DICK BARTON: SPECIAL AGENT. Southern TV, UK, 1979. Tony Vogel (Dick Barton), Anthony Heaton (Snowey White), James Cosmo (Jock Anderson). Creator/screenwriter: Norman Collins. Other screenwriters: Julian Bond, Clive Exton.

   Back when radio was the most significant medium for home entertainment, fifteen million people would listen nightly to Dick Barton: Special Agent, an action adventure serial replete with cliff-hangers and derring-do, on the Light Programme. It followed the adventures of former commando Captain Richard Barton and his two friends ‘Snowy’ White and ‘Jock’ Anderson as they repelled the plans of various criminal masterminds and somehow escaped the perilous traps that were repeatedly set for them.

   The radio serial ran between 1946 and 1951, usually at 6.45 pm, for fifteen minutes apiece. 711 episodes were made, all written by Geoffrey Webb and Edward J. Mason, and each adhering to the thirteen rules of conduct which decreed that Dick could not use bad language, drink alcohol or use a knife to harm. Apart from the hero’s name and the adventure it evokes, the serial is best remembered for its theme tune, “The Devil’s Gallop,” a rousing and rambunctious slice of genius by composer Charles Williams which makes one want to dash about the room and press against the wall as though hiding from fiendish saboteurs.

   The nanny state killed the show off after five years in the belief that it was damaging to the dear young children. By this time, however, the show was a nationwide phenomenon, spawning a behind-the-scenes book, another volume of short stories and three films from Hammer Studios (at the time, best known for making thrillers, not horrors). The BBC then replaced it with a rustic drama named The Archers, the theme tune of which must have made every red-blooded adventurer used to Barton’s buccaneering wish for another war.

   The late 1970s saw a minor revival for Dick and his friends. A somewhat sparsely written but nonetheless enjoyable book, novelising three of the radio serials, was published in 1977. That same year, filming took place on a televised series of new adventures. Made by Southern Television, a small ITV company, each episode lasted ten minutes (excluding commercials) and shown on Saturdays and Sundays from January to April 1979.

   The 32 episodes starred Tony Vogel as Barton, Anthony Heaton as ‘Snowy’ and James Cosmo as ‘Jock’ and comprised four adventures, each lasting between six and ten parts each. Typically for its time, the serial was shot on video, a format which can make the most expensive television look cheap. Such an impression, in this instance, would be accurate as there were apparently several budgetary issues which undermined the production of the programme.

   This is mostly apparent in the sometimes dodgy direction work, though it can only be imagined that the director was doing his best with the little he had. The location work – usually one of the most costly features of scripted television – is plentiful and the acting is more or less solid throughout. As you would expect from such a short serial, the whole thing runs like the clappers, and the scripts – many by Clive Exton, who would later bring Poirot and Jeeves & Wooster to television – wisely play it straight throughout. There is, of course, the odd bit of wince-inducing dialogue, but all such things can be waved away as attempts at period authenticity.

   The first adventure sees an old bird named Sir Richard Marley call on Barton when his daughter Virginia and son Rex go missing. They have been kidnapped by the dastardly foreigner Melganik, who plans on substituting tobacco with reefer and thus turning the whole of Britain into “drug fiends”. The story lasts ten parts, co-stars future Strictly Come Dancing contestant Fiona Fullerton and memorably includes the old walls-closing-in-with-spikes routine.

   The second adventure, in eight parts, starts a little too similarly as a young girl – this time an old acquaintance of Jock’s – is in danger when her scientist father is kidnapped by the evil Muller. The third serial ties in neatly with the first two and involves a disappearing house, while the last adventure sees the team encounter a couple of menacing, Kray-like gangsters.

   The series is available on DVD and can sometimes be seen nightly on Talking Pictures TV – which is how I saw it. Tony Vogel is outstanding in the part of Barton. He takes it all seriously, remains believable in the period, and can even be tough when he wants to be. The whole thing is basically a children’s show, of course, but it was always going to be and is none the worse for it.

   The only downside is the brevity of the episodes: it may have made more of an impact had it been shown in half-hour instalments, like Doctor Who. As it was, for whatever reason, the show was not a success and was quickly forgotten. The production company itself folded within a couple of years.
Dick Barton did not return again until the late ‘90s and then only on stage in live theatre (perhaps inevitably, as he had already featured in every other medium). With only four cast members, the nine plays were comedy-musicals which parodied the brand, boasted innuendo and were mostly staged at Croydon’s now-closed Warehouse Theatre.

   The last we have so far heard from Dick and his friends is, funnily enough, due to the TV version. The series produced four novelizations and one of them, The Mystery of the Missing Formula, was released in 2010 on CD and read by a thoroughly game Toby Stephens.

   After all these years, I don’t think anyone is quite sure just why a British private detective is walking around calling himself a special agent, but I certainly hope he makes another come-back at some point. Cue music!

   Happy New Year! Over the nearly two decades I’ve been writing these columns, I’ve always tried to make sure I knew what I was talking about. This time I know very little about my subject, but no one else seems to know more.

   Recently I found myself getting interested in an over sixty year old TV detective series which, when it was running, I never watched. Nor, it seems, did the overwhelming majority of Americans. THE INVESTIGATORS aired on CBS from early October till late December of 1961, a total of thirteen 60-minute episodes. James Franciscus, James Philbrook and Mary Murphy starred as three detectives specializing in insurance cases. Most episodes featured one well-known movie star — Claire Trevor, Miriam Hopkins, Jane Wyman and Mickey Rooney, just to name four.

   The Internet Movie Database provides cast lists for each episode but no plot summaries, which I dug out from my TV Guide collection. What mainly sparked my interest was that, according to the IMDb, every one of the thirteen hour-long episodes was directed by the same man, whom I happened to know well and who in fact was the subject of one of my books.

   The director in question was Joseph H. Lewis (1907-2000), on whose boat the Buena Vista I taped the conversations that became the raw material for the only book about him published in his lifetime. In 1937, after a few years as a film editor, Joe had become a director and made some superb 60-minute Westerns, usually starring Bill Elliott, Charles Starrett or Johnny Mack Brown, each of them brimming with visual excitement; pictures that earned him the moniker of “Wagon Wheel Joe,” thanks to his habit of shooting scenes through the spokes of guess what.

   After World War II he became involved with what would soon become known as film noir, helming pictures like MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS (1945), SO DARK THE NIGHT (1946) and, best known of all, the classics GUN CRAZY (1949) and THE BIG COMBO (1955).

   In the early 1950s he suffered a major heart attack and was unable to work for a year. Near the end of that decade he moved from the big screen to the small, signing a generous long-term contract with Four Star, one of the top TV series production companies, whose executives wanted him to concentrate on THE RIFLEMAN (ABC, 1958-63), the iconic Western series created by Sam Peckinpah and starring Chuck Connors.

   â€œThey wanted me to direct every show in the series. I said ‘Hell no, I won’t do that!’” The compromise they reached was that he’d work one week a month preparing and shooting an episode of THE RIFLEMAN or some other Four Star series. The rest of the time he’d relax on his boat. Under this arrangement he helmed 51 RIFLEMAN episodes over five years, plus two segments of THE DETECTIVES (ABC, 1958-61; NBC, 1961-62), a cop show starring Robert Taylor, and one story for Four Star’s anthology series ALCOA THEATRE.

   There’s no question that, on loan-out from Four Star, he did some work on THE INVESTIGATORS. “I wanted to do a close-up shot of [James] Franciscus’s hands,” Joe told me, “and I couldn’t do it because of the awful way his fingernails looked. He was a nail-biter.” But would he have agreed to direct an hour-long episode every week when just three years earlier his heart attack had led him to refuse to do more than one 30-minute show a month? In the immortal words of Eliza Doolittle, not bloody likely.

   If only we could check the credits on the 13 episodes of THE INVESTIGATORS, we’d know who directed them, but we can’t. Apparently the only segment that survives is “The Oracle” (12 October 1961), guest-starring Lee Marvin as a religious cult leader, which exists only in a truncated form, minus credits.

   But from what I’ve dug up it seems to have been an interesting little series. Its main claim to historical importance is that one of the three protagonists, played by Mary Murphy, was apparently the first licensed female PI character to star in a TV series.

   For devotees of Cornell Woolrich a further attraction is that two episodes seem to be rooted in the work of that dark angel of suspense. In “I Thee Kill” (26 October 1961) the investigators set out to clear a man (Mickey Rooney) who was in the crowd outside a church when the fellow who was about to marry the suspect’s girlfriend was shot dead. Doesn’t that sound just a bit like a variant on Woolrich’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK?

   More clearly borrowed from a Woolrich premise is “Death Leaves a Tip” (30 November 1961), in which Franciscus and Murphy recruit a shy young waitress to serve as bait to trap a serial killer who’s preying on members of her profession. Unmistakably this is Woolrich’s 1938 classic “Dime a Dance,” also known as “The Dancing Detective,” with a different female job specialty. The guest star in this one was Jane Wyman, one of whose earliest credited movie roles was as the female lead in THE SPY RING (1938), an espionage drama directed by (can you guess?) Joseph H. Lewis, but this is hardly evidence that Joe helmed her episode of THE INVESTIGATORS.

   I touched base with an old friend who has one of the world’s largest collections of TV episodes from the Fifties and Sixties on video and he told me he had never even heard of THE INVESTIGATORS. I exchanged emails with a man whose biography of Joe Lewis will probably be published this year and he knew nothing more about the series than I did. Dead end. Game over. Case closed.

   I had hoped that this column would take me on a voyage of discovery that I could share, but the ship seems to have gotten itself grounded. Luckily I made another discovery late last year, and this is a genuine find. While fumbling around YouTube I came across a composition by my beloved Bernard Herrmann that I’d never heard before, a very early piece written when he was around 22 and never published or performed until after his death.

   What’s most fascinating about his Sinfonietta for String Orchestra (1936) is that it sounds very much as if it were a 15-minute excerpt from his score for PSYCHO, a quarter century later, that Hitchcock never used. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: No one does ominous like Herrmann does ominous. Check out the Sinfonietta and hear for yourself:
   

THE SAINT “The Careful Terrorist.” ITC, UK, 18 October 1962 (Season 1, episode 3.) Roger Moore (Simon Templar), Percy Herbert (Hoppy), Alan Gifford (Inspector Fernack). Guest Cast: David Kossoff, Peter Dyneley, Sally Bazely. Based on a story by Leslie Charteris. Directed by John Ainsworth. Currently streaming on the Shout Factory channel.

   This third episode in the long-running The Saint series starring Roger Moore is only a little better than average, but it does have a few things to note about it. First of all, it has Simon Templar living comfortably in a New York City apartment, complete with a manservant named Hoppy, straight from the books, and a homicide detective named Furnack, a friendly adversary on the NYPD police force, also from the books. He is also up against a villain whom he deems one of the “ungodly,” and from whom he extracts a particularly wicked revenge.

   The fellow, an urbane but totally crooked union boss who blows up a newspaper friend of Templar’s, really doesn’t stand a chance. When The Saint seeks retribution, he gets it, and the boss is thereby “hoist by his own petard.”

   Although he appeared in several of the Saint’s book-length adventures, this was the first and only appearance of Hoppy (Uniatz) in the TV series, and perhaps thankfully so. In this episode he’s played as an out-and-out moron with a mind full of bricks, spending his free time watching kids’ shows on TV and ogling girlie magazines. The fellow who plays Furnack, though, looks much the same as I pictured him, and yet he showed up in only one later episode, due to the fact that he’s pretty much tied down to his home base of New York City.

   So it’s fairly obvious that the show’s producers were still feeling their way with this one, only a short way into the series, I thought it was the best so far. (Number two in the series was reviewed here by me.)

DÉTECTIVES. “Convictions intimes” (Firm Convictions). France Télévision Distribution. 22 May 2013 (Season One, Episode One). Sara Martins (Nora Abadie), Philippe Lefebvre (Philippe Roche), Jean-Luc Bideau (Maxime Roche). Currently streaming on MHz.

   Roche and Son, a family owned and operated private eye agency, is running on hard time, and Maxime Roche the father, now retired, decides that to update the business – new technology and all — they need to join forces with another firm run by Nora Abadie (Sara Martins), a former French intelligence officer. Unfortunately he does not tell his son Phillipe, and the merger gets off to an obvious bad start.

   The problem is basically this: Rocke and Son being a family-run business, they are too casual – not about their work – but in the office, with a couple of children having had free run of their previous location. It is hard for me to say, having watched only this, the first episode – and at that, one that ends in a cliffhanger – but it is easy to suppose that in spite of some initial antagonism between Nora and Philippe, opposites attract and the usual hesitant attempts at “will they or won’t they” will eventually prevail.

   Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

   Their first case in common is an unusual one. The Roches are investigating the death of a young worker at a nuclear plant, while Nora is/has been the director of data security of the company owning the very same nuclear plant. She decides, however, that she’d better investigate on her own, just in case the Roches discover something incriminating.

   In spite of the seriousness of the case, there is a light touch to all of this that makes this go down easily, and at least for now, I intend to keep watching. Immediately after this series Sara Martins was to go on to become DS Camille Bordey on Death in Paradise, a role I continue to regret she decided to give up halfway through the fourth season.

THRILLER. “Lady Killer.” Associated Television [ATV], UK, 18 January 1973. (Season one, Episode one.) Robert Powell, Barbara Feldon, Linda Thorson, T.P. McKenna, Mary Wimbush. Screenwriter/creator: Brian Clemens. Currently streaming on Shout Factory TV.

   At least at the present time, all six seasons of this Brian Clemens-created mystery series are available to be seen online. Clemens is known best, of course, for his involvement with The Avengers, but he also had more than a hand in producing The Baron, The Persuaders!, and The Protectors, plus a few other British TV series not nearly as well known as the one that brought Diana Rigg to the world’s attention as Emma Peel, John Steed’s sexy partner in some of the more bizarre cases of crime-solving in television history.

   As much as I’ve been looking forward to sampling the series, “Lady Killer” doesn’t get Thriller, the series, off to the best start possible, at least it didn’t to my most considered satisfaction. It begins with a shy, pretty but not quite beautiful girl from Indiana (Barbara Feldon) being picked up by a handsomely dressed young chap (Robert Powell) in a British resort hotel and almost literally swept off her feet.

   Every single viewer watching this knows he’s a scoundrel from the first time they see him, but it’s also clear that the young lady he has his eyes on has not had much experience in matters such as this.

   After they’re married, while his plans for her are not yet clear, we know – and probably too soon, for the sake of the story – that he does have plans for her. Could the new housekeeper be involved? Or the man who stops by thinking he has recognized her new husband? She doesn’t know something, however, that the viewer knows, and that is that Linda Thorson’s name was quite openly visible in the opening credits.

   The newly married couple’s new house is close to the sea, with a steep cliff down to the water below. What we have, in other words, is disaster of some kind ahead, and the story doesn’t waste a minute letting the viewer know about it. Which is probably where my disappointment in the story comes in. Semi-spooky, but even though there’s a twist in the tale ahead, too obvious to be really spooky, if you know what I mean.

   On the other hand, it was nice to see Barbara Feldon’s acting ability wasn’t limited to playing Agent 99 on Get Smart, that other show that made her famous.

OVER MY DEAD BODY.  CBS, 26 October 1990. Two-hour premiere of TV series. Edward Woodward, Jessica Lundy,  with Ed Winter, Dan Ferro, Gregory Itzin, Brenda Thomson. Created by William Link & David Chisholm. Suggested by the motion picture Lady on a Train (story by Leslie Charteris, who later published a novelization of the film). Director: Bradford May.

   As a TV series, not by any stretch of the imagination should it be compared to The Equalizer, Edward Woodward’s previous venture into TV-making.  Considering its lineage, it should come as no great surprise that it bears far more resemblance to Murder She Wrote, but I think Woodward is more suited to drama than he is to comedy, which is [mostly] what he does here.

   Maybe his character, Maxwell Beckett, famous  mystery writer and (so everybody believes) former inspector of Scotland Yard — maybe, as  I say, he’ll grow on me.  (They couldn’t get Michael Caine?)

   Beckett’s sidekick, his female Watson, if you will, is newspaper obituary writer Nikki Page (Jessica Lundy) who sees a murder committed in an apartment across from hers, but who finds it impossible to find anyone to believe her. This is where the movie Lady on a Train comes in, which is a movie I’ve wanted to see for  a long time, and somehow it’s never been shown on TV on any station I have access to, or if it has, I’ve missed it.

   However, there is not enough plot here to fill two hours (less commercials), so it takes a lot of funny scenes to fill in the gaps (most of which — the funny scenes, not the gaps — it was possible to see ahead of time in all the promos for the show that ran all the week before. On the plus side, I do have to tell you that there were a few individual lines that were quite clever and perhaps even funnier than the anything than those which were available earlier).

   Unfortunately, the killer is easy to spot. I knew who it was as soon as he appeared on the screen. (This is nothing, though, compared with my wife Judy, who knew who did it as soon as his name appeared in the opening credits.)

   Unlike Murder, She Wrote, it does not seem as though detection will be this series’ strong point. Myself, I think the strong point is going to be Jessica Lundy, who besides being young and good-looking, is also perky, loud and perfectly suited to be on television. You can quote me on this one.

   Incidentally, I thought it was interesting that Leslie Charteris was actually given onscreen credit. He must have a good agent.

THE SAINT. Motion Picture Corporation of America/Netflix, 2017. Adam Rayner as Simon Templar, Eliza Dushku as Patricia Holm, Sir Roger Moore as Jasper, James Remar as Arnold Valecross, Ian Ogilvy as The Fixer/older Xander, Adam Woodward as Xander, Enrique Murciano as Inspector John Henry Fernack. Based on the characters created by Leslie Charteris.  Director: Ernie Barbarash.

   A few years back saw the return of a character who had once been famous worldwide. Simon Templar, a.k.a. The Saint, was followed by many in film, television, radio, comic strips and books. First and foremost a literary character, he featured in fifty books between 1928 and 1983. The Saint was a suave, witty, ruthless adventurer, known as ‘the Robin Hood of Modern Crime’ for his tendency to rob from the wealthy corrupt and help those who needed it most.

   He is best known today for the television series starring Roger Moore, which aired 118 episodes between 1962 and 1969. It was a global hit, turned Moore into British television’s first millionaire, saw him mobbed wherever he went in the world, and won him the role of James Bond.

   Return of the Saint, with Ian Ogilvy, followed ten years later, but was a short-lived success. Since then, the most high-profile attempt to revive the character was a 1997 blockbuster movie starring Val Kilmer. It was an unwatchable mess, flopped hard and Kilmer’s career never fully recovered.

   There was nothing more until a television pilot was filmed in 2013 with Adam Rayner and Eliza Dushku. It wasn’t picked up for a series and the pilot remained on the shelf for four years. Now, it has been dusted down and reassembled as a full-length film for a digital release, with more than forty minutes of new footage and a beefed-up story. The short shooting schedule did not allow for the return of the pilot’s director, Simon West, so Ernie Barbarash was enlisted instead, while no less than twenty producers are credited.

   So, was it worth waiting twenty years for a new Saint adventure? Well, Rayner is excellent as Simon Templar. He has the sense of impish fun that the character should always possess. Dushku plays Templar’s (sort of) girlfriend Patricia Holm, who featured in many of the early stories but hasn’t been seen onscreen since 1943. This version of the character is high-kicking, tech-savvy and knows her way around a gun.

   Cannily, the antagonist of the story is played by Return of the Saint’s Ian Ogilvy, who gets much screen time as a mysterious and callous manipulator of international affairs. The plot sees him and his right-hand man, Arnie Valecross, steal $2.5 billion intended to help a third world country. Valecross, however, suffers a crisis of conscience and diverts the funds. In response, his daughter is kidnapped with the threat that she will be killed in two days unless the money is returned.

   Valecross enlists The Saint, who plans to get the money, retrieve the girl and double-cross the kidnappers. Meanwhile, the FBI and LAPD are on his trail. Things get even more intense when his girlfriend Patricia is captured too.

   This could have been an awkward salvage operation but, happily, the additional material synchronises smoothly with the pilot footage. The only way to discern between the 2013 and 2017 material is Adam Rayner’s beard. He was contractually obliged to keep it between seasons of the FX series Tyrant and retains it for the first half hour of the film (in other words, much of the new stuff). Fortunately, it does not hamper things and it could even be said that the character needs to change his look at times to avoid being recognised. It all works, therefore, as a legitimate television movie.

   The script is surprisingly funny and there is some decent action too, although it could never be mistaken for a theatrical release. Fans of the 1970s series will particularly enjoy seeing Ogilvy again, while genre favourite Greg Grunberg has a minor role. There are numerous flashbacks to Templar’s childhood which seek to establish the character’s backstory, although there’s very little point when this is strictly a one-off.

   The plot itself is convoluted and not distinct enough from other cyber-theft stories. Indeed, the project’s lack of distinction is perhaps its problem. Although many of the Saint stories were set in America, placing a potential series there makes it indistinguishable from White Collar, Leverage, Burn Notice, MacGyver and other G-man series of recent years.

   The Saint property was once in the lead – a champion, if not a trail-blazer – while here it looks like it is simply trying to merge in with the crowd. Nonetheless, despite being unoriginal and unmemorable, this is a fun, undemanding 116 minutes which is worth seeing.

LONGMIRE “Pilot.” A&E, 03 Jun 2012. Robert Taylor (Sheriff Walt Longmire), Katee Sackhoff (Victoria ‘Vic’ Moretti), Lou Diamond Phillips (Henry Standing Bear), Bailey Chase, Cassidy Freeman, Adam Bartley, Louanne Stephens. Screenplay by   Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny,  based on the characters created by Craig Johnson. Nominated for an Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America. Director: Christopher Chulack. Currently streaming on Netflix (all six seasons).

   It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally gotten around to this long running series, based on the even longer running series of books by Craig Johnson (seventeen so far, and counting). I’ve read only one of books, perhaps luckily so, as I had no preconceptions or hopes to be dashed, or vice versa.

   This, the pilot to the series, does a very good job of introducing the primary players and the ongoing plot line, both of this one and things to come. Walt Longmire is the long-time sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming. A large chunk of the country is a Cheyenne reservation, an area over which Longmire has no jurisdiction. Sometime in the recent past his wife has died, and since then his staff of three deputies has been covering for him while he recovers from the loss. One of them, though, a fellow named Branch Connally, thinks Walt is over the hill and is running in the next election against him.

   The characters are well drawn, no surprise there, since they are (more or less) based on the books. You will have to tell me more about the “more or less.”  As I said above, the story is little more than ordinary, mostly because it has to take second place to identifying the characters, who they are and so on. It involves a man shot to death in the snow, a stranger with no obvious reason for being there. In fact his wife, back in Colorado, thinks he is somewhere else altogether. Some conflict with the tribal police eventually ensues, foreshadowing, I suspect, similar situations in further story lines.

   I don’t know the actor who plays Longmire, Robert Taylor, but he plays the part he’s asked to play perfectly. He’s craggy, terse if not out-and-out taciturn, rough, crude, and, as when telling the man’s widow the bad news, also quite eloquent. The series depends on him, obviously so, and a six-year run suggests he repeats the crackerjack job he does in the pilot all the way through.

MURDER IN BATZ. FIT Productions, France, 16 October 2015 (Season 9, episode 2). Original title: Les blessures de l’île. Stéphane Freiss, Flore Bonaventura, François Marthouret, Sophie Le Tellier, Marie-José Nat. Director: Edwin Baily. Currently streaming on the MHz channel (as Season 1, Episode 2).

   It is difficult to obtain solid information about this made-for-French-TV movie. It is that, but it is also an episode of a long-running series with the overall title Murder in… . Each episode has a different pair of police detectives handling the case, almost always (if not always) the pair consisting two members of the opposite sex. (Some couples are on occasion repeated.) Each episode takes place in a picturesque location in France, differing from story to story with the local background generally playing a significant part of the story.

   Take this particular episode. Batz is a small island off the coast of Brittany, France, and when a murder takes place there and the weather is bad, the island is cut off from the mainland until the storm passes by. Taking the trip over before the rain begins is Inspector (?) Grégor Gourvennec, accompanied by a crime scene cleaner named Manon Le Gall. Dead is a real estate woman found in an old abandoned house facing the sea.

   As it turns out, both investigators have issues of their own to deal with. Grégor grew up on the island, but this is his first trip to there in twenty years, even though his mother and his former fiancée still live there.

   As for Manon, she is a medical student who cleans crime scenes to help pay her tuition bills, and once on the scene of the crime, she starts seeing ghosts, primarily that of a very young girl. Even more surprisingly, she also finds a grave with her own name and date of birth on it. Apparently she died there on the island when she was six.

   Naturally this adds a degree of complications not present in most mysteries, causing your typical viewer expecting a straightforward detective story (me) a certain amount of consternation. But believe it or not, the writers knew what they were doing, and by the end of the movie, all is explained to that fully confounded viewer’s complete satisfaction.

   All except for the visions of ghosts that Manon has, but that’s part of the charm of the entirely Gallic tale. One could only wish that the story didn’t have to take place entirely under overcast skies. Batz must look entirely different in the sunshine!

DEATH IN PARADISE “The Early Bird.” BBC, 18 February 2014 (Season 3, Episode 6). Kris Marshall, Sara Martins, Danny John-Jules, Gary Carr. Directed by Robert Quinn.

   An organized group of bird watchers is on the island of Sainte Marie looking for a rare green parrot known to exist there and nowhere else. You might not realize that birdwatching is a competitive sport, but it is so in this story. When one of the group is seen getting up early and heading off into the jungle to be first to spot the elusive bird, the others hurriedly get dressed and follow off together in his wake. To their surprise, they find the man dead, with a knife in his back.

   The problem facing the small but highly efficient police force on Sainte Marie is that the area is a restricted region to protect the birds, and all of the people within the sanctuary were in sight of each other between the time the victim was seen and when his body was found. Who could have done it, and more importantly, how?

   I’m usually not very good at puzzles such as this, but I’m going to pat myself soundly on the back by saying that the “how” was easy. I didn’t figure out “who,” but looking back, all of the clues were there. Not all of the episodes of Death in Paradise are “impossible crimes,” but they are all puzzle stories, and they’re awfully good in making sure all of the clues are there for the viewer to see. All you have to do is pay attention!

   What also makes the series so much fun to watch is all of the good-natured camaraderie displayed on the part of the series regulars. Such is the case here.