joan_freyer
This is a great series from the 1970s and it is a pity it is only 2 boxes. The collection is exciting because 1) there is a who's who of wonderful character actors starring and 2) there is a who's who of little known but wonderful writers of detective stories here complete with short bios.The series is a fine recreation of Victorian and Edwardian times. It is video and is fussy but the sets are lavish and some shows feature live action in the countryside.Most of the plots are clever and the characters include female detectives too! Nice touch! Some are doctors but others are jewelers or insurance or gentlemen or cockneys. Instead of building as series around a young star to be (perhaps) the producing team used the best character actors around and therefore the series is a who's who of the very best talents around.check it out! you will like it! J E F Rose
hamlet-16
Having never seen them I stumbled across the first series on DVD ... they are typical British television in the best sense... literate, beautifully acted (with an amazing cast list) and with a marvellous sense of period.They are based on early crime novels and most of the writers are unknown to me especially those based on novels that are clearly not of English origin. Whilst the production standards of 1970 may not match today and some of the individual plots are sometimes a bit ordinary the two series make great viewing for any fan of crime novels and will especially appeal to any fan of the Sherlock Holmes.
Enoch Sneed
It is so easy to look back and say we had higher standards of television years ago but this series goes a long way to proving the point. When they were originally broadcast these programmes went out at 9.00 on Monday evening following a current affairs documentary "World In Action" - very often a controversial and downright bloody-minded look at national and international politics. In the same slots today we have a half-hour soap opera followed by a series about a PA in a supermarket chain, coping with her employer relocating its head office.These programmes are literate and don't betray their literary origins. The scripts are full of period flavour, take their time to develop plot and character, and give the actors plenty to work with. And what actors: John Neville, Robert Stephens, Peter Barkworth and Peter Vaughan to name a few of the leads; character actors of the quality of Terence Rigby and George A. Cooper turn up in supporting roles.The production values are very high, too, with richly decorated Victorian settings. The BBC has always set the benchmark for period drama in the UK but Thames gave them a run for their money here and were rewarded with a Best Design BAFTA in 1972.If you enjoy period detective work but you are suffering from Holmes fatigue you could do far worse than invest in these for your DVD player - theowinthrop, please note!
theowinthrop
I never saw this series, but from reading the other review on this thread I guess the loss was mine. Since I did not see it I cannot vote on it, but it probably was very well done. And I have some idea about it - you see in 1971 a paperback was put out by Penguin Books that was edited by the producer of this series, with a very informative introduction. That producer was Sir Hugh Greene. He's not well recalled today, unless you know the history of the programming chiefs of the BBC television. He was the brother of novelist Graham Greene, and shared with his brother a fascination with written English and a good taste in detective and mystery stories.Greene's idea was to produce a series of short story based dramas that came out of the literary works of contemporaries of Arthur Conan Doyle, who in their day were as well liked as he was. However if you mention the best mystery writers of the Conan Doyle period, the only name that survives with Sir Arthur is the great English Catholic writer and polemicist Gilbert Keith Chesterton, through his "Father Brown" stories. Only they achieved permanent literary hold. Hugh Greene realized this was unfair, and revived interest in several others.The most notable "rival" fictional detective was R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke (who has several episodes here, usually played by John Nevil - ironically the same actor who portrayed Sherlock Holmes in the film A STUDY IN TERROR). Freeman invented the "inverted" mystery story - wherein you see the criminal commit the so-called "perfect crime" but you wonder how he will be caught. This survives today in the "Columbo" and "Monk" series on television. Dr. Thorndyke, with degrees in law and medicine, used science to uncover the truth. Believe it or not his fictional career lasted from 1903 (his first appearance is in "THE RED THUMB MARK" dealing with fingerprints) to 1943 when Freeman died. The best of Freeman are still fascinatingly good reads. One example here is "The Moabite Cypher", wherein Thorndyke turns his attention to ancient history.Max Carrados, the world's first "blind" detective (with wealthy independent means) is here. This precursor to "Longstreet" and the dramatist sleuth played by Van Johnson in TWENTY THREE PACES TO BAKER STREET, was the creation of Ernst Brahmah. Kind and considerate, Carrados would examine every problem brought to him calmly and solve them. A gentle humor would pervade the stories, which never marred their effect by trying to wring pathos from the situation of the hero.Arthur Morrison is unique. He was the author of some vivid fiction dealing with the urban poor such as "Hole in the Wall", but he found time to write the stories about the plump, pleasant insurance investigator Martin Hewitt. Not too many though - about two or three volumes (one a long novel). "The Dixon Torpedo" is one of them (although the character of Hewitt seems not to be listed). Later he gave up his fiction (after getting an inheritance) and concentrated on a hobby: he became one of England's best experts on Asiatic porcelain.There are others, including our friend from THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, Baroness Orczy. Her creations were "the Old Man in the Corner" (who solved mysteries in a restaurant that were brought to him - as he untied knots), and "Lady Molly" of Scotland Yard. In the introduction to his collection of stories used in the series, Greene pointed out that Orczy's memoirs mentioned Sir Percy Blakeney (Orczy realized whom she would be recalled for). But she barely noticed "the Old Man" and totally forgot the spirited Molly.There was also one great American writer of the period, now recalled for one story which was dramatized here - Jacques Futrelle of Georgia, who created Professor John St. F.X. Van Dusen, "the Thinking Machine", in the classic "locked room - death cell" story, "The Problem of Cell 13". Van Dusen, a very intelligent man (usually accompanied by his "Watson" Huntington Hatch, a news reporter) did not suffer fools gladly, but as you read the tales he shows refreshing elements of human feeling every now and then (in one he is explaining his solution to a greedy man, and notes the man is not interested in the cause of the death of his relative - Van Dusen's face shows disgust at this). "The Problem" is how Van Dusen makes monkeys out of a warden and his staff by escaping from a cell on death row in the time period he gives them. Futrelle is still very readable, but (unfortunately) died on the Titanic. It was a real loss to detective fiction.The stories for this series were first rate. Hopefully the series still exists, and can be seen again.
