crime
Pamela Jahn
Having played Sherlock Holmes’s politically involved older brother Mycroft in the BBC’s hit crime series Sherlock, Mark Gatiss may not be an obvious candidate to now follow in the footsteps of the famous detective. But with his new murder mystery series Bookish, set in London in the aftermath of World War Two, the creator, writer and star of the six-part show has finally become a sleuth himself.“The period is very unusual,” he says over Zoom from Rimini, where the historic crime drama had its world premiere at the inaugural edition of the Italian Global Series Festival. “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following the success of its screen version of Michael Connelly’s veteran detective Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver, Prime Video aims to make lightning strike twice by televising Connelly’s series of Renée Ballard books. Like Bosch, Ballard works for the LAPD, but has been demoted from the Robbery-Homicide division after reporting a sexual assault by her supervisor, Robert Olivas.It’s a man’s world in the LAPD, people. She now heads a cold case unit, staffed by a motley group of part-timers and civilians, and one of the first cases it revisits is the unsolved murder of the sister of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a sometime writer of Poirot, Sherlock and Christmas ghost stories, Mark Gatiss is no stranger to enigmatic crimes and bizarre occurrences set in carefully-recreated versions of the past. He revisits similar themes in Bookish, his new series about a second-hand bookseller in post-World War Two London who is evidently concealing some hidden depths.The show is a bonanza for set designers and location-hunters. Gabriel Book, Gatiss’s lead character, is the proprietor of Book’s (wherein the apostrophe is a cue for some genteel grammarian jokes), and his shop is situated in a quaint and wearily Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of The Gold in 2023 was received rapturously, though apparently it only told one half of the story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport. Now screenwriter Neil Forsyth has returned to the scene of the crime to reveal what happened – or might have happened, since there’s a fair bit of artistic licence at play here – to the missing portion of the £26 million quid’s worth of stolen gold.Though this time around we no longer have the likes of Sean Harris and Dominic Cooper in the cast, there are still plenty of sharply-drawn characters to savour. There is, for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix’s new detective-noir is a somewhat cosmopolitan beast. It’s written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, derived from a novel, Mercy, by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, and set in Edinburgh (as well as other flavourful Scottish locations). There are plenty of Scots in the cast too, although it’s the very English Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey, The Crown etc) who takes the lead role of DCI Carl Morck.But Morck not only doesn’t have a very English name, but is far from your ideal English gentleman with a Lady Mary on his arm. The series opens with a brutal incident in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The art of the conman is persuading their victim to fool themselves, which is the premise that lies at the core of this Australian drama series. Adapted by screenwriter Anya Beyersdorf from the eponymous memoir by Stephanie Wood, Fake is the story of a relationship between Joe Burt (David Wenham), apparently a divorced business entrepreneur and farmer forever juggling a variety of property schemes and financial deals, and 50-ish food journalist Birdie Bell (Asher Keddie), who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time not writing very much for her newspaper.They first meet via a dating Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A year ago Guy Ritchie brought us the Netflix series The Gentlemen, and now here he is on Paramount+ with his latest romp through the verdant pastures of criminal low-lifery. It seems that top thespians are queueing up to bag a slice of Ritchie-world, and an impressive cast includes Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hardy and Helen Mirren.To add a bit of extra lustre, screenwriting duties have been handled by Ronan Top Boy Bennett, with a bit of help from Jez Butterworth in episode one.Ritchie, a bit of a posh boy who likes slumming it, remains fascinated by the underworld/highlife divide. Thus we have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The power struggle between New York crime bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello is one of the foundational stories of the American Mafia, though perhaps asking Robert De Niro to play both of them was a trifle over-optimistic. With his track record of crime-dynasty epics including The Godfather Part II, Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas and Casino, De Niro is able to inhabit the gangster milieu merely by slipping on a favourite overcoat and homburg hat, but watching him play both Genovese and Costello here creates a sort of visual dyslexia.While his Costello feels like a fully-rounded Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They stopped making the BBC’s original Bergerac in 1991, so you can hardly complain that this reboot is premature. John Nettles became closely identified with the titular detective Jim Bergerac before he decamped to Midsomer, murder capital of the world, and has declared himself impressed with Damien Molony’s performance as the born-again sleuth (pictured below, Molony picks up the baton from Nettles).So, we’re back among the picturesque architecture, broad sandy beaches and French-sounding place names of Jersey, where we find Chief Inspector Bergerac in a troubled frame of mind.His wife Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a dingy room with dilapidated furniture on a dismal Sunday evening, two detectives prepare for an interview. The old hand walks out, with just a little too much flattery hanging in the air, leaving the interrogation in the hands of the up-and-coming thruster, a young woman investigating the disappearance of a young woman. Alone, with just a camera for company (we get the video feed also from hidden cameras too) she awaits the suspect for the showdown.A hit at Edinburgh and now expanded to a tense 70 minutes three-hander, Jamie Armitage’s first play as writer as well as director is a wordy Read more ...
John Carvill
The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run from their bosses, “an unsung masterpiece of American cinema”. For once, that doesn’t feel like hyperbole.The film opens with Nicky (Cassavetes) holed up in a flophouse hotel, itching with paranoia and convinced his mob bosses have a hit out on him. He calls his fellow gangster and lifelong best friend Mikey (Falk), but then refuses to open the hotel room door and let him in. It’s a metaphor for the whole story, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though Death in Paradise is an Anglo-French production filmed in Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, the Frenchness seems to have mysteriously leaked away. Where Sara Martins was a long-standing regular as DS Camille Bordey, and other French actors have rotated through the cast, the only glimmer of Gallicness remaining in this seasonal special was the vestigial presence of Elizabeth Bourgine as Catherine Bordey (Camille’s mum, pictured below with Danny John-Jules as Dwayne Myers). Otherwise we might have been on Jamaica or Barbados or St Lucia, such was the general lack of any trace of the Read more ...