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[f-yeahbendaniels]

My Top Five Favorite Ben Daniels Characters (Roles in His 20s): 3. Norman Cubitt - Inspector Alleyn Mysteries: "Death at the Bar" (1993).

[kwebtv]

Thomas Geoffrey Wilkinson OBE (February 5, 1948 – December 30, 2023) Actor known for his role on stage and screen, he received numerous accolades including a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and two Laurence Olivier Awards. In 2005, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

In 2009, he won a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Movie for playing Benjamin Franklin in the HBO limited series John Adams (2008). His other Emmy-nominated roles were as Roy/Ruth Applewood in the HBO film Normal (2003), James Baker in the HBO film Recount (2008), and Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in the limited series The Kennedys (2011).

Other TV series he appeared in were:

Crime and Punishment

Panorama

Spyship

Strangers and Brothers

Sharma and Beyond

Squaring the Circle

A Pocket Full of Rye

Travelling Man

Happy Families

First Among Equals

The Woman He Loved

The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank

The Ruth Rendell Mysteries

Inspector Morse

Counterstrike

Screen Two

Lovejoy

Prime Suspect

Stay Lucky

The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries

Performance

Martin Chuzzlewit

Eskimo Day

David Copperfield

The Gathering Storm

Normal

John Adams

Recount

A Number

The Kennedys

The Kennedys: After Camelot

Belgravia

The Full Monty

IMDb listing

[e-b-reads]

Books of the Month: Sep 2024

Whoops, should probably do this before it gets any closer to Halloween. Interestingly, and unusually, my reading seems to have slowed down a little in terms of sheer number of books after the summer, but I think this is partly because 1) the fall has still been pretty busy (still plenty of work, though less than during summer camp season, with added school stuff) and 2) I've had the mental energy to read some different, longer books instead of lots of mindless, quick murder mysteries. (Still plenty of mysteries, though). Here's the books from September that I think are worth reading:

The Curse of Chalion (Lois McMaster Bujold): Had an odd experience reading this book: I didn't exactly know what was going to happen, but after I hit some fairly major plot points, I would think, "Oh yeah, that's right," as if I'd been expecting them. (There's some neat twists in this book! I was not expecting them all!) Anyway, I do read a lot and sometimes forget what I've read, so it's possible I read this a while in the past (sometime before I started tracking my reads, 3 years ago) and then forgot most of it. I don't plan to forget it this time, because I really enjoyed the experience! Good writing, and I do like a main character who's already seen a lot of shit and would ideally like to just live a quiet life (but also sighs and takes responsibility for things pretty regularly). Sad to see that the sequel is not also focused on Caz. (I'll read it someday anyway, because again, good writing!) (I'm not sure the etiquette on this, but to give credit where due: I had a few reasons to check this book out of the library, but one was that I've seen @wearethekat rec it convincingly multiple times!)

Broken Ice (Matt Goldman): OK, so this is actually book 2 in the Nils Shapiro mystery series (I read book 1 in August), so I recommend starting with book 1, but I'm more recommending the series than any individual book. Each mystery is interesting and original, but none of them stands out to me in particular; what I like is that the main character could very easily be a loner, sad, possibly alcoholic, slightly sexist private detective, but instead he builds up some healthy relationships over the series (romantic and other), and generally is someone I think I would get along with. There are 4 books so far, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a book 5 someday but I see nothing online promoting one.

Overture to Death (Ngaio Marsh): I don't think I've recommended this Inspector Alleyn mystery before, anyway? I think it's one of her better-crafted ones (they're all pretty good tho, imo), with some fascinating characters. (Though I feel I should mention, I reread it this time because of @oldshrewsburyian mentioning that 2 of the spinster-ish characters were at least somewhat - unflatteringly - based on Dorothy Sayers and wow, they're even worse than I remembered!)

[justforbooks]

A farce, for heaven’s sake! Everyone knows farce is dead.” When a character says these lines on page eight of Janice Hallett’s latest whodunnit, The Christmas Appeal, we can practically see the author tipping us an outsized wink. Hallett, after all, is one of today’s foremost exponents of cerebral, knowing crime. A swift 180 pages later, Hallett has slain another victim and shown that farce was never really dead in the first place. Literary murder – especially the cosy sort – has always been comic. The real mystery is: why is it so popular now?

Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, in which laughs, foibles and irony figure far more prominently than bloody murder, has topped the charts for four years running. The Crime Writers’ Association has just launched a new Whodunnit Dagger to honour the year’s best cosy, classic or quirky mystery. This Christmas, production company Mammoth Screen will bring us its latest Agatha Christie for BBC One, a reworking of Murder Is Easy that, like its predecessor Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, plays up the love and laughs – moving away from the grittier cynicism of its earlier adaptations.

But then, this is the production company that made Blandings – based on the PG Wodehouse Blandings Castle stories – and Agatha Raisin. The latter, an affectionate rendering of MC Beaton’s none-more-cosy crime capers, is a reminder that the genre has always been popular. Trace it back from SJ Bennett, whose sleuth of choice is Queen Elizabeth II, and Hallett, through Beaton and Simon Brett, with his wisecracking Charles Paris mysteries, and you find an unbroken link to the golden age of comic crime.

Christie herself wrote laughs aplenty, especially when it came to Poirot; her contemporary and fellow queen of crime, Ngaio Marsh, excelled at badinage. GK Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, written in the early 20th century, have a profound and gentle humour – or not so gentle in the barbed parody The Absence of Mr Glass, which pokes fun at Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle also made space for jokes amid the pea-soupers and arch villainy, not just in surreal escapades such as The Red-Headed League, but in the everyday interactions of Holmes and Watson. And there are links between the generations: as a producer on Radio 4’s classic adaptation of Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey series, Brett revisited the pinnacle of comic crime from the 1920s and 30s.

In Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, the aristocratic Catholic family at its centre turns in times of crisis, not to sermons, but to Father Brown stories. Read aloud by the matriarch, the scene is at once absurd, touching and completely understandable. Part of the solace stems from the benign humour of the tales, and that explains why comic crime is resurgent today – amid planetary and economic crises, that promise of escapism is more beguiling than ever. Especially at this time of year. From Hercule Poirot’s Christmas to PD James’s Mistletoe Murders, authors as well as readers have been drawn to fatal festivities.

We’re all familiar with gallows humour, the need to find laughter in the grimmest places. Yet the appeal of truly comic crime is less about professional detectives doing a grisly job than dilettantes playing a game. Literature has few laughing policemen, but an awful lot of quipping amateurs. Even Marsh gave her best one-liners not to handsome Inspector Alleyn but to her Watson figure, the journalist Nigel Bathgate.

Games, puzzles and mysteries are by definition playful. And it’s not just the sleuths who are playing. Reader is always pitted against author in a test of wits – can we solve the crime before the detective? Like every game, there are clear rules: detective author Ronald Knox set out his not entirely serious 10 commandments of fair play in 1929. This is what makes these stories such perfect escapism today: readers can lose themselves in the contest. Every true whodunnit is a work of metafiction, as the reader flits in and out of the story, constantly trying to estimate the author’s intelligence or honesty in setting trails and leaving clues.

For my money, today’s greatest exponent of playful detective fiction is Alex Pavesi, whose Eight Detectives is a gloriously original, intricate and often very funny series of practical jokes played on the reader. Dann McDorman’s new novel, West Heart Kill, as tricksy as they come, uses a jigsaw puzzle as cover art, while the cover of my own Helle & Death tips its hat to Cluedo. This playfulness puts us in the right mood, but the classic whodunnit has other weapons, many of which it shares with farce: plots like clockwork, exquisite choreography and perfect timing. Sayers’s Peter Wimsey has been called “Bertie Wooster with Jeeves’s brain”.

The most important comic quality of both murder mystery and farce, however, is the meticulous arranging of cause, effect and misunderstanding. The detection of a murderer involves paying minute attention to what people say and do. The reader is given privileged access into the lives of others, replete with dramatic irony and a degree of omniscience. And what could possibly be funnier than the everyday idiosyncrasies of human beings?

The Christmas Appeal is packed with hypocrites and exhibitionists. Mrs Ruddle, in Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon, is a world-class gossip. As for the sleuths themselves, from Holmes, to Poirot, to Torben Helle, the more seriously they take themselves, the sillier they become. Snoop on anyone for long enough, and their habits, sayings, priorities start to become hilarious.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[incohorace]

hercule poirot or miss marple? why?

OOF THAT'S SO HARD. miss marple tho i think just because unlike poirot she isn't an actual detective she's just constantly finding herself in Situations. also i do enjoy her personality a lot + she's the sort of character it's very fun to come up with backstories for. i do love both of them very much tho <3

however if you like poirot and miss marple can i quickly recommend the inspector alleyn series by ngaio marsh? because that's actually probably my fav mystery series and all the characters are so developed! and inspector alleyn is very charismatic and interesting in particular. it's so underrated for a series that is just as good as agatha christie's novels if not better and ngaio marsh's writing style is gorgeous

[moadeep]

Look, Agatha Christie is fine, I thoroughly enjoy Poirot and Miss Marple. But I'm sick and tired of her estate pushing her as THE Queen of Crime and journalists playing along. The QueenS of Crime were Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

I like Christie, sincerely, but she's not even (plot-wise) the best of them. Her great gift was that she created excellent characters and knew her poisons. If you read multiple of her series at the same time (look I have a reading problem) it becomes clear how often she recycled plots and methods. If you like mystery and want to read Golden Age Detective stories, do yourself a favor and step OUT of the Christie lane once in awhile.

Sayers is my personal fave, read most of the wimsey books (maybe all? I'd have to check), thoroughly enjoyed the old radio dramas, and there have been plenty of TV adaptations as well. If you like stuff like Jeeves and Wooster as well as detectives with deceptive exteriors, then Lord Peter Wimsey will likely be very much your jam.

Allingham is a delight, even if she's not my fave. It's fun and educational to watch how the way she wrote Campion evolved, plus you can watch him as played by the Fifth Doctor! I'm not sure I can make a comp as easily with this one...Based purely on vibes that probably only exist for me, I think if you liked Elementary, you may enjoy Campion.

Marsh is the one I've read the least of, mostly because the library just didn't have much of her stuff. She was from New Zealand and there is PLENTY of speculation about her private life. If you've enjoyed Inspector Alleyn, you may already be a fan and not even know it.

[alrederedmixedmedia]

Alredered Remembers New Zealand mystery writer, creator of Police Inspector Roderick Alleyn, Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh, on her birthday.

"It is a curious thing that when one speaks from the heart it is invariably in the worst of taste."

-Ngaio Marsh

[superb-fairywren]

I like thinking about the scene in Artists in Crime when Alleyn is taking the local through clues, and all of a sudden the local also has a tape measure??? So my thoughts are either A. the local had a tape on him so props to him he'll go far or B. Fox recognises keen men at 50 yards and keeps extra measures on his person to gift at times of need

[my-little-kraken]

Selection of Patrick pics found on ebay

[f-yeahbendaniels]

My Top Five Favorite Ben Daniels Characters (Artistic): 5. Norman Cubitt - Inspector Alleyn Mysteries: "Death at the Bar" (1993).

[yogaduck]

[e-b-reads]

36, 38 for the book ask game~

Thanks!

36. Your absolute most favorite character(s) from any book you've ever read.

I actually answered this once already, but it is so hard to narrow down favorite characters that I'll give a few more:

Roderick Alleyn (and Troy, and Inspector Fox) from Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Alleyn mysteries

Many of Terry Pratchett's Discworld characters. I am particularly fond of Vimes and Vetinari (and if I keep naming more I'll never stop!)

38. How many books have you read this year?

Storygraph says 185.

(Send me a number from the ask game here!)

[eihposkcaj]

The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries: A Man Lay Dead

[kwebtv]

The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries  -  BBC One  -  December 23, 1990 - August 29, 1994

Crime Drama (9 episodes)

Running Time:  90 minutes

Stars:

Patrick Malahide as Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn

William Simons as Inspector Fox

Belinda Lang as Agatha Troy

Tim Dutton as D.S. Bailey

Sandy Welch as D.C. Robinson

Leslie Schofield as A.C.C. Connors

Mark Penfold as Doctor Curtis

[alexandria1448]

The most British sentence ever uttered

“‘We must behave,’ Peregrine said, ‘in whatever way one is expected to behave.’“

From Killer Dolphin, by Ngaio Marsh (1966)

[rockislandadultreads]

Police Procedurals from Around the World: a book list

Cover Her Face by P.D. James

Headstrong and beautiful, the young housemaid Sally Jupp is put rudely in her place, strangled in her bed behind a bolted door. Coolly brilliant policeman Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard must find her killer among a houseful of suspects, most of whom had very good reason to wish her ill.

Cover Her Face is P. D. James's electric debut novel, an ingeniously plotted mystery that immediately placed her among the masters of suspense.

A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh

At Sir Hubert Handesley's country house party, five guests have gathered for the uproarious parlor game of "Murder." Yet no one is laughing when the lights come up on an actual corpse, the good-looking and mysterious Charles Rankin. Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn arrives to find a complete collection of alibis, a missing butler, and an intricate puzzle of betrayal and sedition in the search for the key player in this deadly game.

Ashes to Ashes by Tami Hoag

He performs his profane ceremony in a wooded Minneapolis park, anointing his victims, then setting the bodies ablaze. He has already claimed three lives, and he won’t stop there. Only this time there is a witness. But she isn’t talking. Enter Kate Conlan, former FBI agent turned victim/witness advocate. Not even she can tell if the reluctant witness is a potential victim or something more troubling still. Her superiors are interested only because the latest victim may be the daughter of Peter Bondurant, an enigmatic billionaire. When Peter pulls strings, Special Agent John Quinn gets assigned to the case. But the FBI’s ace profiler of serial killers is the last person Kate wants to work with, not with their troubled history. Now she faces the most difficult role of her career—and her life. For she’s the only woman who has what it takes to stop the killer . . . and the one woman he wants next.

A Clubbable Woman by Reginald Hill

Home from Rugby Club after taking a nasty knock in a match, Connon finds his wife even more uncommunicative than ususal. After passing out on his bed for five hours, he comes downstairs to discover communication has been cut off forever - by a hole in the middle of her forehead. Down at the club, passions run high, on and off the field. This is a home game for Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel who knows all the players, male and female. But Sergent Peter Pascoe whose loyalties lie with another code has a few ideas of his own. This is the first appearance together on any field for Dalziel and Pascoe, and already we can feel that electricity of opposite but complementary skills which will take them into the topmost division.