Monthly Archives: January 2012

Three Oscar nominations for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Last September I wrote a glowing review of Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish-style adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. So I was delighted to see that the film has picked up three Oscar nominations.

Actor in a Leading Role: Gary Oldman (Smiley)

Music (original score): Alberto Iglesias

Writing (adapted screenplay): Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan

On hearing the news of his nomination in Berlin – the former heart of the Cold War depicted in the film – Gary Oldman declared himself to be ‘in shock’.

While this is a first nomination for Oldman, it’s the third for Iglesias, a Basque composer who has written film soundtracks for The Constant Gardener, The Kite Runner and All About My Mother, amongst others. You can listen to a clip of his brooding, jazz-tinged score on the film’s webpage. 

The writing nomination is a highly poignant one, as Bridget O’Connor died last year at the age of 49 following a battle with cancer. Her husband, Peter Straughan, gave his reaction to the nomination here.

The 2012 Oscars will take place on Sunday 26 February.

MWA Edgar Award Nominations feature Japanese and Norwegian crime

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Twitter was abuzz yesterday with news of the 2012 MWA Edgar Award Nominations. For those who don’t know (I didn’t) MWA stands for Mystery Writers of America, and the award is named in honour of one of the best-known fathers of crime, Edgar Allan Poe.

The entire list of nominations is available on Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare blog. As a fan of international crime fiction, I was particularly pleased to see two translated novels in the ‘Best Novel’ category: The Devotion of Suspect X, a Japanese novel by Keigo Higashino and 1222 by the Norwegian author Anne Holt.

 

Both novels have been loitering in my TBR pile and I’m hoping that their nomination for this prestigious prize is the encouragement I need to finally get reading.

#18 Jan Costin Wagner / The Winter of the Lions

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Jan Costin Wagner, The Winter of the Lions, translated from German by Anthea Bell (London: Harvill Secker, 2011 [2009]). The third novel in the beguiling Kimmo Joentaa series. 4 stars

 Opening sentence:  Kimmo Joentaa had been planning to spend the last hours of Christmas Eve on his own, but it didn’t turn out like that.

I was given a copy of The Winter of the Lions by my lovely brother for Christmas (following a sisterly nudge in the right direction) and it proved to be the perfect festive read, as the novel’s action begins on 24th December and ends on New Year’s Eve. The evocative cover, with its snowy Finnish birches, also made the novel an attractive winter gift.

Regular readers to this blog will know that I’m a firm fan of of the Kimmo Joentaa series, which, intriguingly, is set in Finland but is authored by a German whose wife is Finnish. The novels are suffused with nordic melancholia, and are in large measure a study of grief, as the first novel, Ice Moon, opens with the death of Detective Joentaa’s young wife. Thus, while each book contains a discrete police investigation, collectively they trace the arc of Joentaa’s grief and the slow process by which he comes to terms with his loss. The Winter of the Lions, set around three years later, sees him embarking on a fragile and rather unconventional new relationship with a women he meets through his duties as a policeman.

One of the big strengths of the series is its focus on the characters within the police team, in a way that’s reminiscent of Scandinavian writers such as Sjowall & Wahloo and Mankell. Joentaa isn’t the only team member with problems, and there are some very human depictions of individuals trying to juggle the demands of their professional lives with the stresses and strains of life beyond the office. In this novel, however, the team also has to deal with the collective trauma of one of their own being murdered. Forensic pathologist Patrik Laukkanen is found dead on a snowy cross-country ski trail in the forest, the victim of a frenzied knife attack. Soon afterwards, another man is found stabbed, and when the link between the two victims is established it proves to be a strange one: both were guests on the popular Hamalainen talk show. As the front cover tantalisingly points out, ‘careless talk costs lives’…

As in previous Joentaa novels, sections of the narrative are written from the murderer’s point of view, and we gradually build up a picture of their character and the circumstances that have led them to commit their crimes. The murderer in The Winter of the Lions is portrayed with sensitivity and a degree of sympathy, although the consequences of his/her crimes for the families of the victims are also carefully spelled out. Here, again, trauma and grief are key themes, and as in Ice Moon, there are some intriguing similarities between the murderer and the investigator whose job it is to track him/her down.

I enjoyed The Winter of the Lions almost as much as the previous two Joentaa novels (although I missed the presence of Ketola, Joentaa’s former boss), and will certainly be back for more. At the end of this third book, I realise that the value of the series lies less for me in the plot or investigative process and more in the novels’ use of the crime genre to explore human reactions to death, trauma and loss. Melancholy and beguiling, these novels are a wintry treat of the highest order.

For other Mrs P. posts on the Joentaa series see Ice Moon and Silence.

The first few chapters are available via the Random House website.

Incidentally, Silence was made into a German film in 2010 (entitled Das letzte Schweigen [the final silence]. You can see the trailer here, which looks great and makes wonderful use of the Finnish *summer* landscape (for a change). It’s in German, but don’t let that put you off!

Mrs Peabody awards The Winter of the Lions a snow and vodka fuelled 4 stars.

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In Praise of Columbo

Posted on by Kat Hall
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In a mad moment before Christmas, I bought a boxset of the entire 10 series of Columbo (including the original TV pilots), and have had a lovely time since then reliving the days of my youth, when this programme was a staple of our family’s TV viewing.

In total, Columbo was on screen for an amazing 35 years between 1968 and 2003, and has held up remarkably well given its age – a tribute to the brilliance of the show’s two big concepts (the character of Columbo and the ‘inverted mystery’ formula), and its high production values.

Just one more thing...

In Lt. Columbo of the LAPD, writers Richard Levenson and William Link created a unique police detective, who was wonderfully realised by Falk. Seemingly bumbling, incompetent and dishevelled (looking like ‘an unmade bed’ in his crumpled mac), his razor-sharp intellect was always fatally underestimated by the murderer, who believed that he or she had committed the perfect crime. Interestingly, and in contrast to investigators in other American police procedurals such as Starsky and Hutch or Cagney and Lacey, Columbo is shown operating largely on his own – we never see a police-partner, Columbo’s superiors, or any action at the police precinct. He’s actually a very clever fusion of policeman (title and frequently flashed badge), private eye (his appearance and constant snooping),  and ‘Golden Age’ detective (his unerring ability to solve the murder, typically committed in the L.A. equivalent of an English country house).  

This wonderful character was then combined with the innovative ‘inverted mystery’ formula to produce a highly addictive show. Each episode opened with a 10 to 15 minute section showing an individual carrying out a murder, thereby inverting the usual ‘who-dunnit’ formula and making the viewer an eye-witness to the detail of the crime. The focus of the rest of the episode was on how Columbo solved the murder and furnished proof of the culprit’s guilt, so that justice could be served. Dogged and persistent, Columbo would seize on any ‘loose ends’ in the case (e.g. why was the victim’s car radio tuned to a classical station when he was a country music fan?) and return again and again to probe the suspect’s story until the truth was finally revealed.

As Andrew Donkin notes in the sleeve notes for my Playback/Universal Columbo boxset, ‘this structure made the show particularly hard to write for, as the ending had to justify the time invested by the audience who already knew the answer [of the murderer’s identity]’  (p.2). A particular challenge was keeping the episodes fresh: while there’s a great deal of pleasure to be derived from the repetitive structure of the show, and the reassuring certainty that Columbo will always nail the criminal, there’s also a risk that the audience will get bored. This was countered in a number of ways: episodes that played with the formula and audiences expectations (such as ‘Double Shock’, which featured twins as suspects); a steady stream of top writing and directing talent, included Steven Bochco and Steven Spielberg (the latter was responsible for the first ever episode, ‘Murder by the Book’, in which a crime writer bumps off his writing partner), and, of course, the numerous, fabulous guest stars who appeared throughout the many years of the show.

The guest stars are a particular pleasure to watch now. Given that Columbo was essentially a two-hander between Peter Falk and the murderer, who was carted off to prison at the end of each episode, there was ample opportunity for often incredibly famous actors to shine in the latter role. Drawn to the show by its quality, the chance to play a gloriously villainous character, and to hog the limelight before Columbo’s entrance, they included (in no particular order):

* Ray Milland * Johnny Cash * Leonard Nimoy * Martin Landau * Vincent Price * Martin Sheen * Ida Lupino * Donald Pleasance * Robert Culp * Dick van Dyke * Patrick MacGoohan * Robert Vaughn * Janet Leigh * William Shatner * Faye Dunaway * Rue McClanahan * Blythe Danner * John Cassavetes * Valerie Harper * Ricardo Montalban *

Peter Falk with guest star William Shatner (aka Captain Kirk)

The other aspect of the show I sneakingly enjoy is its class dynamic: the murderers are typically ultra-affluent, well-educated, oh-so-arrogant types, who are brought low by a scruffy police detective from a humble background. This is not to say that Columbo delivers a detailed social critique of American society (the visually stunning upper-class settings are homage to Agatha Christie as much as anything else), but there’s a sustained contrast between the intelligence, abilities and moral goodness of the hard-working ordinary man and the greed, decadance and arrogance of the super-rich (apologies to any wealthy, morally-upright philanthropists who may be reading!). Notably, it’s the villain’s snobby assumption that Columbo could not possibly pose a threat to them that proves to be their undoing. Columbo frequently makes the point that he’s accumulated skills and experience from the hard graft of hundreds of investigations, whereas the murderer has only ever carried out one crime. They really don’t stand a chance.  

Peter Falk died last year at the age of 83. I will always be deeply, DEEPLY envious of Mr. Peabody, who as a young man on his first trip to America in the 1980s, encountered Falk in the elevator of a hotel in Florida where Columbo was being filmed. Seeing that he’d been recognised, the great actor leaned over, shook hands with the star-stuck teenager, and breathed the immortal line….. ‘How ya doin’, kid?’. 

Just how good is that?!

If you’re a fan of Columbo you might be interested in The Ultimate Columbo website – a treasure trove of information about the programme, its actors and individual episodes.

*****

Thanks to Norman, who has just made me aware of a fascinating intertextual link, namely that the figure of Columbo was partially based on the character of Porfiry Petrovich from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Judith Gunn, in her post on the author, examines the the similarities between the two (and the narrative frameworks of both texts), which are striking and persuasive.

SoundCloud link to the music from Forbrydelsen / The Killing

Posted on by Kat Hall

For the many of us who have wondered where to find the wonderfully atmospheric music from the Danish crime drama Forbrydelsen / The Killing, information is finally at hand – thanks to blog readers Viv and Andrew.

From Viv I’ve learned that the soundtrack is by the Danish film composer Franz Bak. In addition to Forbrydelsen I, he’s also scored the music for Forbrydelsen II, an episode of Branagh’s Wallander series (‘The Fifth Woman’), and the American version of The Killing.

A large number of his tracks are available on the Franz Bak website (see right-hand column) and on SoundCloud (Playlist 3). If you’re in search of that haunting title music, it’s the Forbrydelsen Montage…

It doesn’t look like tracks can be downloaded or purchased (if you know otherwise please let us know), but at least they can now be enjoyed in one place via computer. Andrew adds that lots of Franz Bak’s music is also available on Spotify.

Thanks again to Viv and Andrew for passing this information on – it’s eased the pain of returning to work tomorrow considerably!