Purists take warning: If you’re looking for a faithful adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, this week’s Masterpiece Mystery wasn’t it. But you probably already guessed that when you saw that “The Pale Horse” was a Miss Marple episode. For, if you’ve read the book, you know that Miss Marple isn’t in it. Normally,…
Outside it was the Fourth of July or as near as. Inside it was Halloween, a holiday that Hercule Poirot, being Belgian, would not have celebrated. I’m not sure whether I was celebrating “Hallowe’en Party,” the latest installment of Poirot on Masterpiece Mystery, myself. At any rate, it left me with mixed feelings—like the last…
Before I watched “The Clocks,” this week’s installment of Poirot on Masterpiece Mystery, I decided to read the book. (Well, it was supposed to be before; I wound up finishing the book after. The best-laid plans and all that…) I’ll admit I haven’t done this before. I usually let the series stand alone, and it…
Worlds collided on my TV Sunday night. Running concurrently: a brand-new episode of Poirot to kick off this summer’s season of Masterpiece Mystery on PBS and the season finale of The Killing on AMC. What’s that you say? “Nothing a DVR can’t handle”? You’d be correct, providing the DVR was functioning properly. Mine wasn’t, as…
I’ve never read Arthur Conan Doyle. Is that sacrilege? I suppose I could. I probably will…someday. But I haven’t bothered yet. I know, shame on me. On the other hand, it’s comforting to know that “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, “A Study in Scarlet” and the rest of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales are calmly waiting…
If there’s a contemporary equivalent of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, she would be Jessica Fletcher, the mystery novelist/sleuth at the heart of the Murder, She Wrote TV and book series. Calm, understanding, sensible, and unfailingly polite, she’s everything most female sleuths are not and—if we’re being honest—everything we all should aspire to be. Jessica has…
Camilla Lackberg (Camilla Läckberg) can’t possibly be telling the truth. Even in a clingy cheetah-print wrap dress accessorized with delicate silver jewelry and looking every inch the glamour puss, there’s an air of efficiency about her. She claims to be a procrastinator, but you have the feeling that she doesn’t tolerate slackers. She’s written two cookbooks and…
Still wrapped in my dilemma over whether Indians really speak as they do in Tarquin Hall’s Vish Puri novels (The Case of the Missing Servant and The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing), I asked some Indian friends if, as I suspected, the peculiar syntax of dialog such as “Don’t do tension, sir,” was…
After allowing myself to become sucked into the agonizing five-year vortex that was Lost, I vowed I would never again commit to watching an American dramatic television series. Not for me Mad Men, C.S.I. in any of its myriad incarnations or the interminable West Wing. I wasn’t about to become invested in another relationship that…
I just finished reading The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin—not a cozy, but a historical mystery (which is just as good in my opinion) set in nineteenth-century Russia. It’s the first in a series of a dozen or so mysteries featuring the young police investigator Erast Petrovich Fandorin, five of which have been translated into…
