Murdoch Mysteries, or gritty Victorians

This is one I should have got to before now: a boost for Murdoch Mysteries, an atmospheric detective series set in 1890s Toronto.

I don't know much about the series or about the novels by Maureen Jennings on which it's based, but my first experience with the show finds a highly moral hero with a bent for science, up-to-date production values, and a grittier look than one might expect from even current mysteries set in the Victorian era.

Among other things, the series will be a reminder for crime fans that London was not the only city in the English-speaking world in 1890. I'll be off to watch a bit more once I've made this post, and you should be, too.

(An interesting touch is the lack of respect Toronto's rich show Murdoch. This accords nicely with a theory I've read about the late development of the police procedural in English crime fiction. The theory suggests that a police officer would not have made a credible fictional hero because his social standing would not have made him a believable inquisitor of the nobility. ... Another is a chilling rendering of "She Moved Through the Fair," not the first time that Irish folk song has been invoked in recent crime fiction or television.)

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The protagonist, Police Detective William Murdoch, uses the word criminalistics a time or two in at least one episode. I suspected anachronism, and one source says the word was first recorded in 1943 — decades after the era in which the series is set.

Another source, however, traces the word to the German Kriminalistik, coined by Hans Gross, a pioneer in the field whose work would have been new precisely in Murdoch's time. So I'd call the anachronism permissible. (Gross is a character in author J. Sydney Jones' Vienna historical mysteries set in Vienna.)

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P.S. A comment below from Murdoch/Jennings fan Iden Pierce Ford points out that my post refers in fact to one of three Murdoch Mysteries TV movies from 2004 and 2oo5, rather than to the television series that followed, now in its fourth season. It appears that I have lots of watching and reading ahead of me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Lines

I don't know what to read, so I'm reading two books at once. Here's a good line from the beginning of each:

"Gustav the Ripper? Werthen doubted it."

and

"We had hit the inevitable impass (sic), that stage in marriage when each day is like a long drive through Nebraska."

(See a related post on the joys of reading here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Stuck in Mitteleuropa with you

The TBR pile is situated between wars these days, or between Europes, or as close as one can get to between centuries.

First came Rebecca Cantrell's A Trace of Smoke, set in 1931 Berlin. Now are J. Sydney Jones' Requiem in Vienna, which opens with Gustav Mahler conducting a rehearsal of Vienna's Court Opera in 1899; David Downing's Stettin Station, set in Berlin in November 1941; and Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist, which shows that wars (and spy novels) don't end when walls come down.

As I read these books, I'll think about a Europe as exotic and unfamiliar as any African or Asian clime. I'll think about what draws authors to those agitated times and places where eras, civilizations, cultures and religions clash.

These stories all happen where East meets West. What are your favorite borderlands for crime fiction?

While you're thinking, here's the first sentence of Steinhauer's book:

"Four hours after his failed suicide attempt, he descended toward Aerodrom Ljubljana."

Happy reading!

© Peter Rozovsky 2010