very idea of genre. There was a famous debate which I witnessed at Harrogate a few years ago where he crossed swords with Reginald Hill, and didn't win too many friends in the audience. Reg wasn't impressed, either, I think it's fair to say. But I was lucky enough to be commissioned to interview Banville for Mystery Scene, a few years ago, and in the course of two long telephone conversations, I found him engaging (after a rather guarded start) and not at all dismissive of crime stories. Yes, his tastes run to Simenon and the Americans rather than Christie and Sayers (and Hill, I suppose) but this is simply a matter of personal preference. The fact is, he's a gifted writer, and crime fiction can only gain if the world's finest novelists try their hand at it. My interview with him, by the way, is to be found on my website, in the articles section here. Lots of other stuff there, incidentally!

Sleep With Me review

Sleep With Me was an intriguing choice for ITV 1’s New Year’s Eve drama production. Billed as an erotic thriller, it had a very good pedigree – adapted by the legendary Andrew Davies from a novel by Joanna Briscoe – and a good cast, headed by the reliable Adrian Lester. And it was the type of psychological suspense story that writers such as Nicci French do so well.

The basic premise is that Richard, a journalist and would-be novelist, and Lelia have a seemingly perfect relationship, but their lives are invaded by an apparently mousy (yet at the same time smouldering and intense!) French woman, Sylvie, who has literary ambitions of her own. She seduces Richard, rather improbably I thought, but her real target turns out to be Lelia. And then it emerges that she and Lelia have a shared past, which includes a tragic secret.

I found Sleep With Me to be watchable, and I didn’t regret following it to the end, even though the final plot developments didn’t seem especially credible or satisfying. A harsher view might be that it was neither erotic nor thrilling. The real problem, I think, was that the motivation of Sylvie was ambiguous, and unsatisfactorily conveyed. Maybe the ambiguity was intentional, but maybe it resulted from an uncertainty about characterisation. This impression of uncertainty meant that Sleep with Me was an okay drama, rather than attaining the levels of excellence so often associated with Andrew Davies.

So that’s my reading and viewing for 2009 done. Much more is to come in 2010 – in the meantime, my very best wishes go to all readers and writers of crime fiction for the year ahead, and especially to those who are kind enough to spare some of their time to take a look at this blog.