If you haven't tuned to PBS "Mystery!" in a while, they've been showing good stuff lately. First was a series called "Jericho" about coppers in 1950's London, and now they're running more of the new Miss Marple series. These are beautifully designed and shot, filled with great post war fashion and decor. Totally capitalizing on the mid-century modern craze, but Geraldine McEwan's Miss Marple is so delightfully sly. Genevieve and I want to spend our old-ladyhood solving mysteries and knocking back drinks while playing matchmaker. Also, I either don't remember the plots or they've reworked them to fit the post WW2 timeline and it's all new to me.
But what I wish they'd consider doing is reviving Patricia Wentworth's Miss Maud Silver. I went on a kick of reading these about 4 years ago. Thankfully CPL has quite the supply and even some reprints of really trippy non-mysteries she wrote before she created this mystery series. (Seriously--there's one that revolves around the identity of a possible heiress raised by a butler on a remote island after a shipwreck when she was an infant, and another that's a murder plot thwarted by a Loch Ness monster situation.) Miss Silver is a former governess turned professional detective, another old lady who knits and matches up the lovelorn. Wentworth's characterization is better than Christie's, and she does more with switching between points of view. Some of the plots are creepy dark and violent. My latest read, The Alington Inheritance was described by the Chicago Sunday Tribune as "realistic countryside drama of greed, desperation, and a thread of romance." Just what you need after a long day at work.
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