Small-Screen Mysteries

Parker Stevenson(as Frank Hardy) and
Shaun Cassidy (as Joe Hardy) from
the Hardy Boy Mysteries of the 1970s.

Rewatching some of the early episodes of the PBS television series of Agatha Christie’s mysteries featuring Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, so aptly portrayed by the incomparable David Suchet, set me thinking about other small-screen adaptations that I have enjoyed seeing as thoroughly as I liked reading the original books and short stories.

Like many of my generation—and before and after—my love of mystery novels began during my preteen years in the 1950s, when I discovered the Hardy Boys. The books were “factory” novels, like the Nancy Drew books, written by a number of ghostwriters under the collective pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. Teenage detectives Frank and Joe Hardy enjoyed a run on television in the late 1970s, played by teen heartthrobs Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson.

The decade of the 1970s also saw a series of television programs based on the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers, a contemporary of Agatha Christie. The tongue-in-cheek aristocratic amateur detective of the title was played by Ian Carmichael, my favorite among the Lord Peter portrayers.

And, of course, the next decade bore witness to the start of a long series of television adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, with Jeremy Brett as the eccentric detective. Brett became the quintessential Holmes, just as Suchet has become the definitive Poirot, both actors filming the majority of their respective canons. At least for their—and my—generation.

Great mysteries will always find new adaptations for new generations of enthusiasts. And then there are the mystery novels being written now that will find their way to the small screen to the delight of new audiences of mystery addicts. I could certainly suggest a few characters that I’d like to see. One would be Maisie Dobbs, the World War I nurse turned 1920s private detective, from the well-crafted series by Jacqueline Winspear.

Or what about the Roman Empire era “finder” Marcus Didius Falco, who stars in the wonderfully well-researched historical mysteries by Lindsey Davis? And then there’s Diane Mott Davidson’s caterer-cum-snoop Goldie Schulz and Greg Herren’s gay New Orleans-based New Age detective Scotty Bradley. Well, the list could go on and on. I am addicted to mysteries after all. Who are your favs?

Roman Empire Mysteries Delight

Marcus Didius Falco—If you don’t know this first-century detective from a superb series of mystery novels set during the early years of the Roman Empire, then you have missed many hours of delightful reading. Lindsey Davis (born 1949) is the English historical novelist who launched Falco onto the literary scene in 1989 with The Silver Pigs, set during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian (lived 9-79 CE; ruled 69-79 CE).

In The Silver Pigs Falco stumbles upon a conspiracy that involves trading silver ingots, and the investigation takes him to Britain. There he meets a lady above his station, the daughter of the senator who hired him, named Helena Justina. Against all odds, Falco not only solves the case but also falls in love with the noble lady—and she with him. However, they cannot wed until Falco is raised to the upper middle-class rank of equestrian. And that will take some doing. Thus the stage is set for an unfolding romance (and eventual marriage) that provides a continuing narrative through a long and thoroughly engaging series of novels.

Lindsey Davis, by taking this approach, created both a romantic backstory with three-dimensional characters whom readers become well acquainted with over a number of years and a problem. What happens to your main character (and those around him) as he ages? Moreover, what do you do when he retires? Davis deftly handles the issues of aging as Falco grows in his profession and the relationship between Falco and Helena Justina matures into a longterm marriage, complete with the introduction of children into the family dynamic.

I fretted that Davis might decide to retire with her detective, but in fact she took a more interesting and adventurous turn by focusing on Falco and Helena Justina’s adopted daughter, Flavia Albia. This daughter picks up where her father, now comfortably living in retirement, left off, becoming herself an “informer,” the role of first-century private detective. The first of the Flavia Albia novels is The Ides of April, published in 2013. Set in the spring of 89 CE, Flavia Albia even moves into Falco’s old, seedy apartment in Fountain Court, a rundown tenement that Falco now owns. As the story opens, she is a 28-year-old widow.

Davis adeptly negotiates the potential pitfalls of creating a believable female detective working subtly within the constraints of male-dominated Roman society. I recently finished reading Deadly Election, published this year, 2015, and could not be better satisfied with the continuation of this fascinating series through Falco’s daughter. I recommend this series, particularly to readers who love a good mystery and are interested in Roman history, for Davis’s intricately plotted stories also provide a convincing window into everyday life in Ancient Rome.

Gore Vidal's Box Set

Vidal at 23, photographed by

Carl Van Vechten in 1948

When Gore Vidal died in July at age 86, I belatedly discovered that he had written three mystery novels in the early 1950s, under the penname Edgar Box. An inveterate mystery reader, I take particular delight in discovering mystery novels written by persons best known for other pursuits. (A favorite example is striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, who penned two mysteries in the early 1940s, the first titled, appropriately, The G-String Murders.)

Gore Vidal, aka Edgar Box, cranked out three mysteries in quick succession: Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death Before Bedtime (1953), and Death Likes It Hot (1954). They were reissued in a single volume, titled Three By Box, in 1978. All three feature a reporter-cum-p.r. man, Peter Sargeant, as the amateur detective. Sargeant is a suave, if sometimes bumbling, sexual swordsman, almost a comic James Bond without the trappings of spydom. (Fleming’s 007, however, did not debut until Casino Royale in 1953.)

Despite its heterosexual hero, the first of Vidal/Box’s trio is an unabashedly gay—in both old and new senses of that word—romp along the lines of Oscar Wilde meets Raymond Chandler. The novel is a delicious foreshadowing of later flamboyant works, such as the outrageous Myra Breckinridge (1968), the movie version of which provided a final screen vehicle for the inimitable but often imitated Mae West, and the surreal and irreverent Live From Golgotha (1992).

Death in the Fifth Position is a surprising novel for the early Fifties for its frank, often gay, sexuality. But the treatment is not so surprising for Vidal, who had published The City and the Pillar in 1948. That novel offered a coming-of-age story about a young man coming to terms, healthily, with his homosexuality. Thus it flouted convention, which at the time regarded gay as synonymous with immoral, and so caused a scandal. The City and the Pillar was only Vidal’s third novel, and one can imagine an editor, on receiving the manuscript of Death in the Fifth Position a couple of years later, counseling the author to adopt a pseudonym for the latter book’s publication. I don’t know whether that happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Of course, it could equally be the case of a “serious” writer not wanting to be associated with something as déclassé as a mystery novel.

By contrast, the second of the trio, Death Before Bedtime, is sadly pedestrian. It is a serviceable mystery but lacks punch and pizzazz. The third, Death Likes It Hot, regains some sparkle, rather like a second wind along about midnight after an evening of hard partying. But it doesn’t measure up to the first mystery either, and I’m inclined to think that Vidal must have felt as though, after this third effort, he had gotten mystery writing out of his system. Box was laid to rest.

Still, the three novels are entertaining and, as mysteries go, intriguing. They are worth taking up, though no one could be faulted for stopping after the first one.

A Dame at a Dig

Come, Tell Me How You Live is so little known among the works of Agatha Christie that it sometimes is omitted from her bibliography. The book, subtitled “An Archaelogical Memoir,” was written under her married name, Agatha Christie Mallowan, and published in 1946.

Agatha (nee Miller) Christie married Max Mallowan in 1930, having divorced her first husband, Archibald Christie, in 1928 after fourteen years of marriage. Mallowan was an established archeologist; however, his wife’s fame—though she would not be Dame Agatha until 1971, after her husband had been knighted in 1968—had already eclipsed his. By the time of their marriage, Christie had already published several novels, her first in 1920 being The Mysterious Affair at Styles. This mystery novel featured the first appearance of Hercule Poirot, her longest running detective. Styles, incidentally, was the name of the Christies’ house in Sunningdale, Berkshire.

Eventually, Agatha Christie would become the best-selling novelist of all time, her books selling approximately four billion copies in more than one hundred languages. Her play, The Mousetrap, famously, has been in constant production since its premier in 1952. She has been outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.

Come, Tell Me How You Live makes a delightful departure—as it must have been for Christie herself. It is a rambling, day-to-day memoir that recounts several seasons of archeological digs in the Middle East during the 1930s, prior to the Second World War. Reading it gives one some insight not only into the goings on of a dig in that period but into the character of Christie that in various ways becomes manifest in the array of personalities in her novels. This is a very human, interesting and interested individual, who pays attention to both the vast and the minute. And she’s funny! This memoir is truly entertaining to the point of chuckling aloud from time to time. So many memoirs take themselves far too seriously, and this one doesn’t fall into that trap.

Christie’s prewar Middle East digs provided fodder for several of her popular mysteries, including Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). When the war began, the digs ended and Christie set aside the memoir. In 1944 she took it up again, saying,

But now, after four years of war, I have found my thoughts turning more and more to those days spent in Syria, and at last I have felt impelled to get out my notes and rough diaries and complete what I had begun and laid aside. For it seems to me that it is good to remember that there were such days and such places, and that at this very minute my little hill of marigolds is in their bloom, and old men with white beards trudging behind their donkeys may not even know there is a war.

Readers today are the richer for Christie having taken up the memoir she laid aside before the war. And we can see, through her keen eyes, into a world that has, unfortunately, been largely lost forever.

Still Sherlock

Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian juxtaposes a modern-day mystery to be solved by an earnest young Sherlockian, Harold White, who has just been inducted into the premier Sherlockian society, the Baker Street Irregulars, and a period mystery in which the sleuth is none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, ably assisted by Bram Stoker, who found fame with Dracula. Holmes himself does not appear in The Sherlockian, but the book is a testament to our enduring, collective romance with the great detective. The existence of Sherlockian societies is a similar testament. Indeed, I briefly belonged to such a group many years ago when I lived in Wisconsin. We met in a cozy tavern appropriately called Sherlock’s Home.

Our long-term fascination with Conan Doyles’ creation puzzled even the author himself, who tried to kill Holmes off at the Reichenbach Falls only to feel compelled to bring him back to life for a further series of adventures after what came to be known as the Great Hiatus. Certainly more than the stories must be credited for such longevity, for there is something utterly captivating in the brilliant, maddeningly eccentric personality of Sherlock Holmes.

Another recent addition to the genre is a new British television series, Sherlock (shown on PBS), in which the dashing, improbably named actor Benedict Cumberbatch portrays a Holmes for the 21st century. Cumberbatch’s detective captures all of the nuanced neuroticism so ably conveyed from 1984 to 1994 by Jeremy Brett. For many, Brett was the definitive Holmes. His interpretation was the most compelling of the second half of the 20th century, and he might have filmed the entire Holmes canon had he lived long enough. In the new Sherlock, Martin Freeman is quite believable as a serious, conflicted Dr. Watson.

Bringing Holmes into a contemporary era is a neat twist but nothing new. Another well-remembered Holmes and Watson duo, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, played not only the period mysteries but in a few set against the backdrop of World War II.

To be sure, Cumberbatch and Freeman are a more interesting pairing than the latest Hollywood big-budget foray into the canon, starring Robert Downey, Jr., and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson respectively. Their 2009 Sherlock Holmes seems more focused on special effects than telling a good story. Nonetheless, a sequel is said to be in the making.

There will be more of the Cumberbatch Holmes stories, too, thankfully. And doubtless someone at this moment is crafting yet another book somehow related to Holmes, this icon of the detection genre. With all of this enduring interest, we should be assured of many fine tales yet to come.

(The Sherlock Holmes illustration is by artist Sidney Paget, drawn in 1904.)