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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 21 |
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A riveting new sleuth joins PBS' 'Mystery!' team
of TheColumnists.com
If ever we needed fresh blood for PBS' "Masterpiece Mystery!" series, it's this season, which otherwise would be packed with overly familiar detective names: Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple and Inspector Lewis, heir to the Inspector Morse franchise.
And that's why I'm so delighted to call your attention to mystery author Henning Mankell's Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander, who opens the "Masterpiece Mystery!" season next Sunday night (9 p.m. on most PBS stations) with "Sidetracked," the first of three movie-length episodes of "Wallander" scheduled this season from May 10-31,
Mankell's "Wallander" novels are best sellers throughout the world, but have been little known in the U.S. That will change now that the excellent British-made series, starring the great Irish actor Kenneth Branagh, will tantalize mystery fans and send them rushing to bookstores to snap up copies of the novels.
The "Wallander" episodes are cutting-edge modern police procedurals, but given an extra freshness because they take place somewhere other than America or England. They're also lifted to a high plane of creativity because you'll be seeing one of the world's great actors doing his first series detective role. You don't have to watch "Wallander" very long to quickly understand why Kenneth Branagh has been called "the new Laurence Olivier" ever since he turned up on the English stage.
Kurt Wallander is a dour, lonely and perpetually worn-down police detective who looks in need of a shave, some sleep and a long vacation, not necessarily in that order. He works in a budget-tight police environment where everyone seems to be overworked and weary, especially those who take their work seriously, like Wallander.
In "Sidetracked," he's given an emotional quintuple whammy as he attempts to cope with his estranged wife's demand for a divorce so she can marry someone else, his father's descent into Alzheimer's Disease, his need to heal old wounds between him and his grown daughter--and a pair of police cases that are frighteningly grotesque.
He's really knocked for a loop when he responds to a farmer's call for help because he's the nearest cop to the farm where a young woman seems to be hiding in a sprawling field of rape, a crop that resembles flowering mustard. When he approaches the girl, showing his police badge, she soaks herself in kerosene and torches herself. Watching a teenage girl burn to death can take the zest out of a guy pretty quickly, especially if he's already bone-tired and depressed.
But before Wallander even learns who the girl was, he's plunged into a much more demanding case: Someone has murdered the former Swedish Minister of Justice with an axe and then scalped him! Worse yet, this turns out to be the first in a series of "scalping" murders.
All you need to do is watch that terrifying sequence in the rape field to realize you're not in the cozy world of Miss Marple. The seaside town of Ystad in Sweden, surrounded by vast rolling fields of grain and other crops, doesn't resemble even remotely the usual crime backgrounds for "Masterpiece Mystery!" or any other shows with which you're likely to be familiar.
And Wallander himself, as brought to life by Branagh, isn't your typical TV detective either. Like Inspector Morse, he's somewhat cranky and quirky, but Morse was just a bit iconoclastic or eccentric. Kurt Wallander is hovering inches from a breakdown of some kind or another. He keeps having to pull himself together to keep his focus on the job at hand.
In the second episode, "Firewall," Wallander's daughter, Linda, actually tricks him into meeting an attractive woman through a computer dating website, hoping a new relationship will put him back in good shape. But that takes a terrible turn, too, that soon involves him in yet another bizarre murder case. The final episode, "One Step Behind," is equal to the other two--another absorbing murder mystery made even more intriguing by further revelations about the Wallander character.
The Swedes have filmed a "Wallander" TV series, too, and I believe some of those episodes have been seen over here. I haven't seen any of them, but they'd have to be very, very good to match this trio of top-notch mysteries.
This is a grand sendoff for "Masterpiece Mystery!," which now begins in late spring and runs through the summer months as a replacement for the Sunday night "Masterpiece Theatre" in its new classic and contemporary story modes.
The other first run episodes of "Masterpiece Mystery!" lined up for us are two all-new Poirot movies starring the best-ever Poirot, David Suchet, starting June 21; three episodes featuring yet another new Miss Jane Marple (Julia Mckenzie), starting July 5, and the second season of "Inspector Lewis," starting Aug. 30.
I loved "Wallander" and am now immersed in Mankell's original novels, but I am dying to see those Poirot movies--all of them based on Agatha Christie Poirot stories and novels not yet done by Suchet & Co., who seem set on filming all the Poirot stories, including the final one, "Curtain."
My compliments to Producer Rebecca Eaton and the whole "Masterpiece Mystery!" gang at WGBH in Boston for coming up with what appears to be the best season in just years and years.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The photo is courtesy of the BBC and WGBH. This column first posted May 4, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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