PERFECT MURDERS “Un Bon Chanteur est un Chanteur Mort.” France, 19 Decemeber 2017 (Season 1, Episode 1). MHz, streaming in the US, 2020. Isabelle Gélinas (Agnès), Arthur Mazet (Thibaud). Director: Didier Le Pêcheur.

   Roughly translating, the title of this first episode is “A Good Singer Is a Dead Singer,” in which a record producer is having trouble making ends meet. To assist in alleviating his financial problems, he decides that a singer he has had under contract for quite a while would be more helpful to him dead than he would be if he stayed alive.

   Thus it is only a short while before the singer ends up dead, drowned in the producer’s swimming pool. This is an elaborate production on his part, involving drugs, a watch, an automatic lawn sprinkler system, and a lot of nerve. Investigating the case are Isabelle Gélinas, as the senior officer, and Arthur Mazet as the new recruit and her new partner, fresh from a desk job to this, their first case together.

   The series is billed as one covering impossible crimes, but the fact is, this one isn’t. It’s a well concocted one, but it’s more like one to be solved by a Columbo-like character, not a fictional Gideon Fell, or a Jonathan Creek in a TV sense. The two leading characters have a good rapport, but maybe that’s because the male half of the new partnership is still in the learning stage of his career, and he allows the female half to do all of the detective work.

   It also seemed to me that much of the key detective work is done off screen, perhaps to cover over the fact that the case against the killer does not take up a lot of time and effort on their part, and other things are done instead.

   It’s still an enjoyable episode to watch, and perhaps after the “getting to know the characters” episode is over and one with, later cases will afford a greater challenge for them. The series has been on for five seasons, but note that the leading characters in this first one do not show up in all of them.

ALEXEI PANSHIN – Star Well. Anthony Villiers #1. Ace G-756; paperback original; 1st printing, October 1968. Cover by Kelly Freas. Reprinted by Ace, paperback, August 1978. Cover by Vincent Di Fate.

   An Anthony Villiers adventure, a costume piece of the 15th Century, common reckoning, or the year 3418 AD. Villiers himself remains an unknown quantity, but he has that something about him that causes events and crises.

   In this instance, a smuggling operation working out of Star Well, a planetoid in the Flammarion Rift, is broken up by the coincidental visit of Villiers; an Inspector General; and a group of girls being chaperones to Miss McBurney’s Finishing School.

   Emphasis on customs and costumes; clothes make the man, custom eliminates decision-making. Which will become more and more difficult as pressures of society grow and grow.

   A conversational style of writing is used. Here and there, it reminded me Lafferty , and also of Delany. The story, not told precisely in chronological order, but never mind, is slight, and the effort may not hold up over an entire series.

Rating: ****

         The Anthony Villiers series –

1. Star Well (1968)
2. The Thurb Revolution (1968)
3. Masque World (1969)

   A fourth book in the series. The Universal Panthograph, was announced but never published and perhaps never finished.

GEORGE HARMON COXE – Focus on Murder. Kent Murdock #15. Knopf, hardcover, 1954. Dell 970, paperback, February 1958.

   A newspaper colleague of Ken Murdock, a reporter named Stacy, is found murdered in his apartment. Murdock had been with him earlier in the evening when he had been shot at in his car, and two women had been looking for him after that, at least one with a gun.

   What is amazing is that the next morning Murdock is shocked to hear of the man’s death. It also take him to page 61 [of the paperback edition] for him to realize that the dead man was doing a brisk sideline business in blackmail. Other than that, the mystery is solved in typically good Coxe style.