Tuesday, December 30, 2025

The Singing Detective (1988)

 


 Dennis Potter. The Singing Detective. (1988) Script of the TV series, which we enjoyed very much. Reading this, I realised how much I’d forgotten or missed. The detective figures in the fictions of a writer hospitalised for severe psoriasis. There are both fictional and real-life mysteries, the central one being how and why they intersect in the writer’s memory, and how real life translates into fiction. Potter layers present and past, memory and reality, songs and stories, family and social connections, acceptance and refusal of the truth (such as it is). The TV series is available online (recommended). I found this book resolved some puzzles, but mostly showed me how little I had absorbed the first time round.

Recommended. ***

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Boomps-A-Daisy Timing Solves the Crime (Death and the Dancing Footman, Ngaio Marsh 1942)

Ngaio Marsh. Death and the Dancing Footman (1942). A re-read, and more enjoyable because this time I could see how Marsh constructed the pu...