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Watching the Detectives

Watching the Detectives

And the problem of Poirot

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laura thompson
Dec 02, 2024
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Laura Thompson’s Substack
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Watching the Detectives
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This Thursday, Channel 5 starts a new set of P. D. James adaptations: the first is Death in Holy Orders, followed by Cover Her Face, then the book that I consider her best, Devices and Desires. This series is very watchable, mainly because of the casting of Bertie Carvel as sexy misery-guts detective Adam Dalgleish.

People always talk about the importance of scripts, which of course is true, but to my mind (and as a writer I should probably not say this) a high-calibre actor makes about 80% of the difference on screen. For instance the script of Wolf Hall is superb. Nevertheless: imagine Thomas Cromwell played by an OK actor, rather than one with Mark Rylance’s ability to convey a life’s back catalogue in an eye-flicker (I don’t think the real Cromwell was anything like his Wolf Hall incarnation, but that’s irrelevant).

I am crazy about good actors. When they are very very good they make me want to laugh, even in serious stuff, such is their accuracy and daring. Perhaps because in my twenties I thought I’d make a success of acting, yet was so deeply mediocre, I have particular reverence for their mysterious gift. Why is Lesley Manville so compelling; why Timothy Spall (I love his opinion-splitting Duke of Norfolk)? What enables them to convey an essence through a gesture, rather in the way that a great painter can collect together every possible truth about a person in one ambivalent gaze?

Well: another time, perhaps. Suffice it to say for now that Bertie Carvel as Dalgleish turns an intelligent, serviceable Channel 5 show with a less than lavish budget into something lustrous and serious. He is the best casting of a male Golden Age detective (I regard P.D. James as the last of the Golden Age) since Edward Petherbridge’s Lord Peter Wimsey back in 1987.

It might be said that these actors are A-grade talents, scattering slightly unnecessary quantities of depth and glamour upon a couple of figures from crime fiction. But then the detectives that they play are, in similar fashion, ‘too good’ for their genre. Dalgleish is austere and romantic, a poet published by the fictional equivalent of Faber, Ted Hughes (minus controversies) in the guise of a Met police Commander; Wimsey is a Balliol scholar, a man of wealth and taste who can play the harpsichord and has read every word in the literary canon; both are unfazed by strong-minded women. Dream men, in other words, who happen to be extremely good at solving murders.

Which leads me (as so often) to Agatha Christie, and her Hercule Poirot, neither of whom are ‘better’ than their genre. They merely define it. Poirot is pure detective, no more, no less. Quite impossible to imagine the dear fellow writing verse or falling in love with a tricky Somervillian.

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