Ever since I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. When I was a child, you couldn’t enter our house without catching snippets of Michael Parkinson or Sue Lawley chatting to Joanna Lumley, Eric Clapton, or Princess Michael of Kent about their most treasured pieces of music. As…
At some point, a disturbing notion has to cross the mind of anyone who’s been assigned a bodyguard: who protects me from my protector? If that bodyguard decides he doesn’t like what he learns about his charge, it’s inevitable that he’ll ask himself, why should I protect this person? These questions and more underlie Bodyguard,…
A country house, a dead body, a pack of suspects—sounds like Agatha Christie, no? Of course, it does. It’s said that Dame Agatha named 1958’s Ordeal by Innocence as one of her two favorite novels (Crooked House being the other), though she was known to change her answer to that particular question, as would any…
It’s here. Nearly two years after the end of Series 3 and almost a full year after the standalone “The Abominable Bride” episode, BBC has finally released a trailer for Series 4 of the hit series Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Written and created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, inspired by the…
The San Diego Comic Con looks like it’s all coming up Cumberbatch. Along with the release of a new Dr. Strange trailer, fans of BBC’s Sherlock were treated to a teaser trailer for Series 4 of Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s acclaimed take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s deductive detective. Opening with some eerie footage of…
Certain television protagonists are not always the most honest, upstanding heroes that good-guy-always-wins Hollywood has trained us to expect. Some shows feature outright criminals and monsters, and manage to build a story around them that causes the viewer to sympathize with, and even root for, the antihero. Not all of these shows hit the mark,…
Certain shows’ protagonists are not always the most honest, upstanding “heroes” that the good-guy-always-wins Hollywood has trained us to expect them to be. Some shows feature down right criminals and monsters and somehow build a story around them that causes the viewer to sympathize with, and even root for, the antihero. Not all of these…
In 2004, I was given an opportunity to pitch a TV show to the BBC. My first novel, Dead I Well May Be, had just come out, and although the book hadn’t sold well, it had been well reviewed, and this had attracted the attention of the Beeb. Partly autobiographical, Dead I Well May Be…
It is a fairly widely known fact that I will watch practically anything relevant to Sherlock Holmes and walk away happier than I was previously, always excepting Rupert Everett and his pair of execrably brooding eyebrows in “The Case of the Silk Stocking.” (Each of them, both singly and at times even in concert, gave…
In the second Lord Peter/Harriet Vane case, a walking tour of the English coast hardly goes according to plan when Miss Vane, mystery writer and once accused murderess, stumbles across a body on the beach. Exonerated of the poisoning murder of her former lover, Harriet is vacationing far from London in the hopes of distancing…
