"What if fairy tales are real?" – now with cops

There is a quote from the animated series Phineas and Ferb which is often paraphrased like this: "If I had a nickel for every time [X happened] I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice." I understand why this quote is so popular, because it's genius. I for my part often imagine I can see certain trends in contemporary life, but when I have to come up with examples I can only think of two. Which is too little to positively point at a trend, and yet...

The TV series Grimm, airing 2011-2017 and currently on Amazon Prime where I'm catching up with it, is a typical two-nickel-phenomenon. What's even weirder than that there should be two American TV series airing in the 2010s with a "What if fairy tales are real?" premise, and specifically referencing the Grimm fairy tales before later branching out to all kinds of fantastical stories, is that Grimm and Once Upon A Time should be so different. 

They're both good, though. I actually started watching Grimm when it was on Netflix, but only an episode now and again, as it suffered somewhat from my ongoing Once obsession. However, the solid craft that has gone into making Grimm eventually won me over. It will never cater to my unhealthy fairy-tale villain crushes (well, when I say "crushes" I mean... mostly one) the way Once does, but that doesn't stop it from being extremely watchable. Once I realised this, Grimm had disappeared from Netflix, and I had to buy the DVDs to carry on my watching. Whereupon, shortly afterwards, it appeared again on Amazon.

So if Grimm isn't like Once, what is it about? The premise is almost as crazy in its way as Once's. Nick Burkhardt, a handsome, dedicated homicide cop in Portland, Oregon, is told by his dying aunt that he belongs to a family who has hunted different kinds of dangerous creatures, Wesen, for centuries. He's a "Grimm" (yep, in this reality the peaceful story-collecting brothers were monster hunters). Wesen mostly look like normal humans, but a Grimm can see what they are underneath when they are under stress and can't hide their true selves from a trained eye. Nick would probably assume that his aunt had gone barmy, only he has been seeing the oddest things lately... and then someone tries to kill his aunt.

Most of what follows are murder cases with a wesen (I'll go lower-case from now on) component, although there are also overarching story arcs. Nick swiftly learns that his ancestors were way too harsh with their wesen-slashing. In fact, wesens aren't unlike humans: some are good eggs, some are definitely bad news. Nick is lucky enough to early on come across super-good egg Monroe, a clock-mender who also happens to be a wolf-like wesen called Blutbad (yeah... I'll come back to the use of German terms later). 

They strike up a friendship, and Nick learns to use his talents for the good of wesen and non-wesen alike. Only, he has to come up with ways of solving crimes without letting anyone know the clues he gets from seeing suspects and witnesses turn into different kinds of creatures (from cute to downright scary) before his eyes.

It goes without saying that a concept where fairy tales are (partly) explained by the existence of "creatures" isn't as satisfying for a fairy-tale fan as the premise that actual characters such as the Evil Queen exist. Some of the earlier Grimm cases do take their cue from some particular fairy tale, and there's a fairy-tale- or folklore-related quote preceding every episode, which is classy. The show's real strength, though, lies elsewhere. 

While I was still grumbling over the somewhat haphazard way German phrases were used in order to explain various wesen (always pronounced with a short "e" in the series, for some reason) phenomena, I couldn't help appreciating the fun cop banter between Nick, his partner (in the professional sense!) Hank and the cynical Wu, who always brings the sass. The light-hearted police procedural part of the plot has remained strong throughout the seasons I've watched (I'm now at the beginning of season five). It's impressive how many variations the show manages on the wesen theme – sometimes they're perps, sometimes victims, and the dangerous monster isn't always who you think it is. There are plenty of amusing mini-whodunnits along the way.

The overarching storylines are more varied in quality, but are carried along by a cast of likeable protagonists. Nick is a bit of a clean slate at times, but has the core of decency a hero needs. Hank is a great mate, and Wu somewhat of a personal favourite of mine. But the big friendship prize goes to Monroe, who is there for Nick time and time again, through tough cases as well as personal hardships. It's a good thing that Nick saves his life once or twice, because he owes Monroe big time. Also, Monroe and his later girlfriend Rosalee (a Fuchsbau, that is, fox-like wesen) are unbelievably cute together, plus she is also extremely helpful to Nick. Monroe and Rosalee may be the most shippable couple on telly – perhaps even beating Snow and Charming in Once.

When it comes to girlfriends, though, Nick has a harder time of it, which leads me to a storyline the show handles less well. Nick's girlfriend Juliette has to put up with a lot and is actually often very supportive in trying circumstances. Nevertheless, I never really warmed to this particular romance, and judging from various IMDB reviews I wasn't the only one. Perhaps there is a certain imbalance – Nick seems to need Juliette more than she needs him, and although she stands by him through various surreal trials that would have most girls running for the hills she never accepts his marriage proposal. Maybe a certain coolness from the fans led to poor old Juliette being completely shafted in season four, which I still think is unfair. 

If Nick ends up with someone else than Juliette in the end, though, there will honestly be no complaints from me. But the script writers had better not come between Monroe and Rosalee – that would be a shootable-by-crossbow-arrows offence.

Former friends turned enemies – an irresistible trope (at least for me)

Last week was exhausting, which means I'm a bit late with my blogging. Even now, I'm reaching for the easy option blog-wise. Instead of explaining why Pixar's Hoppers is really watchable and not at all the simplistic "Man the Destroyer" fable I had feared (my least favourite cliché or trope, together with "Eat the rich", and "Who are the monsters here"), I'm going to write about Young Sherlock on Prime.

There's no shortage of films or TV projects that want to hitch a ride on the Sherlock train without having much – if anything – to do with the great detective as described by Arthur Conan Doyle. I've mentioned these Holmesian rip-offs a number of times: the Guy Ritchie movies, the Enola Holmes atrocity (I never did watch the second film), The Irregulars on Netflix. Young Sherlock is undoubtedly the same kind of thing. And yet, as with The Irregulars, I ended up enjoying the series on its own terms, even if it is far from "the spirit of the original". 

I'm not going to go into the matter of why Holmes's good name keeps getting exploited again, as it's well-trodden ground. Instead I'll concentrate on another aspect of the series, the irresistible hook that kept me watching even though the banter of the first couple of episodes was pretty tired. In Young Sherlock, we see the future detective teaming up with an Irish Oxford undergraduate called – drum roll – James Moriarty.

Predictable? Yes. Wonderfully inventive? Not really. But it doesn't need to be. I'm a sucker for a story showing how the hero and his arch-enemy used to be friends. It's why I once sat through an enormously long film (which I think was meant as a TV series, something the DVD I rented did not make clear) called Neverland. It's why I've started to watch the TV series Smallville, in spite of having zero investment in the Superman universe (I'm admittedly only two episodes in, but so far Lex is being a great pal to Clark). It's why Master episodes in Doctor Who appeal to me, in spite of The Master being a bit too chaotic a villain for my liking. The friends-turned-enemies trope is "You and I are not so different" and the hero-villain team-up rolled into one, and I love it.

Admittedly, it could be more cleverly done than in Young Sherlock. You have to ask yourself why a Holmes-Moriarty team-up is so appealing when Holmes isn't behaving noticeably like Holmes and Moriarty isn't behaving noticeably like Moriarty. This Sherlock mostly resembles the Guy Ritchie movie version of Sherlock Holmes in his youth, which makes sense as Guy Ritchie directed some of this TV show's episodes as well. Young Moriarty is charming, full or Irish blarney and has some unscrupulousness about him, but there's little hint of a future criminal mastermind at work, or for that matter a future Mathematics Professor. They are less two geniuses trying to think their way to a solution to their problems, and more two boisterous young men who get into scrapes.

There are some hints that these are bright young lads, admittedly, and that they are uniquely on each other's wave length. While we don't get scenes where Sherlock rattles off brilliant deductions, we do see his power of observation, illustrated by time slowing down while he takes in all the details in a scene or a room. Intriguingly, we see Moriarty joining him in these moments, while he follows the same trains of thought. He is the only one who can enter young Sherlock's "mind palace" (to borrow a concept from BBC's Sherlock).

All in all, though, the show's main charm comes not from any impressive detective work on the part of the protagonists, but more from being a ripping yarn. I was a little doubtful during the first episodes, but when the series switches focus to an unsolved mystery from Sherlock's childhood, the plot thickens and becomes more gripping. However, there are no prizes for guessing who the ultimate Big Bad is (not Colin Firth's blunt Empire builder, no), and the motivation of at least one important character remains something of a mystery. 

This is not the kind of show that makes you feel clever for watching it. But if a 19th-century caper involving two bright hotheads, a female Chinese assassin, a former asylum inmate who (naturally) turns out not to be mad at all and the stiff straight man trying to keep some control over the situation sounds fun to you, you could do worse than giving Young Sherlock a watch. After all, Conan Doyle himself appreciated a good adventure story.                      

The Night Manager season two: the good, the bad and the boring

Of the shows I've watched on Amazon Prime recently, there was one where one of the heroes made a passionate case against the unchecked proliferation of weapons and was willing to risk his life to stop it, though you could also see the point of his emotionally damaged antagonist. And then there was The Night Manager season two. 

Yes, Jonathan Pine is back, and I'm sorry to say as personality-less as ever. Over the years, when I've reread my first blog post about The Night Manager, I've felt guilty about my cattiness regarding Tom Hiddleston in the role. What did I mean when I called him "not conventionally handsome"? He is too! There's nothing wrong at all with the spacing of his eyes. Just look what an absolute dish he is as Loki in numerous Marvel films. What was I thinking?

The second season of The Night Manager comforts me a little, as it reminds me what a yawn-inducing cipher Pine is. The role settles itself over Hiddleston like a wet blanket, dousing all mischievous Loki charm. Pine doesn't even have a sense of humour; he just spends the whole series looking anxious. At least he's not all bronzed and beefcaked this time around, so he looks all right, from my point of view. Oh, and at the start of the season, we see that he has a cat called Corky (of whom he seems fond – the cat, that is, not his season one murder victim). With that, I've run out of nice things to say about the character. Better luck in Doomsday, Tom.

Why this neglect of proper character development for the hero? I suspect the head writer of the series, David Farr, is a bit of a villain-lover. He certainly invests more vim into depicting the baddies: although by no means complex, they are a lot more colourful than Pine and his allies. It's funny, because I didn't get this feeling from the first season, which had a certain tone of moral outrage. Now, although the villain plan is so evil you just have to root for Pine & Co regardless, the slight disdain towards the rich, privileged and criminal is replaced by shameless fascination. Pine seemed perfectly fine shrugging off Richard Roper and his fate at the end of season one. In season two, ten years later, he's still obsessed by Roper and his legacy, and so is the series.

It's hard to review season two of The Night Manager without spoilers (English newspapers didn't even try, so I got the main twist spoiled and was miffed, although it was rather an obvious one). Anyway, the  setup is that Pine once again has to go undercover after he gets wind of the dealings of Teddy Dos Santos, who calls himself "Roper's true heir". Dos Santos is also into illegal arms dealing, in spite of having his HQ in Colombia, where you'd have thought it would be tempting to get into other kinds of shady trades. I don't quite understand why they made the Night Manager baddies arms dealers. Wouldn't drugs be more boo-hissable? Or is this just my Swedish bias?

At the start, I thought I'd like season two more than the sluggishly paced first season. The thriller elements worked well, and Diego Calva's Dos Santos was a charming villain. He had lots more chemistry with Hiddleston's Pine than Pine's potential love interest, sultry Roxana (Camila Morrone), and single-handedly provided most of it. It soon becomes clear that Dos Santos is merely a pawn and not the Big Bad (of course not, he's way too cute). After That Twist at the end of episode three, there are still many enjoyable scenes and nail-biting sequences, but there's no denying the plot's bizarre. One of the protagonists from the first season has to act completely out of character for it all to happen.

Still, if you see it as entertaining, high-octane thriller nonsense with no pretensions to hard-hitting realism, season two of The Night Manager is a good time – up until the highly disappointing ending. I know there's a season three in the works, but really, what was that? I'm not sure how a third season will be able to salvage the whole, to be honest. Though I'll watch it, naturally. I need to know what happened to Corky the cat.

The show I alluded to in the first paragraph? The Legend of Vox Machina, animated, R-rated fantasy inspired by a game I've never played. And yet, it has considerably more complex and likeable characters than a supposedly high-prestige BBC drama like The Night Manager. That's the way of the world.

Chibnall does Christie – and it could have been worse

"From the creator of Broadchurch", an ad boasted, and my heart sank. When I nominated Seven Dials on Netflix as one of the 2026 shows I was looking forward to, I had no idea that the script-writer would be none other than Chris Chibnall, the inventor of The Timeless Child and the bane of Gallifrey.

I had a lot of problems with Chibnall's run as Doctor Who showrunner, which wasn't unexpected, as I didn't care for the Who episodes he penned during the reigns of his predecessors Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat either. Now, however, after RTD has botched his return to the show so badly, I've started wondering whether I judged Chibs too harshly. There were parts of his Doctor Who run I liked, such as the Flux series and The Power of the Doctor. Consequently, I was prepared to give his version of The Mystery of the Seven Dials (simply called Seven Dials on Netflix) a fair chance – or fairish at any rate.

In the end, Seven Dials turned out to be a solid good watch. Chibnall proved to be a better Christie adapter than Sarah Phelps, just as his Doctor Who run (with hindsight) can be said to be better than the RTD 2/Disney Plus era. The problem is, that's not saying an awful lot. I was grateful Chibnall didn't mess around more with the source material than he did, but there were still lots of moments when I had reason to recall why his Who scripts irritated me in the first place.

The basic plot is more or less the same as in Christie's novel, and her twists are intact. Chibnall has added one twist of his own, but I didn't think it detracted from the original story. Other tweaks of the plot were pardonable too. I don't quite understand why Bundle had to be in love with the first murder victim – it causes her to mooch around a great deal during the whole first episode – but I didn't mind it much. Gender-swapping Lord Caterham to an almost equally unlikeable Lady Caterham worked quite well, especially as she's played by Helena Bonham Carter. Mandatory diversity is built into the plot by making Ronnie Devereux of Indian descent and the brilliant researcher from Cameroon rather than Germany, but if we have to play the diversity game I much prefer these kinds of changes to "colour-blind" casting.

What is less easy to bear are the outbreaks of clumsy commentary, as if Chibnall just had to leave his 21th-century fingerprints everywhere. Sir Oswald Coote lunges into a Brash Capitalist rant about how class can be bought at one time, for no good reason that I can see. A whole scene is dedicated to showing how harsh Lady Coote has been to a maid. Lady Coote in the book was a good-natured creature who was bullied by the Caterhams' gardener, but I accept that making her sharper adds her to the roster of likely suspects, which is no bad thing. However, she doesn't have to turn into a servant terroriser. Lady Caterham's snobbishness is very on the nose, and the Cameroonian scientist makes a whole little speech about how he and others on the African continent had to fight at the behest of "European white men" which sounds a great deal more 2020s rather than 1920s.

It's not as if Chibnall has that good a grasp of the period he apparently feels superior to. When George Lomax laments the lack of political interest of young women, Bundle replies sweetly "gives us the vote and we just might [take an interest]", whereupon Lomax guffaws patronisingly. It's true that Bundle wouldn't have had the vote in 1925, but married women of 30 and over already had the right to vote since 1918, so the idea of extending this right further wouldn't have felt far-fetched even for Lomax. Lady Caterham tells Bundle that Bundle's brother died because of the mistakes of a "drunken old general". The High Command during World War One hasn't had the best press, but that is surely an oversimplified view of what went down. Officers trained in traditional warfare were ill-equipped to make tactical decisions in the first truly modern war; I would argue that their age and state of inebriation didn't have much to do with it.

But enough complaining. Chibnall may not be able to refrain completely from Chibnallisms, but compared to some of the pontificating we've had from other script-writers, and the right-out distortions of the source material we got from Phelps, they are simply mild annoyances. The best thing about this adaptation is not the script but the stellar casting. Mia McKenna-Bruce is spot-on as Bundle (though Chibnall should have given her a better grasp of grammar). Helena Bonham Carter is fun, as always. Martin Freeman makes a surprisingly convincing Battle, and his first confrontation with McKenna-Bruce's Bundle adds a welcome sparkle to the proceedings. Edward Bluemel is excellent as Jimmy Thesiger, and Alexander Macqueen is genuinely funny as Lomax. You wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of Mark Lewis Jones's Sir Oswald Coote, especially not if he was carrying his rifle and you were an aristo.

It's a shame that a few things are dragged out or added unnecessarily, while other aspects of the plot which were important in the book – Bill Eversleigh's feeling for Bundle, the efficiency of Pongo – get very little room. But all in all, this isn't a bad Seven Dials version. If Chibnall chooses to do a sequel of some kind (maybe adapting The Secret of Chimneys, though that would be reversing the original chronological order of the novels), I'm here for it. 

Things to look forward to in 2026

Happy Boxing Day! Which is often a reasonably good time to blog, so here goes. There are quite a few projects cultural-consumption-wise that I'm at least moderately excited about, so I'll stick with a roundup of films/TV/the occasional book I'm looking forward to rather than a wish list of what I would like to happen (those are always a bit trickier to write anyway). As in 2025, I'm not expecting to get too carried away and develop a new villain crush or anything, but you never know.

Seven Dials Mystery: Agatha Christie adaptations are a mixed bag, but this one, premiering on Netflix early this year, could be a fun one. The book it's based on is a romp, with some tongue-in-cheek references to the world of P.G. Wodehouse (though you don't have to pick up on them to enjoy it), and an almost guaranteed mood-lifter. The only thing I'm not too keen on in the book is a certain snobbishness – the heroine Lady Eileen aka Bundle is part of the aristocracy, and sometimes a faint contempt for New Money shines through. But Bundle is mostly likeable, unlike her ghastly dad.

I'm relying on Netflix to prune the snobbishness, but I'm a bit nervous about what else they'll change. Bundle seems well-cast, though.

A Tale of Two Cities: Apparently, BBC in collaboration with MGM+ is working on a new adaptation, and it has been a while since the last one. Two Cities isn't one of my favourite Dickens novels (Barsad is fun, but otherwise it's lacking in the male villain department). However, I do like it, and a French Revolution setting is always interesting. 

Moreover, this will give a good indication of whether the Beeb can still do Dickens or if they are too mired in cultural politics to get a classic adaptation right (I could only make it through two episodes of the latest "gritty" Great Expectations). Kit Harington aka Jon Snow in Game of Thrones plays Sydney Carton – no objections from me – but another actor plays his accidental double Charles Darnay. Well, OK then.

One Piece season two: I haven't blogged about this hard-to-define Netflix show – fantasy and pirate adventure mashup is how I'd describe the genre – but I had a great time with the first season of this live-action adaptation of an anime. The fictional world is quite insane, and the premise more than a little strange. The charismatic young protagonist Monkey D. Luffy is dead set from an early age on finding a fabled pirate treasure (the One Piece of the title) and becoming "King of the Pirates". His wild ambition becomes increasingly likely as he gathers a motley crew of talented misfits, acquires a ship and finds (well, steals) a rare map.

What makes the premise strange is that Luffy doesn't actually want to rob anyone, and doesn't seem to realise that this is what pirates do most of the time, rather than just hunt for treasure and go on adventures. Also, no-one points this out to him (his pal Koby, who ends up with the Marines, has a try, but is told that "there are good and bad pirates"). Encountering increasingly sinister pirate captains in the forms of a short-tempered female pirate with a skull-crushing club; a psychotic clown; a creepy con man masquerading as a butler; and finally a fishman with an anti-human bias does not serve as a wake-up call to Luffy. However, the sheer charm of the progatonists and lots of exciting derring-do carry the series through all absurdities (which are entertaining in themselves), so here's hoping they keep it up in the next season.

The Mandalorian and Grogu: As someone who enjoyed all seasons of The Mandalorian, even the third one, I have to include this on my list, though I'm not sure where next Din Djarin's and Grogu's story could go. But I like to spend time in this part of the Star Wars universe, so I'm happy to catch this at the cinema. Let's hope that, if Thrawn makes an appearance, he'll be more impressive than in Ahsoka, and that they don't waste too much time on Grogu-being-cute scenes.

Dark Reading Matter by Jasper Fforde: Finally, a Thursday Next novel! It's apparently the last one, but I understand that; it might be time to wrap up Thursday's story.  

I wasn't as fond of the latest Thursday Next novel, The Woman Who Died A Lot, as the other ones in the series, and I did not care for the last instalment of Fforde's The Last Dragonslayer series (which was never a great favourite of mine) or the stand-alone novel Early Riser. Consequently, I've been a bit worried about Fforde's fictional output lately. What with that obvious immigrants-as-rabbits allegory he wrote (to be fair, I haven't read it, but honestly – I hate this trope), I was afraid that he was suffering from the modern ailment of politicitis which has had a baleful influence on cultural output. But I was pleasantly surprised by the follow-up to Shades of Grey, Red Side Story, which though by no means unpolitical had the old Ffordian verve and inventiveness. So I'm cautiously optimistic. If I like Dark Reading Matter, it might be time for another full-length Jasper Fforde post.

Avengers: Doomsday: It's make-or-break-time for the MCU, and I will be there cheering the Avengers on, or possibly Doctor Doom. And Loki will definitely be in it!

A double dose of cosy crime dramas

The expression "cosy crime" is an odd one. It has a negative, somewhat patronising tinge, and I think few crime writers would whole-heartedly admit to penning "cosies" (as they're called in the latest Carol Goodman – I don't know if it's an established term). People who enjoy cosy crime like myself, though, don't tend to be shy about it, and bookshops sometimes proudly label a whole section of their shelf space as "cosy crime", so their customers don't risk going home with something grim and gritty by mistake. I don't think TV execs mind the term "cosy crime" very much either.

One reason writers themselves are wary of the term is perhaps that it can be unwise to consciously pen a "cosy crime" story. If you sit down thinking: "Right. Let's make this really selling. Cups of tea, shrewd yet loveable senior citizens, fireplaces, cute pets, quirky neighbours, dead earls, here we gooo", chances are you'll end up with a story that is either too cloying or too ironic and underestimates its readership/audience. It's better to start with the mindset that you'd like to write the kind of crime story you yourself enjoy – and then, as often as not, it will turn out a comfortable read or watch. 

As for any moral reservations: it's true that crime is not cosy in real life. But nor is it entertaining in any other way. Criticism against "cosy crime" could be levelled against the whole genre of crime fiction, however glum and gory. We're probably ghouls to like it so much, but hey, no real person is harmed during reading or watching, and it keeps us away from the bear pits.

Circling back to the real subject of the post: I've recently watched not one but two British "cosy crime" dramas, which aired in the UK in the summer and have now found their way to Swedish television. I must admit it took me by surprise to find that they were as good as they were, because on paper they do seem a bit too textbook even for me.

What to say of this pitch? In Ludwig, David Mitchell, the comedian known for his "posh and repressed" persona, plays professional puzzlemaker John aka Ludwig. He's forced to impersonate his much more well-adjusted twin brother when the latter goes missing. The brother's a police detective, and John soon finds that his puzzle-solving flair is a help when cracking murder cases, though he's not great at social interaction.

I was suspicious of this setup as it smacked of "diagnosis crime", i.e. the kind of plot where the problem-solvers are better at their job because they have a touch of Aspergers, autism or OCD. It's a bit overdone. Besides, David Mitchell as nerdy and socially handicapped? Not exactly inventive.

Yet somehow it works. The crimes themselves are nice little puzzles, and the continuing mystery of James's disappearance is intriguing. But what really saves the show from being too run-of-the-mill is John's interaction with his brother's family: his sister-in-law, for whom he has always carried a torch, and his nephew, who isn't half as resentful about his uncle's prolonged stay as he could have been. Anna Maxwell Martin as James's wife, who ruthlessly pushes John out of his comfort zone yet is also very fond of him, is a standout. It's a pity Mitchell doesn't have more scope for his comic timing, though: mostly, he plays it straight.

Another obvious pitch would be Mark Gatiss as a closeted owner of a bookshop, who keeps his books in an eccentric order, enjoys tea and ginger biscuits and solves murders as a side-line in post-war Britain. And that's what we get in Bookish. Gatiss's character is even called Gabriel Book (which means his shop is called Book's, with an apostrophe). He has a harmonious lavender marriage with lovely Trottie, his best friend since childhood, and they own a dog named Dog. Bit too cosy, surely?

However, yet again, the obvious set-up works. The atmosphere is reminiscent of Foyle's War, and we get classic whodunnit plots in enjoyable settings, like a film shoot and a luxury hotel (the latter falling apart a bit). The problem-solving team is easy to root for: Polly Walker as Trottie is a delight, and I like ghoulish girl-next-door Nora and the easy-going Inspector Bliss. The Books' young protegé Jack is less interesting (he mostly walks around looking clueless), but I can take that. As for Gatiss, I admit I prefer his icy Mycroft in Sherlock, but he keeps Book (in some ways an eccentric-Brit cliché) from becoming grating with a touch of vulnerability.

It's heartening to see that even shows that look formulaic on the face of it can turn out to be treats if carried off with a bit of effort and some heart. A focus on core relationships is a good way to make a drama more compelling; it's not all about the problem-solving, even in a whodunnit. I'm looking forward to more Ludwig and Bookish – but no annoying communist housemaids next time, please.

A very English (somewhat chilly) mini-series

Finally, I've followed the strong recommendations of friends and critics and watched the mini-series A Very English Scandal from 2018, which, as luck would have it, was still available on Swedish streaming. The title's not a lie: it's certainly very English indeed. Given this and my anglophile tendencies, one would maybe have expected me to warm to it more, but perhaps it's just not meant to be the kind of story you warm to. In any case, I did enjoy it.

The odds are stacked in the show's favour. It stars Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw, Alex Jennings and a great supporting cast; it's directed by Stephen Frears; it's based on a book by John Preston (if it's the same John Preston I'm thinking of, I used to like his reviews in The Sunday Telegraph a lot); and, last but not least, it's written by Russell T Davies, back when he was still good. All right, maybe that's unfair, but I'm still bitter about what he's serving up in Doctor Who these days. In the best scenes in Scandal, you wonder how it can be the same man who wrote this and drivel like the "male-presenting Time Lord" speech in "The Star Beast" or the clumsy eat-the-rich-kids satire in "Dot and Bubble".

The scandal in question is one I know nothing about, which can be both an advantage and a bit dangerous. It concerns Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party in England in the Sixties and Seventies, who was doing really well until people found out, one: that he had a male ex-lover and two: that he tried to have said male ex-lover killed.

At least, that was what Thorpe was accused of. From the point of view of the TV series, there's never any doubt that he was as guilty as a man can be. This is where the danger of not knowing anything comes in, because I buy it all, even while wondering how a seemingly canny politician could have been so stupid. Although the characterisation is far from black and white, you do briefly wonder about the ethical aspects of making a juicy TV drama of something that happened not so long ago (Jeremy Thorpe's son is probably still alive). But heck, it is a good story.

In spite of its sharp script and good pace, underscored by lively music from the excellent Murray Gold (more British talent), I wasn't completely blown away by the first episode. It was hard to care too much about an affair gone sour when the persons involved were Grant's callous Thorpe and Whishaw's neurotic Norman Josiffe, later Scott, who as soon as he was ditched reported Thorpe to the cops and wrote a 17-page-long letter to his (Thorpe's) mother. But the show got steadily better – or rather, more engaging, as it was always good. By the third episode, I was at the edge of my seat, and here it is a definite advantage not to know how it all turned out. The last sentence of the "what happened then" summaries at the end hits the at once droll and moving note it aims for.

If anyone is short-changed in this drama, it's Jeremy Thorpe. Not that Hugh Grant doesn't do an excellent job of playing him, but the man remains an enigma until the end. Grant can do both charm and the lurking darkness beneath to perfection, but what he's been less called for to do during his career is vulnerability or raw emotion, and this part is no exception. This version of Thorpe is no tragic hero, someone who could have done great things if he hadn't stumbled down a dark path following one misstep. He is a man with a sliver of ice in his heart acting in character. It's not a complete hatchet-job, which makes it all the more damaging. Thorpe clearly cared about his family, and every clip we see of a political speech (there's not that many, though) makes quite a lot of sense. Also, Norman's no saint, and you can understand why his ex feels sorely tried at times. Still, you're left thinking that England had a lucky escape.      

Davies keeps his own hobby-horses admirably at bay. There's the odd line that sounds more like him than the characters, as when Norman complains about "men like him" not being in the history books (but what do I know? That could be direct quote). It's also a bit remarkable that just about every male character seems to have at least tried on sleeping with men, and bisexuality isn't really considered as a plausible explanation to playing both sides, unless the fellow concerned would otherwise be labelled heterosexual. But we're spared ranting, and Davies even uses his own experiences (or what feels like his own experiences) to touching effect. Not that he was around the gay scene, or lack of it, at the same time as Jeremy Thorpe, but he can clearly relate to it's being a jungle out there.

I'm glad I got round to watching A Very English Scandal. Like one of its protagonists, it can be a bit chilly at times. However, if RTD hits his stride again and produces anything nearly as good in the upcoming season of Doctor Who, I will be a very happy bunny.

Anticipation list follow-up: expectations met, mostly

Back in January, I did one of my almost-yearly "things to look forward to" posts (restricted to the area of pop-cultural consumption). As it's sadly a bit too early to start the 2025 lists, but I feel in the mood for a list post, what if I followed up on the projects I thought sounded at least vaguely promising? I mean, I know I've already blogged about some of them, but as a summing-up? No, I'm not dodging an in-depth analysis of the problems of making the multiverse work (in film/TV) at all...

I'll change the order around a bit, though; I'll start with the items I haven't discussed in blog posts yet and save the item that was the biggest disappointment to last.

Moonflower Murders: Thankfully, Swedish Television didn't let me down. They both aired the latest adaptation of an Anthony Horowitz crime novel and made it available on their streaming service, and I was well pleased with it. It had the same virtues as Magpie Murders: Lesley Manville's Sue Ryeland and Tim McMullan's Atticus Pünd make for a likeable sleuthing duo with their meetings on the border between fiction and reality (there's a multiversal incursion for you), and the way some of the actors played two roles in parallel plot threads was cleverly done. As with Magpie Murders, I felt less cheated by the way the two interlocking crime mysteries were laid out than when I read the novel. Moonflower Murders the novel ended with a firm goodbye to this particular fictional universe, but the TV adaptation (also done by Horowitz) leaves the door a little more open for a sequel. I would not say no.

The Bad Batch season three: Is it just me, or have the animated projects from the Star Wars and Marvel franchises been consistently great of late, while the live-action projects are a bit more hit and miss? It may very well be just me with my soft spot for animation. Be that as it may, this Clone Wars spin-off, which perhaps didn't seem that promising on paper, outdid expectations with an engaging, well-knit overarching story about a band of brothers and a sister trying to carve out an existence during the Imperial era of the Star Wars galaxy. Crosshair remained my favourite throughout, but as he kept himself on the path of redemption he hesitantly started on previous season, new entertaining if unsubtle villains were introduced. Doctor Hemlock (I warned you!) with his pleasing design, satisfactorily high level of competence and purring voice (American-accented, which makes a nice change in this context as Star Wars baddies are so often played by Brits) caused my villain-loving heart to flutter, and disgraced Vice Admiral Rampart was a hoot.

Inside Out 2: Yeah, as I've previously mentioned, this was pretty darn good. Even though I prefer the original, which is more rewatchable, the way Anxiety is portrayed in this film is almost too relatable. Roll on Inside Out 3 – next time, I want to see Riley fall in love.

Belgravia: The Next Chapter: OK, I can't pretend it wasn't a let-down that Julian Fellowes didn't pen this supposed sequel to Belgravia, which at the end of the day had very little to do with the original. I had other reservations as well, especially at the start of the series, but taken all in all it was a solid period drama that felt a little closer to being set in a recognisable past than many costume dramas of late (which are often knowingly anachronistic). It particularly seemed to find its stride in the final episode. Poor Oliver Trenchard was hard done by, though.

Doctor Who series fourteen/season one: As you may already be aware, this was a big let-down for me. When will I stop hoping for Doctor Who to return to its former glory? It's hard to let go of hope when the very same duo that were show-runners back in those glory days are still running and/or writing for the series. But by now, Doctor Who has become so heavily politicised that it has a harder time getting away with things that weren't such a big deal in the olden days. 

When the main thrust of Doctor Who stories was about something bigger (love, friendship, the wonders of the universe, the problems of near immortality, the strengths and weaknesses of mankind) or something smaller (oooh, look, Daleks and Cybermen are fighting!) than politics, I could shrug off the odd bout of clumsy messaging. Now, it seems, clumsy messaging is practically all the show does. I had hopes that the Steven Moffat-scripted Christmas special would be a suitably light-hearted palate cleanser, but the sneak peek we've been given does not look promising. "Evil must logo"? Really? Also, the main villain being a Big Bad Arms Manufacturer isn't only clichéd, it's not quite as obvious a choice of common enemy as it might once have been. Yes, of course there are all sorts of ethical implications when a company's products are expressly made to maim and kill people. But at the end of the day, what are we supposed to defend ourselves with if we are attacked? Bananas?

I've not yet reached the point where I will stop watching Doctor Who, and most likely I never will. But for now, it's no longer my favourite sci-fi franchise. For all its faults, Star Wars has eclipsed it. It gave me the most memorable Doctor to watch this year.

Pretentious TV entertainment

It's a sad truth (all right, I don't find it that sad) that it's easier to trash something than to gush over it. And so, once more following the path of least resistance, I forgo the chance to praise the unexpected enjoyability of the film Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves in favour of sinking my teeth into the Netflix mini-series The Perfect Couple.

Reviews of this whodunnit story, set in and around the idyllic coastal residence of an ultra-rich family, have good-naturedly described it as entertaining trash. If I remember correctly, one review even called it the modern equivalent of Lace. For my part, I didn't think it can hold a candle to the giddy slice of escapism that is Lace. Lace and Lace II knew what they were and didn't give themselves airs. 

The Perfect Couple, in contrast, is tiresomely pretentious. If it's just supposed to be light entertainment, why is the pace so languid? Why are there so many extreme close-ups? Why is the background music whoo-whoo-ing in the background in an abstract, non-hummable way? It feels like the series wants to be Big Little Lies very badly. I'm not saying Big Little Lies was a masterpiece, but it offered something unexpected which gave it some substance: far from always being at each other's throats, the yummy mummies did offer one another real friendship. The Perfect Couple is devoid of any such nuance. The wealthy suspects are horrible, the investigating police charmingly down-to-earth, the "normal" girl about to marry one of the sons of the super-rich family Sees Through The Façade etc. These aren't even entertaining clichés (though I liked the cops), and they're served up in a po-faced manner which makes you suspect that the series has ideas above its station.

I'm usually indulgent towards pronouncements like "TV series are the new novels". They're not: novels are the new novels. But it does television no harm to try to emulate the dramatic storytelling and vivid characterisation of, say, a Victorian page-turner. Except, the rising status of TV in the last few decades comes at a cost. The same artsy types who've made novel-reading an endurance sport have muscled in and suddenly want to tell us what is "quality" television and what is not. Anything too upbeat or watchable is sneered at, when entertainment (and perhaps some light instruction) was once TV's prime function. 

In that way, you really could say that TV series are "the new novel". Novels were once written mainly for entertainment too, then they became Something Fancier. Now TV has become Something Fancier, and along with the TV equivalent of Victorian ripping yarns have come the less welcome TV equivalent of those high-brow novels all the critics praise to the skies, but few of us ordinary mortals have actually read, because frankly they sound awful. That's exactly why the critics love them, I suspect. If they were too appealing, then there wouldn't be much cachet in having read them – or, in the case of TV series, having seen them.

What's this got to do with The Perfect Couple, you may ask? It may be a bit pretentious, but it's hardly trying to be a TV version of Ulysses. Well, my (largely unsubstantiated) theory is that some conceptions of "quality" television have trickled down to what could be called "middle-brow" programmes, and have had a detrimental effect on them. Pacy storytelling? Way too cheap. Witty dialogue? Good heavens, no, this isn't an ordinary cop show. Sexual tension? Problematic. Romance? Well and truly dead, darling.

You can still find pacy stories, snappy lines and romance on the telly, but you increasingly have to move to the cheerfully low-brow spectrum of TV in order to get your fix. So be it, then. Maybe it's about time I rewatched Lace?     

Novels that passed the travel test

I tend to underestimate how much time and effort goes into travel, though it's definitely worth it in the end. It's not only the time spent travelling: the week before you go is full of preparations, and the week after you return full of tasks you've put off while you were away, plus you have to readjust to everyday life. All of which is a roundabout excuse for me not having blogged for nearly a month.

Not feeling very analytical, I've decided to simply do a book version of the handy "films I saw in-flight" blogs one and two I resorted to in 2018. My travels didn't take me very far this time, so there were no in-flight films, but I did get some reading done. These novels passed the travel test of providing entertainment on airports, planes, trains, hotel rooms and even one or two buses – though some with more distinction than others.

Oxford Blood by Antonia Fraser I got this classic whodunnit from the Eighties for my birthday as 1) it takes place in the atmospheric surroundings of Oxford colleges 2) it's written by Fraser, a popular historian and thus a tried-and-tested author. As it turns out, it's more concerned with the English upper-crust than academic Oxford, but I didn't mind this, as I'm always up for stately-home-based intrigues. 

Fraser writes elegantly if a little distantly; I never felt I got under the skin of her glamorous TV journalist sleuth Jemima Shore. However, the remoteness had its advantages. Fraser keeping her distance to her heroine meant that Jemima didn't come across as too annoyingly opinionated, which could otherwise easily have been the case. It is sometimes hard to know the level of irony in the narrative's statements, though, or how much Jemima really cares for people close to her.

The Last Word by Elly Griffiths Griffiths is an example of an author who can sometimes make her opinions a little too plain through her characters – always allowing for the possibility that the opinions in question might just be the character's and not the author's. Having said that, I've found all the Griffiths novels I've read to be absolute page turners. I gobbled up this one, which features a likeable group of amateur sleuths last seen in the equally good The Post-Script Murders and, to a lesser extent, Detective Harbinder Kaur. 

Kaur has been the police presence in all the novels I've read so far by Griffiths, and I find her a little too chippy, though her very crankiness does make her less of a box-ticking exercise (she's a Sikh and a lesbian). As other characters apart from Kaur were also quite chippy in her latest outing Bleeding Heart Yard, I enjoyed that novel the least of the ones in the Kaur series. Therefore, I was happy with the amateur sleuth trio once again taking centre stage. Old-age pensioner Edwin, Amazonian Ukrainian carer and entrepreneur Natalka and her ex-monk boyfriend Benedict tend to be less judgemental than Kaur, if also a little more gullible. I also very much enjoy the theme of writers and writing which runs through most of the Kaur mysteries; this one takes place partly at a suitably creepy writers' retreat.

Last Tango in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce I bought this one locally because I was in Wales and had dim recollections of quite liking the first instalment in the series. Of the novels I read, this was the one that didn't quite live up to my expectations, though it saw me through a two-hour train journey and an equally long flight quite nicely. 

As a pastiche of quip-filled PI yarns à la Raymond Chandler, set in an outlandish alternative-reality version of Wales where loose women wear stovepipe hats and gangster druids are in a turf war with Meals-on-Wheels matrons, Last Tango sounds like a comic read in the same inventive vein as Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels. But though there were many neat conceits in Last Tango and a few quips, it wasn't as funny as I'd thought it would be. Sometimes I didn't know if it was going for all-out seriousness or merely parodying philosophical passages in Chandler and others, but I believe it was mostly the former. The novel had a slightly melancholy air in spite of the absurdities going on which, if you're a true Chandler fan, you may see as a plus. I was expecting more high-jinks, though.

Things to (cautiously) look forward to in 2024

I admit, there are few announcements of 2024 projects in the cultural consumption line that I'm unequivocally excited about. Somehow, I don't think we'll get any great adaptations of Victorian classics this year, and a new Downton doesn't seem to be on the cards either – though there is some hope for original costume dramas on a smaller scale. It seems to be a relatively meagre year for geekdom as well. There's only one Marvel movie slated for 2024 (Deadpool 3 – as I've not watched the previous two Deadpool movies I'm not that invested), and what's worse from my perspective, their planned Disney+ shows don't seem that interesting. They may be fun to watch, or they may not.

Star Wars doesn't appear to be bringing its A game to 2024 either (more on this below). Still, seeing as I've subscribed to eleventy-one streaming services I'm in no position to complain. I feel like a fashionista looking into her enormous wardrobe, wailing "I don't have a thing to wear". Maybe 2024 will be the year when I properly explore the content already available on my services and uncover some gems. Or I may be lazy and simply comfort-rewatch a lot of Downton and Once Upon A Time.

Anyway, I've managed to find a few things that I'll definitely watch and hopefully enjoy:

Doctor Who series fourteen/season one As I've ranted about in my review of the 2023 specials, how much I enjoy RTD's second era as Doctor Who showrunner is entirely dependent on how successfully he steers clear of politics. I've heard a worrying quote from Millie Gibson, who plays Ruby, saying that the forthcoming season will have "controversial" elements and is "what we need". The last thing I need is "controversial" Doctor Who if it takes the form of a showrunner, whose political judgement I don't trust, feeding me his opinions like cod-liver oil. But this might not be what Gibson meant at all. She and Ncuti Gatwa made a great duo in the Christmas special, and there are so many intriguing mysteries set up for this and coming seasons. The one who waits? The Toymaker's legions (I bet that piano-themed villain is one)? The Master's return? Mrs Flood's identity? Oh come on – this has got to be good, hasn't it?

Inside Out 2 Shock confession: I still haven't seen Disney's Wish. It wasn't in Swedish cinemas until the beginning of December, and I was travelling, then I had a cold, and then it was Christmas. By the new year, Wish had moved to the matinee slots, which are of little use to me. So I'll stream it in February or whenever it hits Disney+. Judging by the scathing reviews, it seems that in spite of Magnifico it's not one of the all-time Disney greats.

But at least it will give me some sort of Disney Animation fix this year; otherwise, they are offering nothing. I'm not counting a Mufasa prequel with dead-eyed CGI lions.

However, there is Pixar's Inside Out 2, which could be fun. I loved the original – it's one of my favourite Pixar films, perhaps even the favourite one (in hot contest with Ratatouille). I am a little concerned, though. The film will be tackling Riley's puberty, but among the new emotions introduced in trailers there's no mention of Desire or (which would admittedly be more child-friendly) Love. And in that case, haven't the film's creators kind of missed the point of puberty?

Belgravia: The Next Chapter I had to dive deeply in order to find this one (all right, a Google search on "period dramas 2024"), but apparently there is a sequel of sorts to Belgravia slated to appear in 2024. I say "of sorts" as we're fast-forwarding to the 1870s and a new generation of protagonists, but I'm all for it. The first series of Belgravia, an adaptation by Julian Fellowes of his own novel, was entertaining, if not in the Downton class. But I've stopped expecting the new Downton by now. Just give me a good, solid period drama without TV execs tying themselves in knots over the inequalities of history and I'll be happy.

Moonflower Murders As with Belgravia, my best bet for getting to watch this may actually be Swedish Television, not my aforementioned streaming services (buying the DVD is also an option, of course). It was Swedish Television that picked up the adaptation of Magpie Murders, to which Moonflower Murders is a kind of sequel. These crime novels by the ever-reliable Anthony Horowitz were both great reads, but I think I actually enjoyed the TV adaptation of Magpie Murders more than the book. Lesley Manville is older than I imagined Susan to be, but she has lots of style, and I loved her interactions with the fictional detective Atticus Pünd, played by the mellow-voiced Tim McMullan. In general, there were more connections between the murder Susan was looking into and the story-within-the-story than it was possible to convey in the novel, with actors playing both persons in a murdered detective writer's life and characters in his whodunnit. I'm hoping for more in the same vein.

The Bad Batch season three: Yep, I'm looking forward more to the third season of an animated Star Wars show than to either of the live action series that will (probably) be airing this year. This isn't too much of a slight as I enjoy animation a great deal, and the series has been surprisingly strong so far, considering the loveable clone protagonists are not overly complex characters (I perk up no end whenever the villainous Crosshair shows up). But it's still a bit of a slight. Of course I'll watch Skeleton Crew and The Acolyte, but... kids lost in space (admittedly with Jude Law), really? As for The Acolyte, the quote "This isn't about good or bad, it's about power and who's allowed to use it" doesn't sound very promising (see the first item on the list). Though it has to be said, I'm always there for trashing the Jedi.

Comfort reading – and comfort viewing

So, there haven't been that many blog posts from me about books lately. That's because I have been very unambitious in my reading of late. I took one look at Doctor Zhivago, saw that it started with a description of the protagonist's sad childhood rather than some juicy romantic stuff involving villains as love rivals, and concluded that on second thought, it looked more like a winter novel. Not even the self-indulgent reads have always lasted the course – fairy-tale inspired novels I've given up on include Marissa Meyer's Gilded, although it looked so promising (a teenage boy with freckles? Really, Marissa??). One typical summer read I managed to finish, though, was The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. I liked it fine, but I suspect other readers of not-too-grisly crime stories may enjoy it more than I do, and I'll try to explain why.

I can't be the only one who tried on The Thursday Murder Club because Richard Osman is "that guy from Pointless". There is an international channel for us foreign anglophiles called BBC Brit, which basically only airs a handful of Beeb programmes, usually reruns too. Luckily, Pointless is one of those programmes, and thanks to one of my many streaming services I can watch it on catch-up. I love this game show. The premise (the contestants must try to score as few points as possible by finding the most obscure, correct answers to questions that have been put to a number of people before the show – the more people who knew the answer, the higher the score) is tricky to get your head around, but once you have it's a mildly educational delight. If I don't feel like watching anything else, an episode of Pointless usually works. 

One of the reasons this is such a comfort blanket of a show is the friendly atmosphere provided by the programme's presenter, Alexander Armstrong, and said Richard Osman, who is the one giving out the correct answers. The blessedly un-barbed banter between Armstrong and Osman leaves the viewer with a warm, fuzzy feeling towards both of them. In other words, to regular viewers of Pointless, Richard Osman has goodwill in spades.

I was a bit doubtful about the plot of The Thursday Murder Club, though. As advertised on the blurb, it features four senior citizens at a high-end retirement residence who take an interest in unsolved murders, and soon get a fresh, local murder to sink their teeth into. This sounded to me almost like a parody of "cosy crime". Also, though I like Christie's Miss Marple, four oldies solving crimes seemed too much of a muchness, as I'm not really that interested in the daily routine of senior citizens (hopefully, one gets there soon enough). As I feared, the novel focuses heavily on the lives of its four aged protagonists – hard-as-nails ex-spy Elizabeth; Joyce, an retired nurse who's not as ditzy as she seems; tough old union boss Ron and polite and pedantic ex-psychiatrist Ibrahim. The plot takes its time to get going; there's a lot of scene-setting, and once I was actually close to quitting.

Once the crime story gathers momentum, though, it has many pleasing twists and turns, and I swallowed more than one red herring along the way (perhaps you trail after red herrings rather than swallow them? – Joyce or Elizabeth would probably set me right). The senior amateur sleuths are charming, though I occasionally found Joyce's decided opinions and Elizabeth's hard-ball-playing a little trying, and the police officers who try – and fail – to keep the quartet in check are very likeable. But this kind of mystery novel is not quite for me. There wasn't enough focus on the brainwork, and the quartet's different specialities and knowledge weren't used that much to solve the mystery. It wouldn't have mattered if I enjoyed the setting and atmosphere more, but I didn't particularly. I know the novel's message is that we should not discount the old, and it wants to show how intelligent and interesting these old'uns are, but to me, a little of Joyce's recounting of the daily life at the residence went a long way. However, I'm aware that this is very much a question of personal taste. 

The Thursday Murder Club does exactly what it says on the tin. If you like the idea of senior citizens solving murders, with the focus being on the cosy rather than the crime in "cosy crime", you'll probably enjoy this novel a lot. If the makers of Pointless asked 100 persons the question "Did you enjoy The Thursday Murder Club?" (not that they would as it's not a knowledge question, but bear with me), I suspect "Yes" would get a high score.

Grown-up thrillers and unsatisfying endings

Yes, I do occasionally watch stuff on TV that isn't meant for kids and/or nerds. Mostly, though, I have to say, these trips into grown-up land remind me why I usually prefer TV shows for kids and nerds. The slowness and portentousness of "mature" TV can be a trial, and the payoffs resulting from the slow build-ups aren't always worth the wait.

The Undoing on HBO is a case in point. In some ways it reminded me of another six-part thriller relying heavily on relationship dynamics, Behind Her Eyes on Netflix. Admittedly, the ways they tackled the ending of the drama were very different. In Behind Her Eyes, there was a big twist based on a wacky premise, whereas in The Undoing, there - wasn't. But in both cases, the pace was glacial, and I was close to quitting at times. Perhaps writers of thriller series should consider putting a three-episode restraint on themselves. They'd have one episode for the set-up, one for the build-up and creating of tension and atmosphere, and one for the conclusion. That is quite enough. Now, in The Undoing, we basically get a whole episode about the female protagonist Grace Fraser freaking out because she can't reach her husband after a mother of a kid at their son's school is brutally murdered. I liked Nicole Kidman in Big Little Lies, but a little of her neurotic Grace goes a long way. It's no wonder the cops find both her husband and herself suspicious; she claims she hardly knew the victim while at the same time acting like a nervous wreck.

Much of the time spent on Grace's anxiety could have been cut without harming the tense atmosphere. And yet, it's not the build-up of this series that has been criticised as much as the ending. And yeah - it's not great. But then, thrillers like these have a tough job when it comes to pulling off the ending. Their viewers are mostly seasoned consumers of crime drama and fiction and very hard to surprise, let alone in a good way. The ending of Behind Her Eyes was surprising, but it did rely on that wacky premise I mentioned. The Undoing sticks to more realistic scenarios, but that means that whatever you come up with, some of the viewers (or readers - the series is based on a novel) will already have thought of it. There are only a handful of people that could have killed the luckless Elena Alves - I make it four or five at a pinch - if you discount roping in a stranger or a bit player like Grace's best friend as the killer. Like Ariadne Oliver in Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table, we in the audience can cheerfully suspect all of them, one after the other, thinking up the most likely scenario for the murder in each case, so when the truth is revealed we are unlikely to be blown away.

When disappointed viewers say that "any other ending" of The Undoing would have been better than the one we got, I'm not so sure. It wasn't satisfying as the solution of a mystery, certainly, but I can think of at least one ending that would have felt equally "meh", and in terms of fall-out for the characters that were not guilty of murder it could have been a lot worse. Not that you care desperately about them (and this is another problem with a lot of "grown-up" TV dramas). The ending, to my mind, felt flat, but it didn't feel insulting.

What bothered me rather more was a plot point where a tragedy in a character's past - and said character's reaction to it - is given undue weight when the reveal draws near. That the character in question shows "neither grief nor guilt" over what happened is seen as a grave point in their disfavour. But the tragedy wasn't the character's fault, and they still got blamed for it - in such circumstances, I would also have been wary of expressing any grief freely. 

But the series has points in its favour too. Hugh Grant acts his socks off as Grace's husband Jonathan, who thinks he can charm his way out of any scrape (I preferred his disarmingly flippant moments to his emoting, but maybe that's partly the point). Donald Sutherland is badass as Grace's father, who as a bonus likes to hang out in front of the appealing paintings in the Frick Collection; Noah Jupe is affecting as the Frasers' precocious son, who has to watch his world fall apart; Mendoza the cop was cute, and I enjoyed the scenes with public defender Robert Adelman and super-expensive private lawyer Haley Fitzgerald respectively ("not feeling the vibe here, team" quips the latter when things are going especially poorly). It's to be expected: David E. Kelley, the script-writer, is an expert on courtroom drama.

All the same, if you're looking for a thriller that will have you murmuring "wow, that was clever", this isn't it. But then, how many thrillers are?                                    

Making it past chapter one

I've not had much luck with my reading of late. Books have been laid aside or abandoned altogether after a few pages after failing to engage me. Sometimes I've willed myself to continue: novels where you've read the first chapter without getting hooked are less likely to be picked up again than completely unread novels, and having too many of the first category lying around is depressing. So I did, for instance, manage to finish another book in the fairy-tale-inspired fantasy genre, although it was too slow-moving for me, in spite of goblins being present. One book where perseverance paid off, though, was The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz.

I usually enjoy Horowitz's writing, whether in crime novel or TV screenplay form. I really liked the TV series Foyle's War, and the crime novels The House of Silk, Moriarty and Magpie Murders all proved good reads. Thus, I bought The Word is Murder, regarding it as a sure thing. The first chapter failed to spark my interest, however. With hindsight, I can see why it was laid out the way it was, but at the time it only looked like an overlong scene-setting for one of the key elements of the murder mystery: a woman arranges the details surrounding her own funeral, and is killed later the same day.

Things brighten up, however, when we're introduced to our crime-solving duo: ex-policeman turned freelance Daniel Hawthorne, and... the author himself. The novel's conceit is that it's supposed to describe an investigation that really happened: Anthony Horowitz agrees to follow Hawthorne around and then write about his solving of a murder case, and then they split the profits. At first very much against the idea, Anthony (as I will call the character, as opposed to Horowitz the author) finally agrees to this plan for various reasons and becomes the Watson to Hawthorne's Holmes - not that Hawthorne has much in common with Holmes apart from an uncanny power of observation.

It's usually tricky for authors to insert themselves in their own work, and other examples from the world of crime fiction are not encouraging. Sweden's own 20th-century Queen of Crime, Maria Lang, created an author character called Almi Graan (an anagram of her pen name), who first started to appear in Lang's popular whodunnits in the Sixties. The problem is that Almi Graan's first appearances coincide with the decline of quality in Lang's books, and she is not as easy to like as was perhaps the intention. Agatha Christie's Ariadne Oliver, though good fun, isn't an unqualified success either: she adds little to the plots and is something of a self-indulgence on the author's part.

I thought Anthony Horowitz the character works well, though, as he is treated pretty mercilessly by Anthony Horowitz the author. The whole "this is a true crime" conceit can be a bit grating, with coquettish asides from the author bemoaning the fact that he doesn't have control of his material and would have written the whole thing up differently if it was all fiction. But it is all fiction, and the murder has enough fantastical elements - like the dramatic conclusion of the case - not to resemble "true crime" in the least. However, it's worth going along with it all for the sake of having Anthony as a Watson figure: not a complete clown, but pretty clueless compared to Hawthorne, whom he doesn't much like. For my part, I enjoyed the uningratiating Hawthorne and his dynamic with his author assistant. Anthony thinks that he needs to include colourful details about Hawthorne's character and private life in order for the book to sell, and tries to pump him, but Hawthorne is having none of it: the murder's the thing. On the other hand, one gets the feeling that Hawthorne likes Anthony rather better than the other way around. This looks like a crime novel series worth sticking with. Incidentally, another thing that warms me towards Hawthorne is that he didn't like the first chapter of Anthony's book.

Another crime novel where I had problems with the beginning chapter was Booked for Murder by Val McDermid, or V.L. McDermid as she signed herself for this book. It starts ostensibly from the point of view of a female hit-man (hit-woman?), but you can see there's a twist coming. I was glad when the story proper started, but all in all I got on considerably less well with this crime story compared to The Word is Murder. To be fair, this is an old novel of McDermid's, published in the Nineties, and is probably not one of her more ambitious works. Still, my goal was to try out McDermid, and as I wasn't that impressed, I'll probably be giving her Tony Hill books etc. a miss. The crime solver in Booked for Murder is Lindsay Gordon, a Scottish lesbian ex-journalist with a working-class background. Which doesn't have to mean she's chippy, but... she is. Or perhaps opinionated would be a better word. I didn't really warm to her, and the fact that her all-female circle of friends all share her views didn't make things better. The murder victim is killed in a flat in Islington, and I don't think it's wrong to say that the book's outlook overall is very Islington. Although the murder motive was pretty much impossible for the reader to figure out beforehand, I had no problem guessing who the murderer would turn out to be.

I'll say this much for Booked for Murder, though: it's an easy read, and what with all the reasonably sparky dialogue, it's a good distraction on the bus or if, like me at the moment, one is nursing an aching jaw. If Islington is your spiritual home, you may very well enjoy it.

Pleasant audiobook distractions

Ugh - while I had a run of benevolent posts at the end of 2019, I suspect 2020 will be the year when I complain a lot and will actually have to move into contentious territory, though I really don't wanna. Not yet, though. Let's have a nice, unprovocative theme for this week's post. Like, erm, audiobooks?

I've never really been into audiobooks until the last months, because I always preferred actually reading the books, and I still do. Belatedly, though, I've discovered the perfect use for an audiobook: as a means of taking your mind off the fact that you're doing something mind-numbingly boring. Earlier, I've tried music as a boredom-reliever, and in some situations - like simple working tasks that still require some attention - it's still the best remedy. But when it comes to, say, domestic chores, music leaves too much room in my brain to reflect on how dull the chore in question is and how much I would rather be doing something else. If I'm very lucky and find an audiobook I really enjoy, on the other hand, the opportunity to listen to it partly makes up for the dreariness of doing the washing, packing my lunch, unpacking supermarket bags or cleaning the kitchen. The first audiobook I tried - River Road  - helped me get through a four-hour train journey when the novel I'd brought failed to thrill.

The service I use is Audible, which has its advantages and disadvantages. The selection of books on offer is outstanding, but it's pretty pricey. I thought that the monthly subscription would give me access to the audiobooks on offer for free, but no such luck. You get a couple of free ones at the start, then one free book per month, but that's it: the rest you have to buy, and they're not cheap. I'll think I'll stick with it, though: I can work the app now, and it's nice to have so much to choose from. Here are some of the audios I've found so far:

River Road by Carol Goodman: Carol Goodman is the perfect autumn read, and most enjoyable in traditional book form. The settings, which are often academic and/or connected to creative writing, like a school teaching the Fine Arts or a writers' colony, have a high cosiness factor, and Goodman's use of myths and folklore appeals greatly to my inner librarian. On the down side, her heroines - often pretty opinionated - can annoy me, and the payoff of a nicely set up story is not always satisfying. The earliest books - The Lake Of Dead Languages and The Seduction Of Water - had wonderful atmosphere, and I loved the fairy-tale theme in The Seduction Of Water. But there are really no prizes for guessing who the main villain is in either of these novels. Later novels like The Other Mother and The Night Visitors are less easily guessable, but also less cosy and less full of "gosh, I know this myth/fairy-tale - aren't I learned" moments.

River Road was a novel I didn't get hold of in book form, so I was glad to find the audio version. It's in between the early, bookish but a bit predictable Goodman novels and the grittier later ones. Though not Goodman's best, it still has an enjoyable atmosphere - the protagonist Nan teaches creative writing at a college, which is the kind of job you have if you're a Goodman heroine - and as she has had some hard knocks in her life, like losing her small daughter in a car accident (why are writers so obsessed with kids who die or go missing?), I may actually have appreciated this story more as an easily digestible audiobook than if I'd pored over the pages of the actual novel.

Blythewood, also by Carol Goodman: This teen fantasy story was a disappointment. I'd have thought someone well-read like Goodman would be able to come up with a fantasy world enriched by classic myths and fairy-tales, but this was pretty generic stuff. The teenage heroine's love interest is a beautiful boy with wings, and the main villain is a creature of smoke and shadows - nothing particularly new there, and the magic school setup feels pretty done by now. I don't think I'll bother with the sequel; swooning over winged, misunderstood male beauties just isn't my thing.

Evil Under The Sun by Agatha Christie: One way to make sure you don't lose the thread of an audiobook's narrative is to listen to a book you've already read. This was read with relish by David Suchet, who did all the voices, not just Poirot's. If you stick with it through the somewhat slow start - Mrs Gardiner's monologues can be a bit much in this format - this is good fun, ideal for sorting and archiving documents to.

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie: What, again? Well, this was one of the freebies on offer at the start of my subscription, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to familiarise myself with the play as opposed to the book. It wasn't made clear, though, how close this adaptation actually was to the play, and apart from some obvious liberties taken with the source material - the Darling household scenes are set during the Blitz; Tiger Lily leads a gang of "Lost Girls", so not for the first time in the history of Peter Pan adaptations her poor tribe is shafted and written out of the story altogether; Hook flirts outrageously with the devoted Smee - the story follows the one in Peter and Wendy very closely indeed. I'm not sure I'm much the wiser. It was a nice, light-hearted listen, though. Rupert Everett's Hook is the campest pirate who ever yo-ho-hoed on the seven seas, which is something of a pity - even the Disney version is a wonder of dignity and menace in comparison - but he draws the odd chuckle. Adeel Akhtar is sweet as Smee (the polar opposite of his Thénardier) and the kids are convincing.

The Two Destinies by Wilkie Collins: OK, I'm not going to lie: about one hour in, this story is still rather soporific, even if it is read by the admirable Sam West. I'm a huge fan of Collins, but he can be long-winded in his explanations, and perhaps he's not ideal audiobook material. Anyway, I couldn't resist getting nine hours listening time as my free book of the month (a Christie would only have offered six hours). It remains to be seen if my greed has deceived me - nine hours are no good if I'm to give up after three. But sometimes Collins is a late starter, so there's still hope.

New Year’s resolution: to read more (or better) books

“Ooh, look, she’s reading a book, isn’t that nice”, a mother cooed to her toddler on the bus the other month, when same toddler was intrepid enough to take an interest in my reading self. It was a heartening comment as it shows how books (real ones made of paper) are still generally considered to be A Good Thing. At the same time, I felt a bit of a fraud. 2017 has not been a great reading year for me. Increasingly, I have been so little engaged in the book I’ve had on the go that I’ve preferred spending spare moments trawling the net or partaking of mood-lifting villain clips on Youtube.

Mind you, I haven’t completely neglected the reading part of life this year. I started on some of my impulse buys from this and previous years and managed to finish at least some of them. Tainted by Brooke Morgan (an impulse buy from the Strand, no less) proved to be well and evocatively written, though the genre – domestic chiller – isn’t really my cup of tea. With the irresistibly named If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio it was the other way around. I found the prose style a little precious, but the genre and setting was exactly the kind of thing I enjoy: the novel followed a group of drama students at a prestigious, seemingly idyllic College for the Creative Arts in Illinois. I’ve been stage struck since childhood and I love stories taking place in a theatre/drama school setting; it didn’t hurt that the College specialised in teaching its drama students nothing but Shakespeare. (It’s a little unlikely, though: surely, a successful drama education needs a bit of range?) The novel owes a heavy debt to The Secret History as we see a group of talented but not necessarily wise group of young students grapple with collective guilt. Fortunately, though, they don’t let the guilt get in the way of a lot of Shakespearean acting scenes.

Another impulse buy was the promising-looking family saga Roses by Leila Meacham – however, I’m ashamed to say I gave up on this one. My shame stems from the fact that it was written in a very enjoyable, page-turning style, so quality-wise there was no excuse not to finish it. The problem was I just couldn’t get behind the story, which seemed to follow the old pattern of “tough female neglects what really matters (family, love of her life) in favour of something that matters less in the great scheme of things (her family’s plantation)”. If you have no problem with this storyline and would like to try a doorstopper that’s unusually well-written, this could well be worth a look. For my part, I just thought the heroine’s family and love interest were tiresome and felt full sympathy with her for prioritising the plantation.       

Truth be told, there have been few novels this year that I’ve felt like losing myself in. This is irksome. I want to be the lady on the bus who reads a nice, old-fashioned book; being bookish is part of my identity. Steps will have to be taken in 2018: the question is, which ones?

At the end of the year, I always feel full of ambition regarding the cultural consumption of the year ahead: there’s so much to explore and whole new worlds to be discovered. Once the new year gets started, though, my ambitions tend to shrink very fast. I have a theory that this could be connected to sleep, and the lack of it: it’s always easier to set yourself life-expanding goals after a good lie-in. Also, once you get started, it’s discouraging if you happen to read more than one book in a row by authors you’ve not tried yet and find them disappointing. Much as I’d like to make new discoveries, perhaps I should be more open this year to re-reading classics from favourite 19th-century authors and reading more Ambitious Book Projects by the few high-prestige authors I’ve already tried and liked. It may not be the most innovative way to go, but it could be a way to get properly into the reading habit again.

There’s no denying that my Once Upon A Time obsession has got in the way of reading a bit, more than Downton Abbey ever did. Downton at least had the saving grace from a book point of view of making me interested in family sagas (admittedly, my search for the perfect family saga was not a great success). So maybe 2018 will be the year when I discover fantasy?       

Famous authors as characters (and narrators)

I haven’t had much luck in my reading of late, but after 50 pages of Drood by Dan Simmons I’m cautiously optimistic. Perhaps it’s partly due to my low expectations which were easy to exceed. For a long time, I passed Simmons’s novel by on my book-buying sprees, as the reviews had given me to understand that it  1) had horror-story elements  (and I don’t like horror stories) 2) was sneering about Dickens. In the end, though, immersing myself in yet another Dickens-themed tale proved too tempting, and besides the novel is acclaimed and can be seen as an Ambitious Book Project. After a lot of trying out of potentially soufflé-light reads which failed to give the proper comfort-blanket feel, maybe an ABP is exactly what I need.

I wasn’t wrong in my prejudices – Drood does have horror-story elements (though I’ve been able to stomach them so far) and it is sneering about Dickens. The sneeriness is largely a consequence of its narrator, though, who – supposedly – is Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s friend and protegé. Collins in this version is deeply envious of his older and more successful friend, and this colours everything he says about Dickens as a man and as a writer.

I find I can bear attacks on Charles Dickens’s character surprisingly well. Few people would contest that he behaved like a pig towards his long-suffering wife Catherine, for instance (though there are actually those who do). I have no problems in imagining Dickens as a difficult man; I admire him as a writer, not as a wonderful specimen of human kindness and philanthropy. Consequently, criticism of his writing is much harder to take, but in this context we needn’t credit the clearly biased narrator’s musings on the subject.

If anyone comes out of this set-up looking less good than he should it’s Wilkie Collins, and since I really like his books I think it’s a bit of a pity that he has to play the role of “Salieriesque rival” – as the blurb will have it – in Drood. I’d have preferred a fictional, envious sidekick to Dickens. Maybe the real Wilkie Collins’s position as young friend, colleague and reluctantly admitted almost-family member (Collins’s brother married Dickens’s daughter, a match Dickens didn’t care for), as well as an opium addict, is what makes him ideally placed to be the narrator of this book. I’ll take the liberty of seeing  Collins in Drood as fictional in substance, however, as I would like to think that the real Wilkie was a great deal less small-minded than he’s described as here.

One thing that makes it easier to imagine Drood Wilkie Collins and the real Wilkie Collins as separate people is that the narrative style in Drood doesn’t resemble Collins’s style at all. Again, this raises the question of why Collins is the narrator when he doesn’t even sound like Collins: on the other hand, we are spared cumbersome pastiche, which makes the novel a far more interesting read. I like Wilkie Collins’s style when he is the one using it, but I can imagine that it would not fare well in the hands of another author, especially as even the original can become a bit knotty at times when Collins insists on explaining every detail of his plot in order to make sure that there are no holes in it.

Another author whom you pastiche at your peril is Jane Austen. I’ve lost count of the times I wished that an Austen-themed novel – sequel, prequel, retelling, you name it – was not written in a supposedly Austenesque style. Austen managed to be pithy and amusing in spite of the regency feel of her prose. Modern authors, however, seem to use regency expressions in order to make the prose more genteel and circumspect than it need have been. This, in my view, is to misunderstand what makes Austen such a good writer – and it often makes for a boring read, too.

I’ve had mixed experiences with Stephanie Barron’s series of crime mysteries where Jane Austen is the narrator and sleuth. I remember enjoying Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor as a cosy manor-house mystery, and I liked the salaciously gossipy Jane and the Barque of Frailty (what it blithely presents as a known fact about Castlereagh even Wikipedia finds hard to credit). On the other hand, I can’t remember anything about Jane and the Wandering Eye except that I found it surprisingly heavy going, and recently I felt the same about Jane and the Man of the Cloth. In the latter case, I was also irritated by Jane’s crush on mercurial man of mystery Geoffrey Sidmouth, whom I found eminently resistible and notably underwritten, as if the mere idea of a moody squire with his own code of honour etc. should be enough to set hearts a-flutter. The books are written as pastiches on Austen’s style – it’s supposed to be extracts from her diary – and this simply weighs the narrative down, as do the faux-scholarly footnotes. Even if the real Jane Austen’s family does play a part, I was still left wondering why the heroine had to be Austen. There’s not much about her writing in the “diary extracts” (admittedly, what there is I enjoyed). The characters and plot of the book don’t connect to Austen’s novels in any interesting way. Surely, any plucky regency lass would have done just as well as protagonist, and would have been more likely to be susceptible to crushes than the level-headed Austen.

I’ll give this series a couple of more chances – after all, I’ve already purchased a few of the books in it. Man of the Cloth and Wandering Eye are early books, and maybe the mysteries pick up pace as the series moves along. But on the whole, I wonder if famous authors may have one thing in common with villains – they’re better off being depicted in novels at one remove, by someone close to them rather than supposedly in their own words.       

Hercule returns, but did he need to?

We're back to the theme of character-pinching. Sophie Hannah - an acclaimed crime writer in her own right - has to this date penned two new Hercule Poirot mysteries, with the approval of the Christie estate. I'm ashamed to admit I have no idea who the Christie estate are, but they needn't feel they've sold out: Hannah's crime stories are high-quality page turners and suitably whodunnity. I was left wondering, though, if the link to Agatha Christie and specifically Poirot was strictly necessary. One thing is clear: if these books - The Monogram Murders and Closed Casket - hadn't been marketed as Poirot mysteries, I probably wouldn't have read them. Hannah's other novels appear to belong to a scarier crime tradition - the psychological thriller - than Christie, and I would not have thought of looking for old-style whodunnits among her work.

Something of a psychological thriller feel does seep into these new Poirot novels, but not so much as to keep one awake at night. They're not quite classic Christie crimes, being more focused on making the crime or crimes themselves bewildering conundrums. In the first book, the detectives have to figure out how the murders could have been committed at all; in the second, the big poser is who would kill a dying man. I must admit I found the solution to the murders, with regard to motive especially, less satisfying than in Christie. Christie is often underestimated when it comes to characterisation: her characters have a believability which makes the reader swallow one surprising reveal after the other without feeling hoodwinked (there are exceptions: I do think the solution of Sparkling Cyanide was a cheat both psychologically and regarding how the murder was done). In Hannah's Poirot novels, the murder motives are a little strange and twisted. Christie's murderers have a moral blindness in common, and the motive is often something prosaic like downright greed, but the murders tend to make sense in their callous way: there's seldom anything weird about them. Though there are exceptions here as well. You can say that Hannah's mysteries have more in common with A Tragedy in Three Acts than, for instance, Five Little Pigs. However much or little they resemble Christie, they're certainly a good read.

What of Hercule, then? Hannah's treatment of the iconic Poirot is pleasingly subtle. The egg-shaped head, green eyes, little grey cells and French-isms are given an airing (yes, I know, Poirot is Belgian, but he speaks French) but take a back seat compared to his detective skills. As in Christie, when it comes to explaining the crime at the end, Poirot is suddenly capable of flawless English. His deductions are convincingly brilliant. But as his mannerisms don't play much of a part anyway, I was left wondering why these particular crimes had to be solved by this particular detective.

The question why Poirot is really needed is highlighted by the fact that the sidekick Hannah has invented for him - Scotland Yard Inspector Edward Catchpool - is both likeable and competent. Christie herself favoured the idea of a decicedly dense sidekick for her detective, based on her rather ungenerous interpretation of Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Hence poor Hastings, who is never allowed to be right about anything. I prefer Hannah's approach here. It's easier to identify with a character who isn't supposed to be a complete dunce, and as the narrator of the novels Catchpool becomes the reader's point of reference. He is a little Eeyoreish - the fact that he is firmly in the closet, which is why a well-intentioned attempt on Poirot's part to fix him up with a girl falls flat, doesn't exactly help in that regard. But the hang-dogginess suits him, and you trust his psychological insight and common sense (for the most part, anyway).

Why, then, couldn't Catchpool solve these crimes singlehandedly? Why bring Poirot into the story at all? I would say that if Poirot adds anything, it's that little extra dose of brilliance. Catchpool is intelligent, but a bit of a plodder, maybe because he doesn't have the self-confidence to trust his grey matter the way Poirot does. Then, as I've mentioned, the presence of Poirot labels the mysteries as the kind of crime novels a Christie fan will like, and that is admittedly helpful. I like Hannah's understated Poirot, and if she writes any more Poirot-Catchpool mysteries I will certainly read them. If, in time, she lets Catchpool solve a crime all by himself, I'll read that novel too.