The Daily Detective

Quotidian sleuthing

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I'm honestly not sure if I should start posting to Tumblr again now Twitter is falling down.

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The #DailyDetective for 27 June 2021. Biff Elliot is Mike Hammer, pointing a deadly weapon at Peggie Castle in I, The Jury.

This was the first film adapted from any of Mickey Spillane's novels and the first of two features based upon I, The Jury. The key scene in the previous tweet was not only reflected in the marketing for the movie...

... it has featured on the book cover of numerous editions.

I, The Jury has some impressive credits. Alongside writer-director Harry Essex there's cinematographer John Alton and composer Fran Waxman. The art direction is by Wiard Ihnen, Edith Head's husband. Alan Reed, later the voice of Fred Flintstone, is in the cast.

I'd love to see the film in 3D - it's the only 3D film shot by noir-master John Alton, I believe - but I've only had the pleasure of the two dimensional version. Still, Alton's deep black depths seem like they'd be perfectly menacing in stereovision.

That is Elisha Cook Jr. as Bobo the store Santa. He's not officially credited in the film. Obviously this is for the exact same reason Peter Jackson isn't credited in Hot Fuzz: to not spoil the magic for young children. That *is* obvious, right?

Finally, a little-seen treasure for those who have already seen the movie. In 2004, Biff Elliot sat down with his nephew Josh Shalek and recorded an audio commentary for the film's entire duration.

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The #DailyDetective for 26 June 2021. Perry Caravello in Bobcat Goldthwait's Windy City Heat.

Windy City Heat is a one-of-a-kind movie, a Making Of for a feature film that doesn't exist even though its star, Perry Caravello believes it does.

The whole film is one huge prank played on a rather unlikeable man. If we overlook the complex ethical questions for moment it's easy to say this the film is uproariously funny. Distressingly so, in places. Every time I watch it, I laugh until it hurts and then feel awful.

Caravello's character in the non-existent film is Stone Fury, a ludicrous wish-fulfilment 'sports PI' character. We see no detective work. In fact, we barely see Caravello connect any mental dots himself. He does not grasp what he's a part of at all. The prank is a total success.

Vulture succinctly made the best argument in Windy City Heat's defense. "Perry himself is the fulcrum for his own humiliation. Don and Mole just set the stage for it to happen, reacting to him perfectly and building consequences for his actions."

I think all of Bobcat Goldthwait's movies are moral fables at heart, even this one, a picture he directed but did not write. You can still grab a copy of the out-of-print Windy City Heat DVD very cheaply and, honestly, I feel slightly off about recommending it as fully as I do.

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The #DailyDetective for 25 June 2021. Edward James Olmos in Blade Runner.

Blade Runner was released in the US on 25 June 1982, 39 years ago today.

The colloquial job title Blade Runner was borrowed from William Burroughs for the sound and not the sense. in Ridley Scott's movie, Blade Runners are members of the police force tasked with hunting down and killing Replicants.

Perhaps it should be surprise no-one that they're not especially good detectives.

The overall experience of Blade Runner means most audience members will do more and probably better detective work than Rick Deckard. Outside of his use of the Esper for some virtual CSI, most of Deckard's breakthroughs are handed to him.

Gaff, meanwhile, seems to be ahead of us all. It's only by understanding what he shows us that the full picture comes into focus.

Edward James Olmos contributed Gaff's multilingual Cityspeak dialogue. For example "Monsieur, azonnal kövessen engem bitte" which connects one word of French, three of Hungarian and then one of German into a sentence meaning "Sir, immediately follow me, please."

If you would like to make one of the Blade Runner origami unicorns for yourself, Kenneth Thompson has compiled some instructions (as well as more for Gaff's chicken and matchstick man).

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The #DailyDetective for 24 June 2021. Ian Richardson in Murder Rooms.

Murder Rooms, subtitled Mysteries of the Real Sherlock Holmes, tells stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and his mentor, Dr Joseph Bell. Richardson played Bell, who the real Doyle named as an influence on the creation of Sherlock Holmes.

The implicit promise is that this show brings Holmes, or at least Holmesian detection, into reality. The truth is, Murder Rooms, along with other pseudo-historical fictions like Houdini & Doyle or Arthur & George, do quite the opposite: they fictionalise the real-life Doyle, turn him into myth.

Maybe this tangle of fact and fantasy couldn't find a more suitable subject. Sherlock Holmes might be a figurehead for ratiocination but Doyle himself appears rather credulous, believing in spiritualism and fairies, and writing impassioned defenses of both.

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The #DailyDetective for 23 June 2021 was Frances McDormand in Fargo, on the occasion of McDormand's birthday.

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The #DailyDetective for 22 June 2021. John Simm in Life on Mars.

David Bowie's Life on Mars? was released as a single on 22 June 1973, almost a full year and a half after the album Hunky Dory.

The mystery in both Bowie's original song and the show that shares its name are ultimately the same. It's also the one question where humans don't seem able to take No for an answer: Is there something else, something that gives meaning to our lives?

In Bowie's lyrics, a young girl watches a "best selling show" to see a "lawman beating up the wrong guy" while unaware that there's an entire universe of meaning beyond his own. There's only a lonely, desperate prayer that the same could be true for the girl.

Life on Mars, as created by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah, marries the police procedural, complete with clues and twists and more genre tropes than you can shake a gloved fist at, with these deeper-reaching questions. There's nothing else quite like it, including the less searching, more concrete sequel, Ashes to Ashes.

Hopefully the proposed final series in the sequence, Lazarus, can engage with something more akin to the far-reaching mysteries of Life on Mars and not the more self-regarding, fiction-bound, canon-building concerns that bogged down too much of Ashes to Ashes.

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The #DailyDetective for 21 June 2021. Howard Charles in Whitstable Pearl. (Pearl herself was #DailyDetective on 25 May).

The sixth and final episode of Whitstable Pearl, at least until it gets renewed (surely?) was released today. Charles plays DCI Mike McGuire, a character who obviously fulfills two regular murder mystery tropes:

- On the one hand, he's the police investigator, there to both facilitate and challenge the private eye lead (in this case, the brilliant Kerry Godliman as the almost-as-likeable-as-Godliman-herself Peral Nolan).

- And on the other, he's a love interest, again for Pearl Nolan.

Romance and mystery can make very comfortable bedfellows. Especially so when the characters are engaging and we want to see their relationship unfold. Happily, this is very much true here.

Each episode of Whitstable Pearl has its own mystery, a definite plot to be resolved before the end credits. What ultimately adds another, very welcome dimension, is the execution of a longer, full-series arc.

Not only does this mean the growing relationship between Pearl and Mike, but also - not to spoil anything - the pacing out of set-up throughout the series, small steps building to a final story that capitalises on so much of the character interplay and plotting that came before.

Whitstable Pearl is comparable to My Life is Murder with numerous plot points in common. But where 'Murder' seems to be spreading out Alexa Crowe's personal story indefinitely, 'Pearl' has a clear, clean six-episode plan in mind from the word Go.

Having said this, I really hope the show comes back for more. There's no reason a second season couldn't feel as satisfying and complete as this first one, and I'm certainly *nowhere near* being done with either Whitstable or Pearl.

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The #DailyDetective for 20 June 2021 was Jackie Chan in Police Story and Police Story 2.

In the 1980s there was no Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire or Harold Lloyd, and Gene Kelly was either trapped in Xanadu or lost at sea on The Love Boat. But we did have Jackie Chan, the true heir to their antic, elastic and kinetically poetic cinematic genius.

Not only are Chan's Police Story action sequences amazing feats of imagination, choreography and performance, they're superbly filmed and edited. He's the consummate action filmmaker.

The Police Story movies have simple plots but they set up a dynamic that infuses every element of the films: Chan's character, Kevin Chan or Chan Ka-Kui, isn't cocky or invulnerable but he won't ever give up. He is always looking for a way to stay in the fight.

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The #DailyDetective for 19 June 2021. Michael Keaton in Batman Returns. Today is 29 years to the day since the film was released in the US.

Bruce Wayne first appeared in issue 27 of the anthology series Detective Comics, published in March 1939. The comic had already featured numerous detectives, both superheroic and not, including Gumshoe Gus, Slam Bradley and The Crimson Avenger.

Somewhere along the way, Batman was given the appellation of World's Greatest Detective, even while the way he's portrayed tends towards relatively thoughtless, brutal vigilante tactics. Let's just say I find this something of a 'missed opportunity.'

Back in 1989, I queued for hours on the opening day of Batman because I was a fan of Beetlejuice and Pee Wee's Big Adventure looking for more Tim Burton. I actually liked the film a great deal, but it wasn't until 1992's Batman Returns that I really found what I had been looking for.

This is my favourite Batman of all: Gotham City is a surreal picture of violent class war, Selina Kyle's transformation into Catwoman is imaginative and surprising, Bruce Wayne is a multilayered lost soul. It also looks and sounds fantastic throughout.

To call anything Batman or Bruce Wayne does in this film 'detective work' might be generous. The Penguin does at least as much sleuthing, piecing together his lost family history and the truth of what Max Schreck has been up to.

A large part of what makes Batman Returns work is the wild screenplay by Heathers mastermind Daniel Waters. Ironically, seeing as I'm quoting this for a #DailyDetective post, Waters says that his draft replaced "a meat and potatoes mystery, with clues... like a Hardy Boys story. It was a good yarn."

I have read that unfilmed Sam Hamm script. It revolves around five raven statuettes which together reveal the location of a hidden secret. The MacGuffin-driven plot feels like The Maltese Falcon crossed with Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's a detective story - but not a great one.

Matt Reeves has promised his upcoming Batman movie is more "in his detective mode than we've seen in the films... tracking down the criminals and trying to solve a crime, it's going to allow his character to have an arc so that he can go through a transformation." Great!

Meanwhile, Michael Keaton is returning to his Batman role for The Flash. The lead character in that movie, Barry Allen, is CSI so there's double potential for detective work and mystery plotting. In any case, it will be good to see Keaton back in... well, in anything really.

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The #DailyDetective for 18 June 2021. Julie Graham, Olivia Vinall, Siobhan Redmond and Sarah Woodward, the four stars of Queens of Mystery.

The opening voiceover for Amelie, as per the English subtitles on my disc, begins "On September 3rd 1973 at 6:28pm and 32 seconds..."

The pilot episode of Pushing Daisies starts with a voiceover saying "At this very moment in the town of Couer d'Couers, young Ned was 9 years, 27 weeks, 6 days and 3 minutes old."

Queens of Mystery opens with Juliet Stevenson's narrator explaining "Although not officially declared an orphan until her tenth birthday, Matilda Stone lost her mother 3 days, 3 hours and 3 minutes into her third year."

Julian Unthank, the creator of Queens of Mystery, has specifically named both Amelie and Pushing Daisies as influences on the show, declaring an ambition to be "fun, joyous and quirky and unusual... the exact opposite of Scandi Noir."

The pop-up book opening titles of the show bring the message home just as clearly. Queens of Mystery isn't set in the real world, it's set inside a genre.

Each of the three Queens is a mystery novelist, and represents a different crime-solving archetype. Siobhan Redmond plays Aunt Jane, the rationalist. She's the author of the Henry Lambert iDI books, about a detective who is "essentially a computer."

Julie Graham plays Aunt Cat, the interventionist. She's the creator of the Roxanne Parker comics. Cat is hard-boiled, always forthright and ready to get stuck in.

Sarah Woodward plays Aunt Beth, the people-person with a strong streak of sleuth's intuition. She's the author of the ironically very gritty, but no doubt empathetic and warm, Reverend Iris Freeman books.

The fourth member of the Stone family is Matilda, our protagonist. Raised by three crime-writing aunts she, of course, joined the police force. Matilda is played by Olivia Vinall.

You may have noticed that the character names are all queens, or queens consort, of England. Eliza(Beth), Jane (Seymour), Cat(herine of Aragon), (Empress) Matilda. Matilda's mother is even named Eleanor (of Aquitaine). They're working the 'English' angle hard.

There's a strong sense that this show is reflecting its core audience back at themselves, perhaps in an idealised, certainly a stylised form, through the four lead characters.

I expect that most would-be Queens of Mystery fans have yet to find the show. When they do (like lots of #DailyDetective fare, it's on Acorn) I think they'll find it pleasingly detailed with an irresistible, eccentric cast. Series 2 is in production now.

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The #DailyDetective for 17 June 2021. Larry Hagman is Sherman Holmes in The Return of the World's Greatest Detective.

Perhaps the most famous murder mystery in all of pop culture was the Who Shot JR? plot in Dallas, centred on Larry Hagman's character JR Ewing. Had things taken a slightly different path in 1976, however, TV history might have been radically rewritten.

16 June 1976 was when the TV movie Return of the World's Greatest Detective first aired. It was originally conceived as a pilot for a show that would have been called Alias Sherlock Holmes. I'm pretty confident it would have been good fun. What we do have is a one-off broad, silly comedy that actually does mystery fairly well.

The show's concept is not dissimilar to James Goldman's play and later feature film They Might Be Giants, in which a modern day legal professional (judge in Giants, motorcyle cop in Return) becomes consumed with delusions that they are Sherlock Holmes.

What Return had going for it was director and co-writer Dean Hargrove and co-writer Roland Kibbee, alumni of Columbo, The Bob Newhart Show and Tony Curtis' McCoy. They knew twists and they knew comedy.

After a bang on the head, Sherman imagines himself as having the reasoning capability of Sherlock Holmes. It spoils nothing, I hope, to reveal that this new-found, confident persona allows Sherman to successfully solve multiple mysteries in just the pilot episode.

It's an occasionally whimsical affair, right down to the character names - the above image shows Sherman Holmes with Doctor Joan Watson, against all odds - but the shifting tone is generally well handled by all. Hagman proves to be good for scenes as both doofus and master detective.

I would certainly have liked the full series, though the pilot ends on a memorable, off-kilter wrap-up wherein Holmes and Watson literally walk off into the sunset as bells ring out on the soundtrack.

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The #DailyDetective for 16 June 2021. The brilliant Ed Asner in the bizarre It Crawled Out of the Woodwork, an early episode of The Outer Limits.

This early episode of The Outer Limits was directed by A Kiss Before Dying's Gerd Oswald, written by Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano and shot by Conrad Hall, cinematographer of Cool Hand Luke, Road to Perdition and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Ed Asner's character, Sergeant Siroleo, takes a while to show up, gets waylaid by a meandering plot but finally gets a great last line. Overall, this is a baggy story that needed some ironing out. As a fan of the show, Asner himself was disappointed.

What the episode does have going for it is the raging subtext about atomic age fears. The energy monster of this story isn't too hard to interpret. Some of the FX shots are a little goofy but inventive and memorable.

I'm also entirely sure that David Lynch explicitly referenced this episode in Twin Peaks.

Ed Asner's great role was that of Lou Grant, first on The Mary Tyler Moore show and then in his own brilliant, self-titled series. As a newspaper editor, a lot of what Grant does is borderline #DailyDetective material. Perhaps I'll push the envelope a little and include him soon.

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The #DailyDetective for 15 June 2021 was Emma Roberts in Nancy Drew.

First appearing in the 1930 novel The Secret of the Old Clock, Nancy Drew was by no means the first teen girl sleuth but was soon the best known. The original Nancy Drew Mystery Stories were published through to 2003, ending just a few years before Andrew Fleming's 2007 film.

Nancy's home town in the books is the fictional River Heights, though many adaptations relocate her in some way. In the 2007 adaptation, Nancy is sent to Los Angeles, and this ends up underpinning most of what the film is concerned with, in terms of both theme and plot.

Emma Roberts' Nancy feels like she's out of time as much as place, with her penny loafers and plaid skirts proving conspicuous in the corridors of Hollywood High. In 1930, Nancy stood at as a girl ahead of her time, but in modern Hollywood she seems, at best, extremely retro.

What is the relevance of Nancy Drew to a 21st century audience? This film at least provokes the question, even if it doesn't come close to a complete answer.

There's always power and value in stories about underestimated outsiders firing up their grey cells, taking risks and working hard for justice, but Nancy Drew has some very real privilege and the best Drew stories at least try to come to grips with this.

One truly lovely thing about Nancy Drew is nothing more elaborate than her genre: these are mystery stories for youngsters, adventures in which the day is saved through smarts. I hope kids have a great time trying to solve the 2007 movie's mystery. I know I would have.

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The #DailyDetective for 14 June 2021. Stephanie Zimbalist is Laura Holt, the power behind the name in Remington Steele.

Almost every episode of Remington Steele begins with the same voiceover from Zimbalist, explaining the show's premise.

"Try this for a deep dark secret: The great detective Remington Steele? He doesn't exist. I invented him. Follow - I'd always loved excitement, So I studied and apprenticed, and put my name on an office. But absolutely nobody knocked down my door. A female private investigator seemed so... feminine. So I invented a superior. A decidedly masculine superior. Suddenly there were cases around the block. It was working like a charm. Until the day he walked in, with his blue eyes and mysterious past. And before I knew it, he assumed Remington Steele's identity. Now I do the work, and he takes the bows. It's a dangerous way to live but as long as people buy it, I can get the job done. We never mix business with pleasure. Well, almost never. I don't even know his real name."

Pierce Brosnan plays the man who takes up the Steele mantle. It proved to be, almost literally, an audition for the role of James Bond.

The show teetered on the edge of formal cancellation in '86, which led to Brosnan being offered the James Bond gig and Zimbalist being offered the Officer Lewis role in Robocop. But the Bond offer leaked, building hype for Steele and ensuring its renewal.

The show's Bond references started early: the first episode is called License to Steele. Every episode title has the word Steele in it somewhere and some are amusing enough: Steele Waters Run Deep, Steele's Gold, Steele Knuckles and Glass Jaws, Steeled With a Kiss.

Others are just weird: Steele in Circulation, Love Among the Steele, Blood is Thicker Than Steele, Let's Steele a Plot, Steele Spawning. The most memorable episode title of them all belongs to a Christmas-themed hostage episode that feels like small-scale warm up for Die Hard. It's Dancer, Prancer, Donner and Steele.

(An odd aside: Laura Holt's car in Remington Steele and the limo in Die Hard have the same registration number)

Remington Steele disappointingly undervalues the best part of its premise, wherein an excellent detective feels she must compromise and appeal to misogynist attitudes in order to maintain her business and swishy lifestyle. This show would have benefited from much sharper teeth.

The show is mostly interested in bubbly romance and light capers (it's as much The Thomas Crown Affair as anything else) and the casting goes a long way in ensuring it pulls off a sense of fun and adventure.

I wish we'd seen a lot more from Zimbalist over the years.

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The #DailyDetective for 13 June 2021. Cal Wilson in mystery-based comedy game show, Sleuth 101.

Several TV shows have sought to make a game show out of murder mysteries, from the early 70's Whodunnit? to 2017's Armchair Detectives. Meanwhile, Murder in Successville blends celebrity detectives and improvisational comedy. Sleuth 101 attempted all of this at once.

Each episode is comprised of pre-filmed sections, showing a murder and its lead-up, alongside studio sections in which a celebrity guest detective scours a set for clues and conducts interviews with a roster of four different suspects.

The clue-hunting segment is a total non-starter, and host Cal Wilson often has to point her celebrity guest directly towards the pieces of evidence. Luckily, it's over and done with early and the rest of the show works rather better... at least until the guest presents a theory.

The guest detectives are selected because they're able to crack wise not necessarily able to crack crimes. When it comes to the guest sleuths joining the dots and unravelling the mystery, they tend to be pretty bad at it. This means Wilson has to step in, explain the clues and show how the mysteries slot together.

Thankfully, the larger-than-life murder plots offer the audience playing along at home a good number of fun clues and red herrings, a few of which are pretty clever, and most viewers will feel pretty good about how much they're able to unravel as they watch along.

The funniest detectives and best guest suspects don't always line up with the cleverest mysteries (I was chuffed to see Frank Woodley and Celia Pacquola, for example, but their episode has a so-so plot) and the best sleuths aren't always the most amusing.

A second season might have benefited lots from the lessons learned from the first and sharpened up Sleuth 101 nicely but, sadly, it was not to be. UK viewers can buy the whole series of eight episodes digitally for about £8 right now - a pretty good deal, if you ask me.

One final note: Robyn Butler has a role in the first episode of Sleuth 101. More recently, Butler was one of the creators, writers, producers and directors of The InBestigators, a family comedy series that ranks among my favourite mystery shows.

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The #DailyDetective for 12 June 2021 was John Thomson in The Moonstone.

The appearance of The Moonstone on the BBC daytime schedules of 2016 was a clear reminder that great TV exists outside of prime time. BBC One especially has a way with good afternoon drama on weekdays.

I put Cuff at the head of this post but the heart of the story is really the relationship between courting cousins Rachel Verinder and Franklin Blake, and how it is impacted by the theft of a precious diamond.

Maybe only the Holy Grail trumps the Moonstone for the title of Most MacGuffinest MacGuffin. Both Wilkie Collins' original novel, and this nifty adaptation, by Rachel Flowerday and Sasha Hails, coil all manner of plots and dramatic power-shifts around this prop.

This particular re-telling is structured around Franklin's interview-led investigation into the central mystery of who stole the Moonstone, how and why. It's an on-point way to adapt the epistolary novel but also keeps the drama focused on the stakes as Franklin feels them.

The BBC have adapted The Moonstone four times for TV, including a 1996 version with Greg Wise, Keeley Hawes, Peter Vaughan and Lesley Sharp. It was starry and swish, but missed a lot of the tricks of the witty, multilayered and resourceful 2016 version.

The most recent Moonstone adaptation I know of is a transmedia mash-up of Youtube videos, Twitter accounts and other bits of web bric-a-brac. It's certainly ambitious. The 2016 version is less formally blatant about being a story about stories and storytelling but it very much is, and all without sacrificing the mystery, romance and passion.