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Murder is My Side Hustle.
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That’s a mystery title we might expect to see any day now in this era of the gig economy. It certainly is a notion that’s get a lot of play in the realm of the streaming mystery series.
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Bear in mind, the moonlighting characters we’re seeing are not to be confused with professional sleuths such as Poirot or Holmes. No, these are professionals in other fields who rather unwillingly play detective when bitter circumstance forces them to do so. And as it turns out, their legit professions happen to nicely dovetail with crime-solving.
Of course, this is nothing new in the TV mystery realm, which has given us crime-solving novelists (Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote, on Crave), and crime-solving doctors (Dick Van Dyke in Diagnosis: Murder on Netflix).
One of the finer new entries in this field is The Final Problem (on Netflix), a very handsome four-part series from Spain, in which the designated gumshoe is Benjamin Basil (José Coronado), a retired actor best known for portraying Sherlock Holmes in Spanish films of the ‘40s and ‘50s.
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The year 1959 sees Basil officially retired but still looking for work, which is why he deigns to accompany a sleazy producer to a meeting on a beautiful island resort, where a storm suddenly renders them cut off from the outside world, much like the situation in Agatha Christie’s mystery, And Then There Were None, especially when a woman is discovered dead by apparent suicide after the first night.
She will not be the last victim, and it falls on Basil (named in homage to the first major Hollywood Sherlock, Basil Rathbone), to use his own sound stage-honed deductive powers to cut through the deceptions running rampant on this scenic little slice of paradise. By his side is mystery novelist Francisco Foxá (Martiño Rivas), acting as a Watson to Basil’s Sherlock, at least until he too becomes a suspect.
It’s not as hokey as it sounds. While the series fairly drips with ‘50s glamour, it also plays on the tensions of the postwar era, with, for example, one of the island inhabitants revealed to be an ex- Nazi officer. Indeed, by the fourth episode, there is a smoky-sweet world-weariness to it all, with Coronado channelling a whole host of European actors who mined a wistful romantic pathos in their twilight years, such as Marcello Mastroianni, Bruno Ganz or Jean-Louis Trintignant.
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The Holmes stuff is not all window-dressing. For Arthur Conan Doyle fans, it might help, to re-read the story A Scandal in Belgravia to appreciate how cleverly the series interacts with Holmes’ canon.
The BBC series Ludwig (streaming on BritBox), likewise, gives us a sleuth once removed from the workaday investigator.
John Taylor (David Mitchell of Peep Show), is a socially awkward puzzle-setter, celebrated in brainteaser circles under the mononymous handle “Ludwig.”
He answers an emergency call from his sister-in-law Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), who informs him his twin brother James has gone missing. Lucy suspects some kind of secret conspiracy has driven James underground and begs John to masquerade as his own more socially adept sibling to infiltrate the Cambridge police station where James had been working on a case involving the murder of a conspiracy-theorist blogger.
John, who has apparently carried a torch for Lucy all his life, agrees.
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While disguised, he finds himself whisked to crime scenes where it turns out that John is actually very good at solving murders, viewing each killing through the lens of a different puzzle. (It is a running joke that John regards issues of motive as an ongoing extraneous distraction.)
The show’s format nimbly jumbles the weekly murder a-plot with the running b-plot of Jame’s disappearance. Mitchell, a seasoned sketch comic, seems disinclined to play up the character’s presumed neurodivergence, freeing him up to play for guiltless laughs. Martin provides a solid foil as Lucy bravely ventures out from her own comfort zone to join the investigation herself.
The undercurrent of a possible, poignant attraction between the two is, well, no mystery.
The second season of Ludwig promises an upcoming episode for Christmas guest-starring none other than David (Poirot), Suchet, playing a suspect for a change.
randall.king.arts@gmail.com
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