‘Jonathan Creek’

While “Daemons’ Roost,” the episode I watched last night, was much better than the Season 5 eps, it reminded me of an apparently much-needed lesson for aspiring mystery writers—that mysteries have to be clear with their setups.

Creator-writer David Renwick’s solutions are good, even great: The main one is basically a magic trick reworked as an impossible-crime solution, a Renwick specialty (cf. “Black Canary,” “The Tailor’s Dummy,” and especially “Danse Macabre”). I’d go so far as to say Renwick’s been rewatching some Penn and Teller specials.

But his setups for the tricks aren’t good: It’s hard for the viewer to get a good sense of what’s going on, and for much of the ep we’re not even sure what Jonathan is investigating. For example, the titular “Daemons’ Roost” manor was supposedly built by a Satanist. But now it’s owned by a Hammer horror director who used it as inspiration for his movies. Problem is, the Satanist backstory is confusing because it’s so irrelevant—the director and the Satanist serve the same purpose in-story, so a bunch of reviewers were confused on who was who. The Satanist backstory, meanwhile, gets mentioned once or twice and then never features into the plot.

That’s putting aside the story’s other flaws: the unfunny comedy (Renwick started out as a comedy writer—he also created One Foot in the Grave—but I generally find his Jonathan Creek comedy writing far inferior to his mystery writing), some pointless characters, general muddiness in the plotting, an anticlimactic murderer.

But mystery writers should learn just from the setup element: You have to present the mystery puzzle clearly. (The exception, of course, is if the puzzle is “what is going on?”—but even then the reader has to be clear that that’s the puzzle the writer’s going for.)

Broadly similar to those, but I’d say JC is better (though I haven’t seen Wallander and only lasted through a few minutes of Rosemary & Thyme).

It provides a better mystery than almost every other mystery TV show—I’m not even sure what’s comparable; when Renwick was on his game, in the early seasons, he wrote probably the best original-for-TV mysteries ever. In the early seasons, too, his comedy writing was better, and the episodes are expertly paced—and, thus, lots of fun.

Creek’s biggest problem for me is the unlikability of the characters, but if you can overlook (or don’t mind) that and you like mysteries, you’ll probably love it. A good first episode is “Danse Macabre,” the Season 2 opener—not the show’s best episode, but an encapsulated version of everything the show’s about.

Any Midsomers or Lewises you really liked? Midsomer strikes me as the essence of a “cozy mystery”—what people think Agatha Christie is. John Nettles is warm and likable as Barnaby, but the only episode that wowed me is that Christmas one with the garage door closer, and I haven’t seen that ep in years. I liked the episodes I saw of Lewis, but I’m not sure why: It’s so humorless, even (especially?) when it goes goofy. But the pacing is good, and I remember liking Hathaway. I’d love to see a standout episode of either show, though.

Yeah, I can’t imagine binging Midsomer!  As I said, I remember liking the Christmas one, but I can’t remember who the murderer was or even vaguely what the actor looked like! (Whereas I can remember the killers in many Creeks.)

I like Laurence Fox (Lewis’s partner Hathaway) as well. Do you like Morse? It seems like it should be exactly my kind of thing, but the episodes I’ve seen were just dull.

By Inspector Alleyn, you mean the Patrick Malahide adaptations? I should watch more of those: Looking at the list of episodes, I see they adapted my favorite of Ngaio Marsh’s books, Final Curtain. I know I’ve seen the Malahide adaptation of A Man Lay Dead, which is better than the terrible book.

Not related to Jonathan Creek, but I wanted to tell you that I watched the Patrick Malahide adaptation of Final Curtain—my favorite of Ngaio Marsh’s books—and enjoyed it, even though I found it kinda wonky as a mystery. It keeps most of Marsh’s clues in the book, but it underplays them, and Alleyn never explains how he reached most of his conclusions.

Still, as a piece of television it’s good fun—in large part because I like Malahide as Alleyn and Belinda Lang as Troy. Malahide’s Alleyn is more sympathetic and fun than the book character, for one thing. I should watch the adaptation of Death at the Bar, another good Marsh book.

I’m never quite sure what to make of Marsh. She was a good writer, and she had some good mystery plotting ideas (Final Curtain prefigures a better-known Agatha Christie book), but her murderers are usually unsurprising, and she lacks the theatricality of Christie, John Dickson Carr, Christianna Brand, and Ellery Queen. And her investigation sections are often, though not always, dull. I’ve always thought she would have been better off writing something other than detective stories.

By the way: Have you seen Death in Paradise? Not one I’d binge through either, but a lot of good episodes there, especially in the first two seasons. The last few seasons aren’t as good, unfortunately, but I keep watching in the hopes that it will go back to its original quality.