Dvd Review: The Ice House

This article was first published at Blogcritics

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to assume that the recent BBC, Warner Home Video DVD release of the 1997 two part TV movie adaptation of best selling crime novelist, Minette Walters' first novel, The Ice House has something to do with the fact that it features the young Daniel Craig. And, since it just happens that the older Daniel Craig is returning to the big screen as Bond, James Bond, the resulting attention certainly couldn't hurt. Still, cynicism aside, whatever the reason for the current release, it is certainly welcome.

The Ice House is a taut, well paced crime drama in the best traditions of the British "who done it," filled with the kinds of revelations that are surprising, yet develop organically from the narrative. An unidentifiable body is found in an ice house on the estate of woman whose husband had disappeared some ten years earlier. She had been suspected of murdering him, but his body had never been found, and the detective in charge convinced of her guilt had reluctantly left the case unsolved. Now he is sure the newly discovered body is the husband and is out to prove it. Add some sensationalistic plot elements like lesbianism and spousal abuse and you have the makings of a smart piece of work with just enough spice to titillate viewers.

 

Corin Redgrave, the older Jolyon from The Forsyte Saga, plays the detective in charge with the measured competence one expects from the archetypical British police officer. Craig plays McLoughlin, his younger associate, and it is made very clear early on that he is the center of attention. He has something of a back story. His wife has left him. He has been drinking. And, his first spoken line introduces him with perhaps the most memorable line in the film. Craig doesn't disappoint, his performance is as good an indication that he would be going far as one could hope for.

The rest of the cast, although not particularly well known, at least on this side of the Atlantic, is excellent. Penny Downie plays the wife with appropriate emotional distress. Kitty Aldridge and Frances Barber play the friends who have moved onto the estate to live with her. Aldridge is a sarcastic tough talking radical; Barber is a softer character. The three form a protective support group in a hostile community where the locals assume that not only is the one a murderer, but that three women living together must be lesbians.

The two parts of the film run nearly three hours.  There is also a bonus feature on author Minette Walters which follows her has she plans, researches, writes and revises what was to be her seventh crime novel The Shape of Snakes. She comes across as a vibrant lively woman with a real commitment to getting things right in her fiction. She visits a prison to see how visitors are treated. She talks to a pathologist to get information about what can be learned from a body. She scouts locations for the novel much the way filmmakers would.  Perhaps the most interesting revelation in the film is her acknowledgement that three quarters of the way through the book, she still hasn't decided on the killer.  Although the nearly 45 minute film has little to say about The Ice House, it offers a fascinating insight into at least one novelist's modus operandi.

 

 

From Good Reads Website

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A lot of analysis of ethical problems, especially about lies and half truths, obligations to act on one's knowledge. Ultimately the ending is unsatisfactory, in that Isabel simply believes the killer's assertion that it was an accident. In the tradition of the unlikely investigator.

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Book Review: The Bad Book Affair, by Ian Sansom

There are the hard boiled detectives who stalk the pages of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. There are the rational logicians who look to their little grey cells while traveling on the Orient Express or breakfasting at Baker Street . There are the disillusioned police officials, the scientific sleuths, the high brow elites playing sometimes seriously, sometimes not, at police work. And of course there is the amateur detective: the rabbi who takes time out from his preaching to find killers, the crime fiction writer more adept at solving crimes than any detective she creates, the rare book specialist, the forensic psychologist, the elderly spinster, and so on.

It is to this latter group, that Israel Armstrong, the somewhat anti-hero of Ian Sansom's Mobile Library Mystery series belongs. An English, Jewish, vegetarian librarian working on a mobile library in a small village in Northern Ireland, Armstrong is as unlikely a crime solving candidate as any amateur sleuth in the pantheon. As The Bad Book Affair, the fourth in the Mobile Library series begins, Israel is in a depressive funk. He is approaching his thirtieth birthday. He has been dumped by his long time girl friend, and is feeling himself the proverbial fish out of water stuck in the Irish backwater, humdrum Tumdrum. Not only is Armstrong an amateur, he is something of a 'nebish.' A 'nebish' is the Yiddish equivalent of the naif who always seems to be saying and doing the wrong thing, who is constantly being taken advantage of, who never seems to have a clue. Although, in this case, Israel Armstrong in one 'nebish' who despite his inadequacies manages to get it right in the end.

As mysteries go, The Bad Book Affair is rather innocuous. If you're looking for murder and mayhem, this is the wrong book. The actual problem doesn’t even show its face until a hundred or so pages have passed, and even then it isn't a problem that is going to compete with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. What we've got here is no violent who done it, but more realistically a fairly gentle what happened. In fact, Sansom, it would seem is much less interested in any crime plot, than he is in things like character, tone and style.

The book is filled with as quirky a cast of characters as you'd be likely to find in even a Dickens novel. There is Ted, Israel's co-worker at the library, who doesn't seem to have a last name, and who doses Israel with commonsensical prescriptions that more often than not make absolutely no sense. He speaks home spun words of wisdom in a language all his own. "What's the point of having a dog and barking yerself, eh?" He invents words: "deedlin'," as in if you were driving, you'd be "deedlin'." "Jandies," as in "Ye give me the jandies." Linda Wie is Israel's jargon spouting, Chinese lesbian boss. Maurice Morris is an adulterous politician looking to get back into the government. There is a landlady named George, well on the way it seems to be a new love interest for Israel, and she is complemented by a Bible spouting fire and brimstone grandfather. There is a free thinking Presbyterian minister and a breakaway charismatic leader. It is these characters and Armstrong's interaction with them, rather than the somewhat piddling mystery that serves for plot, that is the central interest of the novel.

In general the tone of the book is satirical. Like a naïve Candide, Israel wanders through his world bumping into all sorts of behavior worthy of censure and ridicule: from a doctor who has no interest in his patients to a fish and chips Bible quiz, from a hidden shelf of 'bad' books to be kept out of the sight of impressionable youth to a teenage Wikipedia editor who has no knowledge of what he is editing. He pokes fun at religion, politics, literary icons like Harry Potter, artistic pretension, vegetarianism, journalism and almost anything else you can think of.

He likes the occasional play on words: a restaurant is called the Thai Tanic. Someone comes into the library and asks to borrow the De Saurus, the book with words. All books have words, Israel tells him. As a stylistic matter, it's the kind of thing that either makes you chuckle or makes you groan. Me? I chuckle. He also infuses his prose with allusions, both, classical and modern, literary and pop. So at the novel's opening, Israel in his depression is reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Later he reads from Madame Bovary to his dying friend. He talks about his ideal of living in a Brooklyn brownstone like Paul Auster and asks "who cares about Five People You Meet in Heaven with Morrie?" He has Romanians upset because people don't know Ionesco. Meanwhile, he clearly knows his readers will be sure to recognizeGrand Theft Auto, Dawson's Creek, Buffy , Lurch and Morticia. When it comes to allusion, eclecticism is the rule.

The Bad Book Affair is a whimsical entertainment that never hesitates to take potshots at a good many modern targets, and more often than not hits the bull's eye.