Back to the Murder Rooms (2)

My daughter Ellen, known to the Twitterverse as @audreydeuxpink, had a small speaking part in my Murder Rooms episode and has been blogging about her experience of the shoot. Check out the middle picture in the post below - that's her in the doorway of the travelling-show caravan, between Warwick Davies and Charles Edwards.

You can read the first instalment here.

Back to the Murder Rooms

Is it Box Set or Boxed Set? One's wrong but sounds right, the other's right but... oh, never mind.

The main thing is that the series of TV-feature length Murder Rooms mysteries produced by BBC Films is finally getting a widescreen DVD release in the UK. Created by David Pirie out of a two-hour special that he'd made a couple of years before, the series features the young Arthur Conan Doyle (Charles Edwards) and his real-life mentor Dr Joseph Bell (Ian Richardson) in what amounted to a new and baggage-free take on the Watson-Holmes relationship. The set comes bundled with a 2002 Holmes documentary fronted by Patrick Macnee.

I imagine that the commercial thinking behind the release involves a gamble on the continuing Richie/Downey/Moffatt/Gatiss movie and TV euphoria... the individual shows have been around on DVD for a while but in a form I've always recommended avoiding. They were soft, muddy 'fullscreen' transfers, released when the 4:3 format was already on its last legs. The target market seemed to be technophobes and pensioners; the discs could be had for a fiver in Past Times shops and at one point were even given away with The Daily Express. The episodes were actually gorgeously lit and shot on crisp Super-16. They'd look great in Hi-Def or on Blu-Ray. I know 'cos I was there.


Let's leap lightly over the fact that my Murder Rooms story and one of my (unrelated) novels share a title - I can explain how that happened some other time. But I loved the show, thought it showed the BBC at its best and had a driving concept that would have sustained it for a number of seasons.

I almost didn't get to join the party. The BBC Films machinery was set up to deal with one-offs, not series, and funding was being released in stop-start increments. First the money for one script, then for another... then a green light to go ahead with the first couple of episodes... it was like the constant opening and shutting of a miser's purse, a few coins reluctantly handed over every time. The original aim was, I believe, to film seven stories. I think mine was fifth in line but it got bumped up in the production order because I got my first draft in quickly, and with most of what it needed already in place. The purse slammed shut on four episodes but by then I was in.

It was a class production, handsomely done. The series producer was Alison Jackson, with Jamie Laurenson as development exec/script editor. My director was Simon Langton - Simon effing Smiley's-People Pride-and-Prejudice Langton. I watched and learned. He shot with graceful, understated, old-school brilliance - terms that could equally describe Ian Richardson's approach to an old-school magisterial role. The editor came on set one day to observe, and confided to me that he wanted to see how it was being done because the footage was pretty much falling together.


And it was a success - the notices were good, and so were the viewing figures. We geared up for second season that would kick off with those three unmade stories. I was asked for another, and put in my pitch. Ian Richardson shared his Joseph Bell research with me. David Pirie got a publishing deal.

The BBC pulled the plug. All plans were cancelled.

I was told some time after the event that this was most likely the outcome of a silent turf war between BBC Drama and BBC Films. The word went around that the show had been "too successful for the wrong department". Co-producers The Television Company offered to take it over and finance it themselves, but were turned down. BBC Drama then announced a Hound of the Baskervilles with Australian actor Richard Roxburgh for screening the following year. My recall is that it was a serviceable retread of the familiar material, but nothing special. A disappointing changeling, for many.


The new set won't be out for a couple of weeks yet, so I can't comment on its quality. Ignore the information on the Amazon sleeve pictures, they're for the old versions; in an email this morning, a representative for distributors IMC told me, "I can confirm the new set with the four episodes will be in a 16:9 re-edited format." Prior to this, if you wanted to get hold of widescreen DVDs you'd have to order from Sweden, the US, or Australia.

Personally, I'd like to see them reshown on the BBC's HD channel. Not least because I might get a couple of bob out of it. But mainly for, you know, cultural reasons.

UPDATE: The 'Ultimate Collection' DVD set is unwatchable. Avoid.

The Suicide Hour

The dust is finally settling after internal restructuring at Random House - I expect you can read about that somewhere else - so with thanks to those who've gone out of their way to ask, I can tell you that The Suicide Hour is back on track.

I received a copy of the edited manuscript on Christmas Eve and worked on it over the holidays. It's a sympathetic edit, and some of the points raised have driven me to make significant improvements to the finished book. A reminder to me of how a good publisher raises an author's game. Some of my earliest paperback originals were just marked-up and printed without any real editorial or proofing stage, and the results could be pretty shabby. These past few weeks have made me cast my mind back to my first proper engagement with an experienced editor - neither critic nor reader, but another kind of creature altogether. One whose forte was finding my weak spots, the points where I'd maybe had my doubts but persuaded myself to ignore them, and exposing stuff I'd unconsciously thought I could get away with.

The Suicide Hour is set in 1912. It isn't a direct sequel to The Kingdom of Bones but a new story featuring that novel's Sebastian Becker, ex-British Detective, one-time Pinkerton man, now working as Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy.

It's a murder mystery, with locations ranging from Southwark to the Americas. Becker is sent to the West Country to establish the mental state of Sir Owain Lancaster, a discredited industrialist under the control of a personal physician. Following the deaths of two children on Lancaster's land, Becker unravels the secrets of a disastrous expedition that destroyed the man's reputation and possibly his sanity.

Life is strange. In the UK I'm a forgotten '90s horror writer (no complaints; it was a hell of a run) while in the US I'm now a literary author.

I'll post dates and cover scans when I get them.

After Gutenberg...

I was thinking about writing a blog post on my trickiest-ever script assignment, and was scrolling through the news section of my old website trying to locate a particular item when I came across this review of The Painted Bride from The Washington Times.

The Painted Bride (Subterranean Press, $40, 181 pages) is veteran thriller-writer Stephen Gallagher's tense melodrama spun from the mysterious disappearance of auto dealer Frank Tanner's wife Carol, the stalled police investigation into Frank's possible guilt - and the complications ensuing from the obsessive actions of Carol's burnt-out, former drug-taking younger sister Molly, who knows Frank did away with his wife, and devotes her dwindling energies to protecting the children now in his care and bringing him to justice.

Mr. Gallagher expertly shifts among several characters' frazzled viewpoints, detailing the progress of Molly's "investigation" and Frank's suspicious evasive actions in crisp, quick scenes, making chilling use of a child's drawing of a woman in a red dress ("the painted bride"), leading toward a series of violent climaxes at a seaside ferry terminal, where crucial secrets are unearthed - and the paradoxical image of the nurturing parent as murdering monster is finally engaged and explained.

There's even a hint of the supernatural in an endangered child's anguished outcry... It's a neat capstone to an accomplished and suitably unpleasant shocker.

The print edition sold out and I've now priced it as the cheapest of my Kindle titles... if you got a device for Christmas and you've already downloaded all the free classics from Project Gutenberg (and why wouldn't you?), then you might want to give it a go.

(In England that's what we call a 'hard sell')

Noir and Back Again

I just heard that two of my favourite publishers will be combining forces to put out a double volume of early Lawrence Block novels sometime early next year. I suppose that Subterranean Press and Hard Case Crime can both fairly be described as 'niche' publishers, but not in any pejorative sense; in an era when general publishing is like a great beast struggling to adapt in a changing landscape, they survive by reflecting editorial taste rather than a marketing department's analysis.

Subterranean's Bill Schafer and Hard Case's Charles Ardai set out to publish the kind of stuff they like. If it's the kind of stuff you like too, then you seek them out. Subterranean's list is primarily SF and Fantasy, built around a core of Joe Lansdale material, while Hard Case specialises in reprints of of high-craft but forgotten noir mixed in with modern writing in the same hardboiled vein.

In each case the books' physical form is an element in the reading experience, though the two have very different approaches. While Subterranean specialises in quality limited runs, Hard Case celebrates vintage era paperback design with artwork from the likes of Robert McGinnis and Glen Orbik, whose painting for Wade Davis' Branded Woman is a particular favourite of mine. Where every other crime novel seems to feature a blurry generic library photo with whatever font the Art Director's chosen from the Photoshop menu, they really stand out.

(I should declare an interest - Subterranean published two of my novels and a story collection. Each was a great experience and the editions all sold out.)

Hard Case books are inexpensive mass-market paperbacks, printed and distributed (until now) by 'mass market romance publisher' Dorchester Publishing. Last month, Dorchester announced that they were getting out of the print business and switching to an E-book model, which many have read as the last optimistic thumbs-up gesture of the about-to-drown.

This should be interesting. I'm crossing my fingers for Hard Case, and optimistic for the survival of the line; just as a freelance has a more precarious existence than an employee but more options for surviving market changes, I'm willing to bet that Hard Case will reconfigure its relationships and prevail. I believe that this collaboration of independents predates Dorchester's announcement, but I reckon it's a sign. A sufficiently good idea has a life that's independent from any one business model.

Here's Chris Moore's cover art from the Subterranean edition of The Spirit Box.



The Subterranean logo and back-of-jacket copy were added later.

UPDATE: Hard Case titles are now to be distributed by Titan.

Of Girls, Swedes, and Dragon Tattoos

If you're interested and you get the chance, try to see Niels Arden Oplev's Swedish-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before you hear much more about the planned David Fincher remake. That first adaptation isn't a perfect movie by any means, but as screen mysteries go it's a very good one. A nicely paced Euro-thriller, crisply photographed, immaculately cast, with actors that are more fascinating than beautiful.

There's the thing... all credit to Fincher for keeping the story in its Swedish setting, but you only have to observe the casting process to get a sense of how the ground shifts when Hollywood reprocesses success. Gym-toned Daniel Craig in place of pie-fed Michael Nyqvist (if Nyqvist ever set foot in a gym, he was probably there to install the carpets), age-defying Robin Wright for ageing-gracefully Lena Endre... I've never seen Rooney Mara (Fincher's choice for Lisbeth Salander) in action, but by her stills she's more pretty than she is odd.

(And by the way, that rich old guy at the beginning of Oplev's movie... that's Sven Bertil-Taube, that is, powerboat hero of 1971's Puppet on a Chain.)

Fincher will most likely do good work but there's definitely something in the original that you're never gonna get. The cinematic equivalent of a fine Continental beer that's 'brewed under license in the UK'. The Swedish film is an indie movie with a commercial aesthetic; Hollywood is going about its version in the only way it knows how, infusing a commercial film with an indie vibe. If you want to taste the original, then now's the time. It won't taste the same later.

I cannot, alas, be quite so positive about Daniel Alfredson's follow-up movie The Girl Who Played with Fire; most of the cast and the production standards are the same, but the material is decidedly inferior. Nice poster art, though.

Mystery and Imagination

In the comments section, Good Dog wrote:

...if you’re stuck for something to do next weekend, the Mystery & Imagination Bookshop at 238 N. Brand Blvd in Glendale is having a signing/celebration for Ray Bradbury’s 89th Birthday on Saturday 22nd, August starting at 1:00pm.

When I last stopped by (some years back) they were still in the tiny premises around the corner on East Broadway so I don’t know what the new location – a few blocks down from where Warner Bros Feature Animation used to be - is like. More space for a start, obviously. Still, the owners are really great people. They were certainly happy when I bought a fine hb copy of Harlan’s Strange Wine for $75.

The heads-up info is much appreciated. As it happens I found the M&I on my very first night in LA, which confirms my belief in some kind of supernatural karma-driven radar - Steve Jones had mentioned it to me in an email but I wasn't specifically looking for it, just doing that thing where you've landed and you're tired and wired at the same time, so you go exploring.

My motel was right by the Americana Mall, which has sprung up complete in the past couple of years and isn't a mall in the usual sense - that function's served by the enormous Galleria Mall that all but adjoins it. The Americana is a bizarre open-air retro small-town square, style of Disney, feel of Futurama, with performing fountains and piped Tom Jones and Dean Martin from speakers hidden in the street furniture. Some Angelenos seem to hate it but for me... well, I clearly have debased tastes because I thouight it was fun, not least because of the way that its enormous Barnes & Noble - about six strides from my motel - stayed open until 11pm.

The new M&I premises are maybe a five-minute wander up the street, with stuff to look at along the way. I can't say what the area was like before, but my impression is that North Brand has been given a boost by the development... maybe not a huge boost but it's created that fringe of cheaper-renting premises where the more interesting businesses are always found. And though, for some reason, town planners never get this, it's always those businesses - the stamp shops, the second-hand bookshops, the woman who makes her own jewellery, the bloke who fixes old watches - that make a place a destination.

The frontage looks like something out of a Bradbury or a Wells story. Once you're inside, the stock goes way back deep into the building and there's an upstairs room for readings and talks. And I got recognised! They asked me to add to their signature wall in the stairwell. I found a space and wrote big. I could barely get my ego out through the door afterwards.

I'm reaching a point now where the town feels like it's opening up to me, and instead of seeking out tourist high-spots I'm beginning to find those quirky little pleasures that don't need to feel like a 'day out'. They just call for an hour here and there.

So this afternoon I'm heading for the long flight of steps in Silverlake, up which Laurel and Hardy made repeated attempts to lug a piano in The Music Box. Not only are the steps still there, but some devotee with time on his hands has scrutinised the footage and established from cracks in the concrete that they're still the originals. Gonna walk 'em all, whistling and saying a silent thanks for hours of childhood pleasure.

And speaking of childhood pleasures, and while we're under the Mystery and Imagination banner... Network DVD have released all the surviving episodes of the '60s series of that name. It set an unmatched standard for television treatment of the supernatural and macabre.

This highly acclaimed anthology series presented a selection of Gothic tales by major 19th century writers. Among the adapted works featured in this collection are Robert Louis Stevenson’s nihilistic The Suicide Club, Sheridan le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula and a commendably faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A distinguished cast includes Ian Holm (Chariots of Fire), Denholm Elliot (Indiana Jones), Patrick Mower (Callan) and Freddie Jones (The Elephant Man), who gives an astonishing performance as the demented barber, Sweeney Todd.

While checking their website for the link I noticed that in September Network will be releasing the Ted Willis-created Sergeant Cork, which I remember as a hugely atmospheric Victorian procedural.

Laurel and Hardy on Bob Monkhouse's Mad Movies, Sergeant Cork, Mystery and Imagination, The Avengers... my God. Is that what ITV Saturday nights used to be like?

UPDATE:

Well, I found it. I parked on Sunset Boulevard, just across from what appeared to be a strip club, a one-story windowless building with no name but a neon skunk for a sign. In the dark and with the sign lit, the skunk's tail would be animated and would flicker back and forth. Pepe le Phew, perhaps? I have no idea.

The stairway begins about a hundred yards or so from Sunset. Where once it ran up a largely open hillside, it's now lttle more than a narrow alley with properties right up against it on either side. First thing I saw was a toilet bowl which had been dumped, along with a pile of ruined old suitcases, just behind where the nursemaid is standing in the picture.

But f*** it. They're the Music Box stairs! A blue civic signpost tells you so, top and bottom, and there's a small plaque let into the lowermost step honouring L&H.

I climbed to the top. The stairs there end at a street of houses that seem to have been built on shifting ground -- the sidewalks are buckling, the driveways are sagging, and perimeter walls are bursting outward under pressure from tree roots.

Of course, when I got up there I had that dorkish feeling. Because there was nothing for it but to check out the view and then turn around and go back down.

At which point I heard it - someone, no more than two or three houses away from the top of the steps - was practising the piano.

Sweet.

I didn't take any shots. But I did find this YouTube video made by someone else.

Edgar Allan Poe

Thanks to Stephen Volk for a reminder that tomorrow marks the bicentenary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. Doesn't matter which way you come at it, whether you see him as a giant of American literature or one of the key figures in a beloved genre, Edgar Allan Poe was The Business.

As with many a true artist, you may envy the man's achievement but you wouldn't want his life. His aim was to be a man of letters, not a master of the macabre. But his was a dark talent, that fed upon the negativity, conflict and disappointments of human existence and made from them something that is simultaneously grim and glorious. Loved ones suffered and died, his ventures mostly failed, and even after death his reputation suffered when an embittered rival managed to gain control of his literary estate; succeeding only, in the end, in contributing to the writer's growing legend.

Poe moved around throughout his life, and museums and memorials have sprung up in his wake like the Children of the Hydra's Teeth. One such stands on Seventh Street in the Spring Garden district of North Philadelphia.

We paid a family visit there during a follow-up trip to research my Philadelphia-set novel Red, Red Robin. I'd done the bulk of the work during a solo visit the previous year, and this time around there was less pressure and a chance for some sightseeing.

Unfurnished and stripped back to the bare materials, the Spring Garden house works in a way that recreated or restored properties often don't; the imaginative path from now to then is shortened, not cluttered, and the bare-bones presentation has an air of truth. Though there's no way of determining exactly which of his works were written during Poe's time as a tenant - one year out of the six or seven he spent in Philadelphia - the layout of the cellar strongly suggests a link to The Black Cat, and the story's publication date supports this.

As our tour party of a dozen or so stood in the cellar, our Ranger guide launched into a from-memory recitation of The Tell-Tale Heart and did it pretty well, too, with captivating gusto.

After the tour, as we wandered freely through the empty rooms on the upper floors, my daughter stepped on a loose board. The board lifted - and there beneath it, in the space between the joists, lay a large, realistic, red rubber heart.

A League of One's Own

In a feature-length episode of Rosemary and Thyme titled The Memory of Water, I wrote a scene in which one of the characters - a fully-qualified anaesthetist, and like everyone else in a 'tec show a potential suspect - explains over coffee in her kitchen a number of suspicious-looking phials that she keeps in her refrigerator.

Katie’s examining the medicine bottle in the light.

KATIE
It’s for the children’s little ailments. I make it up myself. Do you know how homeopathy works?
LAURA
You take a heavily diluted form of something that causes the same symptoms as the disease?
KATIE
Ah. You’ve done a study.
LAURA
Just what I read in the magazines.
KATIE
Of course, when they set the dilution levels, they failed to realise that you’d need to drink eight thousand gallons of the stuff to get one molecule of the additive. So then they came up with the Memory of Water.
LAURA
I was never that good at science.
KATIE
They say it doesn’t matter if the additive’s long vanished. The water (gives the bottle a shake) remembers it. Now, when I make up medicine for the children, I take that one stage further. I just show the additive to the water. And then the water (shake) imagines it.
LAURA
(catching on)
You... don’t believe in any of this, do you?
KATIE
I do believe in the placebo effect. The power of suggestion. And I don’t imagine plain water ever did much harm to anyone.

So, just to recap... a form of medicine that goes one better than homeopathy, where instead of the water having to 'remember' the nonexistent ingredient, you just show it the ingredient and the water 'imagines' it.

Of course, you do something like this, only to find that life outstrips art. A friend who's a science lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire told me, "I was on a course with a biologist and he'd met a bloke who insisted that all you needed to do was write the name of the chemical structure on a piece of paper and put it under the glass. And the water then reads the chemical structure and puts it into the solution. At the time I said you couldn't make this stuff up - seems I was wrong!"

The University made the headlines earlier this year. They'd been offering a BSc Honours degree in Homeopathic Medicine. Not as a rigorous dissection of a pseudoscience in which philosophical conclusions are transmuted into invented principles, but as "a recognisable academic and professionally recognised course for people interested in pursuing a career in homeopathy."

UCLAN is a former Polytechnic that was awarded university status and has been steadily raising its game to merit the name. Many of the staff were horrified to discover that the course was on offer. Now, as a result of "relentless attacks from the anti-homeopathy league", the course has been suspended.

Lost, in Transition

You know where I came across the pilot episode of Lost? The one with the graphic plane crash and everything? It was part of the in-flight entertainment on a Virgin Atlantic service to the US. I mean, it didn't bother me, but, you know...

Apparently eight episodes of the new season were shot before the WGA strike closed down production. The ABC network has indicated that they'll be shown rather than held back, but hasn't yet said when.

Season three ended in a cliffhanger that neatly flipped the show on its head and refreshed the premise, which I thought was no mean feat. Lost is a show that plays a risky game; tantalise and satisfy but while tantalising more, on and on, with continuous invention and a continuing danger of viewer burnout. Just like on a plane ride, viewers can bale out in mid-flight but there's little-to-no chance of picking up new ones.

We baled early, but only because we found its form of transmission (5 breaks, ignoring the designated act endings, with the same sponsor bumpers repeated with throw-the-remote regularity) unwatchable, and so bought the US complete-season box set and watched that at times of our own choosing.

I'm not saying that Lost is the best thing ever, but when it's good, I do like it. It plays like a feuilleton - constant invention and distraction with the sense of a Big Scheme even though the big scheme itself can only have a vague shape in the creators' minds, and is being defined in the writing rather than designed in advance. And with the sense that anybody could fall into a volcano at any time.

(I know what they've said. That everything's been planned all along. Arse. Even the guys who sold 24 didn't know what was going to happen until they were into production.)

For me it can never end successfully with a make-sense-of-it-all revelation, any more than The Prisoner could... it's all about dread and uncertainty and wondering about what's on the other side of the door. As Stephen King points out in Danse Macabre, the moment you actually open the door all that wonder condenses down into whatever's there.

The only good ending I can imagine is s something like, they find a box that's the answer to everything, look inside it and go "Wow." Like the moment in Lost in Translation where Bill Murray whispers something to Scarlett Johannsen that makes everything OK, and we all have ideas about what it might have been that are unique to ourselves, and which are best not shared. Some people won't have that... a quick Lost in Translation Google shows messageboards with people wanting tips on how they can boost the soundtrack enough to hear what Murray says.

In the meantime I'll endure the dull touchy-feely stuff and bad dialogue ("You okay?" "I was looking for you." "Well, you found me.") for the high-concept elements I'm getting a kick out of, and a trust in the astuteness of makers who know to throw in a good kit-off moment or a bit of mud-wrestling when everything flags.

But this business with the box set permanently altered our attitude to series TV. It's been a liberation. Now disc is our first-choice viewing medium, something I could never have imagined.

Monster Munch (2)

Although prolific British thriller writer Edgar Wallace has a 'conceived by' co-credit on the 1933 film, Merian C Cooper later denied that Wallace had any hand in the finished product. "Edgar Wallace didn’t write any of Kong," he said, "not one bloody word."

Wallace died before production began, but in his diary mentioned completing a Kong scenario during his final boat trip to the US.

I recall reading somewhere (but cannot, alas, locate the reference) that there's a tantalising document catalogued under Wallace's name in the Library of Congress (?) that may or may not be that very item.

Two Make a Pair

Ira Levin died on November 12th. His obituary in The Times refers to Polanski's film of Rosemary's Baby and suggests that "the atmosphere of evil that pervaded the screen had its origins in Levin's fictional skills."

Indeed - one of the most seamless book-to-film transitions around, and an adaptation that honours its source material to great effect. In my opinion it stands alongside Ted Tally's screenplay for The Silence of the Lambs as an example of best practice in adaptation.

But although Rosemary's Baby is the work that gets most of the attention, A Kiss Before Dying is the Levin novel that I'll cherish most. It's pretty well unfilmable, for reasons you can only understand by reading it - Levin's cool-headed manipulation of viewpoint and reader perception have no cinematic parallel. Gerd Oswald and Lawrence Roman tried adapting it in 1956, and James Dearden in 1991; both versions rendered the story as a routine psycho-stalker tale, which it's anything but.

And Levin, the bastard, was twenty-three when he wrote it.

This year also saw the passing of novelist and screenwriter Marc Behm, on July 12th. Behm's novel The Eye of the Beholder is right up there with the Levin for me - one of those books you finish and close with awe, and, if you're in the game yourself, not a little envy.

It was Maxim Jakubowsky, anthology editor and proprietor of the Murder One bookshop on Charing Cross Road, who put me onto this transcendent Private Eye novel. It's a mythic search tale with an unforgettably obsessive tone and, perhaps because it began in Behm's mind as a screenplay idea, it fared well when filmed by Claude Miller as Mortelle Randonnee in 1983. The movie starred Michel Serrault and Isabelle Adjani. A later English-language remake with Ewan McGregor fared less well.

I saw a TV screening of Mortelle Randonnee under the title of Deadly Run, and spent years trying to track it down on tape or DVD. Alas, when I finally located it, I found Fox Lorber's subtitled release to be a shortened and much less effective version which even lacks the crucial final shot.