By Lisa
Malice
If you’re like me, you learned to love
mysteries from your parents. My first exposure came about when my family
outgrew our Sunday night viewing of The Wonderful World of Disney and
replaced it with The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie
(1971-1977). With different sleuths rotated through the weekly series lineup, my
family religiously followed Columbo, McCloud, and MacMillan & Wife catch
the bad guys, though my favorite was—and still is—The Snoop Sisters, starring the incomparable Helen Hayes and Mildred
Natwick as two gray-haired mystery-writing busybody sisters who use their sleuthing
skills to help their police detective nephew (Bert Convy) solve real-life
murders. Sunday nights during the summer were spent driving home from the
family cabin listening to The CBS Radio Mystery Theater. The radio plays,
broadcast 1974-1982, were engaging, suspenseful, well-acted, capturing our attention
and imagination of the scenes, characters, actions, murders, and motives. (You
can access these wonderful radio shows via www.CBSRMT.com.)
These shows captivated my young
mind, prompting me to start reading mysteries, ones I pulled off my mother's
vast shelves of books. She read the masters of British Mystery--Agatha
Christie, P.D. James, Ngaio Marsh, and others, and I followed suit. But as my high
school studies focused more on science and math, I found myself under the spell
of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic deerstalker-capped sleuth fascinated
me with his vast wealth of knowledge, mastery of logic, and keen abilities of
observation and deduction to identify a murderer, his or her motive, weapon of
choice, and how the deed was done. I used my paper route earnings to buy my own
copy of The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes: 37 Short Stories and a
complete novel from The Strand Magazine” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1976),
complete with all 356 original illustrations. With more than 600 pages, the
book kept me reading night after night when I was supposed to be asleep. I
still have the thick tome in my personal library.
Nowadays, I always have a
good crime story on my nightstand, but my days also start out with a daily dose
of mystery at the gym, eyes glued to my tablet as I watch an episode of my latest
(rarely current) tour of murder while sweating away on the elliptical machine. Just
the suspense is often enough to keep my heart-rate elevated. My brain cells get
a work-out, too, matching wits with fictional detectives which wield powers of
observation and deduction to rival that of Holmes. Apart from obvious
portrayals of Doyle’s iconic characters, such Elementary (starring Jonny
Lee Miller as Sherlock and Lucy Lui as Dr. Joan Watson), TV producers and
screenwriters have filled the broadcast spectrum with a variety of Sherlockian adaptations.
Each sleuth has a unique backstory, personality quirks, and entourages that round
out the series bible.
Two current shows are
keeping me entertained right now. ABC’s Elsbeth, which is now in its
fourth season, stars Carrie Preston as a Sherlockian attorney, a court-ordered observer of NYPD Homicide, who
draws on her singular point of view to make unique observations the detectives
often overlook. Her astute deductive abilities allow Elsbeth to ID the real villain
fairly quickly (rather than the suspect that the cops like for the crime). Like
the series drew me into mysteries and made Peter Falk a household name, Columbo,
Elsbeth, is an inverted detective show—a howtocatch’em vs. a whodunit—and
a joy to watch.
I’ve just discovered Best
Medicine, which follows the adventures of a Dr. Martin Best, a big city
surgeon who signs on as the town doctor for a picturesque lobster-harvesting
village in Port Wenn, Maine. Wait! You say. That’s not a crime show.
Well, no it’s not, but every week Dr. Martin Best has a medical mystery to
solve that invariably requires a good bit of sleuthing to save one or more of
the town’s characters from all manner of diseases, illnesses, and strange
conditions (one character claimed his blue skin stemmed from all the
blueberries he ate). Doc Best’s keen
observational skills, probing questions, and encyclopedic knowledge of medicine
put him on par with Sherlock Holmes to close cases. The doc’s gruff bedside
manner is often at odds with those of the residents of Port Wenn, a delightful
cast of characters. A little romance is also in the air.
Do you have a favorite TV version of Sherlock
Holmes? Tell us about the
show!
