Location, location....scenery! Putting TV thrillers in their place

I have neglected the Thrillfilter site over the past few months, which is not to say I’ve abandoned the crime and espionage genres. I have been guilty of obsessive Kindling, unable to resist the attractions of cheaper-than-the-hardback serials. Not to mention total immersion TV.

Netflix, of course, gave us the second season of House of Cards, which was terrific, but my big (re)discovery in telly terms has been the writing of the late Alan Plater. I bought the 20th anniversary DVD box set of The Beiderbecke Trilogy off eBay, which remains absolutely superb. Two teachers (woodwork and English) do not solve crimes, but explore the world of Thatcherite repression with heartbreaking wit and warmth. It sent me in the direction of Plater’s jazz autobiography (the unfortunately named Doggin' Around) and the recorded works of Bix Beiderbecke and Sidney Bechet.

Plater’s book of Oliver’s Travels  is far better than the TV series (Beiderbecke hits the road), in which a terribly miscast Alan Bates flounders floridly in a part written for Tom Courtenay. Bill Patterson is great, though. And so is Orkney. Then there’s Plater’s screenwriting for the Olivia Manning series of World War Two books Fortunes of War, starring the young Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.  This wonderful tale of  eccentric British Council teachers and stragglers caught up in World War Two retains all its style, wit and power. And the acting is brilliant throughout. Available very cheaply on DVD.

There has been a huge upsurge of crime-related, location-defined TV drama recently. For the sake of peacekeeping I’ll not say anything much about Shetland, the adaptations of Anne Cleeves’ crime novels. Other than this: It’s getting better, and will improve further once the next series abandons the book plots. I live in those locations, though, and so have to overcome what our family calls ‘Green and Orange Bus Syndrome’, after a comment my wife made to one of the executives responsible for Taggart, thus cutting short my brief STV career (“The only reason people watch this rubbish is for the green and orange buses”). Hinterland is very much a Welsh Broadchurch-meets-Taggart and very well shot. I abandoned ship though, halfway through the second episode.  It creaks, if stylishly. No buses, but a dodgy caravan in a ridiculous setting, and loads of Welsh landscape. The Broadchurch II plot/backstory is pushing it, though.

Then there’s Fargo. I was puzzled, initially, by the whole concept of adapting the tone and location of the great Coen Brothers movie, while using aspects of the main film characters to ‘inspire’ what are essentially new ones. Yet it works well.  Martin Freeman at last transfers that weird cock-of-the-head mannerism into something utterly  un-Office, anti-Hobbit. Billy Bob Thornton is magnificently charming, funny and brutally sinister, and the infusion of David Lynchian Blue Velvet surrealism is an effortless fit with the cold humour of the Coens.

There’s nothing cold about Happy Valley. I have avoided the Sally Wainwright ouevre for no reason other than laziness and suspicions over someone working in what appeared to be Plater territory. But the first episode of Happy Valley completely captivated me. The Fargo references are overt and knowing, but the central female cop character, played by the amazing Sarah Lancashire, goes from initially funny through pathos to a kind of threatening, vengeful, simmering rage, all in the first 50 minutes. It has a rare narrative momentum (the polar opposite of Hinterland, for example) and the attention to detail is what raises it head and shoulders, I think, above the other ‘thrillers’ I’ve mentioned. Including Fargo, the (movie) plot of which is knowingly referenced. The grandchild’s behavioural problems, the affair with the ex-husband, the weird Corrie-in-the-country vibe of Hebden Bridge, nastified for the occasion; those sly, breathtaking wee scenes like the BMW Estate with mountain bike rack, and the appearance of Sylvia Plath’s actual grave at one point. I absolutely loved it.

And of course, the influence of Alan Plater is everywhere. The magnificent George Costigan (from The Beiderbecke Tapes) as Nevison may even be a nod in that direction. It’s more brutal and may turn bloodier than Plater could ever be, but it has wit, style and, most importantly, warmth. This is flesh and blood drama, anchored in more than just a location, more than scenery, but in a sense of real, beating human hearts.

One thing, and this applies to all current police dramas: We know cops have to wear disposable rubber gloves and weird wee bootees at a crime scene. But please, stop dwelling on it as if it’s an absolute indicator of verisimilitude and accuracy.

Seven Days in South Africa

Deon Meyer 7 Days Drew ratter writes: THERE'S been a fair gap since my last Thrillfilter review. I have not stopped reading the stuff, of course. For instance, I consumed the whole of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series (they are cheap on Kindle). Once I started, I could not stop. I find that character driven material of that kind appeals particularly to me. I can live with limited plotting if the writing is good, the imagined world is vivid, and the chief character has character. The next writer I picked up was a sort of accident. Looking at recently returned books at the library, I picked up 7 Days, by Deon Meyer. Meyer lives in Durban, in South Africa, and writes in Afrikaans. He's the first South African police procedural writer I have sampled, and so far 7 Days is the only book by him I have come across. He's good though. His hero is Benny Griessel, recovering alcoholic, completely lacking in self confidence, and with a tendency to swearing at inappropriate moments, and then being wiped out by embarrassment. His love interest, Alexa Barnard, is likewise recovering, and driven by a complete loss of belief in her music career. The book is by no means a one man band. Apart from Benny, one vivid and believable character after another crosses the scene, all interacting, fluent, and well defined. The narrative is well judged and propulsive. The background, that is South Africa recreating itself after the end of Apartheid is well realised. It's good to come across something worth recommending!

Norwegian by Night

Derek B Miller Norwegian by Night Drew Ratter writes: Derek B. Miller is the director of The Policy Lab and a senior fellow with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. He has a PHD in international relations from the University of Geneva, among numerous other academic distinctions. He is also the author of rather a marvellous novel, a thriller certainly, but a very unusual one. His hero, and a hero he is, is an old Jew. Eighty-two years old, and recently widowed, Sheldon Horowitz has grudgingly moved to Oslo, with his grand-daughter and her Norwegian husband. They are lovely, but Sheldon is unsure, and grouchy. In New York, he was a watch repairer, with friends, and a relationship with his dead son. He was a marine in Korea. He may be slipping into senility (especially given his conversations with his son and his old friend 4000 miles away in New York. Both dead). He may have been a sniper, or he may have been a cook's helper. When he takes on, without the slightest hesitation, the child of a murdered woman, to save him from his monstrous Albanian father; the murderer of his mother, we begin to accept that his marine training and career were serious, and he is, without qualification, wonderful. Norwegian by Night is full of wonder, rather a marvellous piece of work. I certainly hope this fine and deeply humane writer produces more work.

The Hitman's Guide to housecleaning

Hallgrimur Helgason The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning Drew Ratter writes I wonder if the cult of the Scandi thriller is receding, as everything does, sooner or later. I might be mistaken, but there seems little new blood lately, and being honest, some of those who rode the wave were middling, at best. Shan't name them here, but if you want bad writing....well, as I said,not now. Helgason, though, is great fun, and this is only book written in English. His principal is most definitely an anti hero, Tomislav Bokæsiâc, with accents, who moved to New York, became Tom Boksic, without, and then Toxic Thus into the only occupation which can use his skills effectively. A massively effective contract killer working for a horrible Eastern European mafia. It goes wrong, though, and he has to run. Dodging the law on his way through an airport heading for Zagreb, he ends up murdering a fundamentalist preacher, stealing his identity, documents, and air tickets to Reykavik; a destination he has never even heard of. The remainder of the book is about the life he makes among the evangelist community on that island, as the Reverend Friendly. It is very entertaining indeed. Among other things, his phonetic rendering of Icelandic names is excellent. Goodmoondoor, Sickreader, the evangelists. Gunholder, their daughter, who fairly quickly becomes his lover. And so on, though not to the point of tiresomeness. It's written in the first person, something of which I think there is rather too much these days. But still.

Rabb, Rosa Luxembourg and some wee anachronisms...

Drew Ratter on another chronicler of the inter-war years...

 

Rosa

Jonathan Rabb

Jonathan Rabb is American,but doesn't really feel it, any more than does Alan Furst or Philip Kerr, respectively American too, and Scottish, respectively. They appear to be sort of international initiates in some arcane brotherhood of the interwar years, more specifically the sept which psychically exists in Germany and Eastern Europe.

Rabb is the least prolific of the three, all young men. He is also formally the most academic. Both his parents and most of his grandparents were historians, so it seems, and he gravitated naturally to Yale and Columbia.

His early life as a historian imbues his Berlin trilogy. The immediate post war period is meticulously delineated, and Kriminal Kommissar Hofner works out of the Alex; very familiar to friends of Kerr's Bernie Gunther (who, as a character lives much more strongly in my head, by the way).

The Rosa of the title is the murdered socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg, who so tragically overestimated the internationalism of the industrial proletariat. Other historical figures flit in an out, mingled with the fictional players, Karl Liebknecht naturally, as a corpse, but lesser known socialists and heroes of the Spartacus League like Leo Jogiches flit about, half seen, in the wings. Jogiches then turns out to be crucial.

As well as the heroes, of which there are but few, there are villains. Many villains, easily available, as we are well aware given the era, and the fact that by the early 1930s, a mere decade later, evil had comprehensively triumphed in Germany. Included are not only members of the Freikorps, who were the backbone of the SS, but also the natural foe of the Kripo, the criminal police, the Polpo, the political police. Thereafter, this latter organisation became the basis for the Gestapo

The hook is the fact that there have been constant doubts expressed about whether the shot and bludgeoned corpse examined following its discovery was really that of Luxemburg. DNA analysis in 2009 did not, as anticipated, clear up the whole mystery.

A good read, overall, with  a strange and worrying lace-obsessed murderer with perhaps a slight hint of Jean Baptiste Grenouille? But then, he doesn't turn out to be so central after all.

And so it redoubles and redoubles. The final verdict? Vastly learned, but rather longwinded. And the anachronisms..............even up to and including "So we're good here"