Leverage: Five Little Grifters

"I'm not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go."
- Sherlock Holmes.

I cherished the hope that with the passing of another year, and the beginning of a new one, I could accelerate my reading pace, which has slowed considerably over the past month, but the first week of 2013 almost draws to a close – and I haven't even reached the halfway mark of the New Year mystery I have been reading. So, in lieu of a proper review, I have compiled a rundown of the fourth season of Leverage.

The fourth season successfully maintains the quality of the previous batch of episodes, and even ups their game, beginning in The Long Way Down Job when the team scourers an Alaskan mountain top for a missing climber and the evidence he was carrying to bring down a shady financier. We're also getting a glimpse of the main storyline that runs through all these episodes when they discover that their office has been bugged. Next up is an homage to the classics of yesteryear, The Ten Lil' Grifters Job, in which they infiltrate a detective-themed costume party at an cut-off, island mansion and Nathan (Timothy Hutton), dressed up as Ellery Queen as a nod to his father, Jim Hutton, who played the role in the 1970s television series, becomes the prime suspect when their mark is murdered during a black out. 

Sophie as Irene Adler & Nate as Ellery Queen

Without question one of the most enjoyable episodes, but also disappointing in a way, because it just goes through the motions of the preconceived image people have of a classic whodunit and they missed a few opportunities (besides an actual clever plot a la Ellery Queen). While their hitter and retrieval specialist, Eliot Spencer, mingles with the guests hunting for leads, Nate is upstairs getting comfortable in his role as armchair detective, however, there's not a single allusion to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin – in spite of the fact that Hutton played Archie in what's perhaps one of the best adaptations of a detective series that ever graced the small screen. And how neat would it have been if Nate or Sophie had said the following lines into Eliot's earpiece, "where force fails, craft succeeds." Kudo's to anyone who gets that reference!

Character-wise, the most interesting episode of this season was perhaps The Van Gogh Job, in which the stories of Hardison and Parker run parallel with that of their client and involves a lost Van Gogh that was smuggled into the country after the war. The Massive Lady would have probably described this one as a love story with criminal interruptions. The Grave Danger Job continues to develop the relationship between Hardison and Parker when the former ends up being buried alive during a con on a family of undertakers, who swindle their clients and sell the identities of the deceased to a drug cartel, and they have to race against time to find him – as well as finishing what they started! The Boiler Room is another fun one, in which their mark is a third generation conman whose family invented half of the tricks in the book and how do you con a man who was brought up by the men who invented the game? Well, you play a game that he isn't familiar with and we learn the identity of the man who's being spying on them.
 

The Cross My Heart Job has the team opposing a wealthy, but terminally ill, man who stole a heart that was donated to an ill 15-year-old boy and Nate, who lost his own son at a young age, takes this job personal – very, very personal. At the end, we get a peek of evil Nate. Evil Nate is fun. Mischievous, but fun. The Queen's Gambit Job is a bit lighter in tone, in spite of the job that consists of stealing a nuclear centrifuge calibration weight from a highly secured skyscraper in Dubai, during an international chess tournament, which they do as a favor to Sterling. As to be expected from his involvement, there will be double-dealings and crosses adding to the overall fun. Nate and Sophie are also developing a relationship, and from what I have seen of the next season, they're turing into one of those flirtious, comical husband-and-wife sleuthing teams. Except that they grift and steal things. 

The Girls' Night Out Job and The Boys' Night Out Job take place on the same evening when the girls (in the company of grifster Tara from the second season) and boys take an evening off to relax and enjoy themselves, but the girls end up tailing a good looking, internationally wanted man into an embassy and the boys have to try to keep a former mark they helped from getting killed by drug dealers. I think the night out with the boys was more fun and exciting. I mean, how could the other episode beat dropping Nate in the middle of an AA meeting? You simply can't!

In a previous episode, Hardison expressed his desire to run his own crew one day and began to notice that he was slowly growing into the Danny Blue of the group. The Gold Job is the next stage in becoming the next big con artist when he leads a job against a pair of lecherous gold dealers and plans to write a new page in the playbook of the modern conman. Luckily, his team has his back on his first outing as the leader of a pack. By the way, how awesome would it be if they put together a new team consisting of Hardison, Danny, Stacie, Parker and Eliot under the title Leverage International. Or Hustling for Leverage, if you want both shows in the title. It would also be a perfect vehicle to bring Nathan Ford and Michael "Mickie Bricks" Stone together. It would be like Lt. Columbo meeting Adrian Monk! Now, that's not too much to ask, is it? 

Yes. Every time I devote a post to either Leverage or Hustle, I'll mourn the fact that a crossover will never breach the boundaries of fantasy. Deal with it.

The Radio Job and The Last Dam Job make up the final, two-part episodes of the season and has the team up against the man who bugged their office and an old enemy from the past – who wants to extract his own kind of justice on them for putting him away and bringing down his company. In The Radio Job, another familiar face pops-up, Jimmy Ford, who attempts to steal a document from the patent office, but things go array when law enforcement encircles the building. Nate pulls off an impressive con to get them out of there, but his old man has a trick up his sleeve and gets away with the patents – and he isn't getting much in return for his trouble. 

SPOILERS (select text to read): I know this is suppose to be his send-off, but if the series wasn't cancelled, we would've seen Jimmy Ford rise from the dead. Remember, Jimmy Ford is an old-time grifter and fixer who runs with what he's got (as witnessed by his crafty, but simple, escape from the patent office), and he has good reasons for wanting people to believe that he's dead (see: The Three-Card Monte Job). And what we hear doesn't always align with what we see.

The Last Dam Job tips it hat to the final confrontation between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, as the team has to recruit allies to mislead the one adversary who knows all their tricks, and thus we get the return of the master-thief Archie Leach, Parker's "father" and mentor, and the hacker "Chaos," but you guess what I was thinking when these characters were re-introduced. Yes. What a great way it would've been to bring in the Hustle crew.

Anyway, there is a final, well-played confrontation at a dam that is very reminiscent of the scene at Reichenbach Falls (despite the modern scenery) and we have Ford holding his opponents at gunpoint (with his father's revolver) on the edge of the proverbial cliff. The main point of suspense is how he's going to deal with these powerful, relentless opponents and if he will go over the cliff himself by becoming a murderer.

I know I skipped a few episodes, like the wonderful The Hot Potato Job, but it has become a lengthy post as it's and I think these snippets did a sufficient job at conveying my enjoyment over the sustained quality of the stories and characters that have really grown on me. When I first blogged about this series, I thought it was a cut below Hustle, but Leverage upped its game, and now I think they bowed out on equal footing. 

One more season left to go!

Leverage: Let's Go Steal a Show!

"Grifting is the aristocracy of crime."

- Albert Stroller (Hustle)

Back in August of 2011, I was already a fan of the BBC series Hustle when I learned that there was an American counterpart (of sorts) to the series, entitled Leverage, which followed the same basic format – except that everything was done bigger and faster. 

Sometimes bad guys are the only good guys you get

Leverage, for those unfamiliar with the series, follows the exploits of a group of criminals, each a specialist in their own particular field (grifting, hacking, retrieval, etc.), who turned on the lowest of their own kind to provide leverage to their victims. I noticed in the previous post that I made on this series that my main objective, when comparing it to their overseas colleagues, was the lazy plotting – when they're faced with a hurdle, Hardison strokes his keyboard and problem solved! This was hardly a problem in the third season. They were even working long cons in a more traditional way. 

The Jailhouse Job has the brains of the outfit, Nathan Ford, locked up in a privately owned, maximum secured prison that functions as a cover for a money making scheme and they've decide to take down the corrupt warden as they pull Ford from prison. Hacking into the facility won't cut it and we even get to see them map out the prison the old-fashioned way. As a classicist, I could not but recall The Thinking Machine's prison caper in Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13" (1905). You can put a great mind behind bars, but that won't always lull them into inactivity. 

In The Reunion Job, they work what is perhaps a bit of an overly ingenious and emotionally deep con to pry loose a password from a powerful software mogul, but in order to do so, they have to "hack" and "take over" his personality. The Inside Job puts Parker in a tough spot when she botches a solo job and is trapped inside a building with an intelligent security system. They have to con their way in to get Parker out, before the system finds her. The Boost Job and The Ho-Ho-Ho Job featured a high-tech gizmo that briefly brought back that one annoyance from the first season. That said, it was interestingly used in The Boost Job, but too SciFi for my taste.

My favorite episodes of the third season were definitely The Three-Card Monte Job and The Rashomon Job, in which the teams' adversaries are respectively Nate's father, Jimmy Ford, and themselves!

Jimmy Ford is an old-school crook, who did time for one of the families as a favor and wants to get back in the game as a fixer for the big guys. There's just one problem: his son is sitting on his spot and one of them has to go. Nate not only has to go up against the man from whom he got his intellect, but also a hardened criminal who got experience on his side. It's episodes like these that show that the otherwise playful characters have their darker sides and their fair share of emotional baggage. The Inside Job did the same with Parker, perhaps the most popular character of show, reminding the reader that her funny quirks and anti-social behavior have a serious origin. But we also have comedic capers, like The Rashomon Job, in which the team are sharing memories of past jobs and discover that they all tried to steal the same artifact on the same night – five years before they officially met in The Nigerian Job. Their vague memories of that night and their perception of each other, especially Sophie's fake accent (Elliot's version was hilarious), were often very funny.

I thought these episodes were better than the final two-parter, The Big-Bang Job and The San Lorenzo Job, which began at the end of The Jailhouse Job when they were blackmailed by an Italian woman in taking down Damien Moreau, an untouchable crime lord, and most of the jobs they took in this third season was in order to get closer to Moreau (have the writers been reading Detective Conan?). They were not episodes, but the combination of a mob boss and a rogue president of small country didn't felt like the threat it should've been. Like Sterling was in the first two seasons.

That being said, it was a pretty solid season with overall better stories, character development that added to the stories instead of intruding on them and recurring characters (like Agent McSweeten and a rival hacker) that gave the series that real world feel – which is one of the things I love about Detective Conan and the Wolfe Corpus.

 I noticed something of interest: In the third episode, The Inside Job, Richard Chamberlain plays Archie Leach, a legendary thief, which happens to be a very similar role he played in a third season (and also the third) episode of Hustle. A mere coincidence or a cleverly hidden nod to that crew on the other side of the pond? Pity that they'll never meet, now that both series are taken off the air. Ah, the road not taken.

Well, I still have two seasons left to go, but first, I have to get back on track with these regular reviews.

The Man Who Leaped Through Time

"I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own."

- H.G. Wells.

I only recently learned that the missing and presumed dead Jonathan Creek series has resurfaced to hopefully redeem itself, after an ungraceful plunge into mediocre in the abysmal The Judas Tree (2010), in an as-of-yet untitled Easter special – to be filmed in early 2013. The episode was originally planned as a Christmas special, but Alan Davies' touring commitment delayed the production a few months. 

Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

Personally, I'm as thrilled as an early 1900s shilling shocker! Jonathan Creek has always been a very hit-and-miss series and The Judas Tree represented an all-time low, illogical to the extreme and riddled with plot holes, but the show's creator, David Renwick, also penned a few solid contributions to the impossible crime genre (e.g. Jack-in-the-Box (1997) and Black Canary, 1998). And hey, if we can forgive John Dickson Carr for Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956), we can certainly forgive Renwick for The Judas Tree.

And as we eagerly await the first snippets of information on this new episode, I wanted to take a look at an older one from the second season, Time Waits for Norman (1998), which nobody seems to like except me.

To be fair, Time Waits for Norman is an unusual episode – even for Jonathan Creek! The impossibilities, up to this episode, involved tangible miracles like a body inside a sealed nuclear bunker or a murderer, dressed-up as a skeleton, vanishing from a closely guarded garage, but here it's a domestic phenomenon of a man who only does things by his watch.

Maddy's publisher, Antonia Stangerson, finds herself confronted with irrefutable proof that her husband, Norman, was in America and England around the same time! It begins when an employee of a burger joint returns the wallet of her husband, which he left behind, but that’s highly unlikely because: a) Norman is a vegetarian and b) he was in New York at the time the man says he was eating a hamburger in the city. The man's story is on the threshold of convincibility, but Norman's employer confirms that he attended an early morning meeting.

A most singular problem, if you have to believe the evidence. Norman had a mere seven hours to hop on a flight back to the UK, to apparently enjoy a burger at his leisure, and hurried back to Manhattan in time for an important meeting. Maddy becomes interested and automatically draws in Jonathan to pick Norman’s story apart. Clues vary from a photo of Norman, taken in the UK when he was suppose to be in a meeting, a cryptic note and a scald mark on Norman's foot corresponding with the story of him spilling coffee in the burger tent. 

It's all Shakespeare to them

I guess this makes it for some people a dull and unexciting story to watch, because it’s basically tearing an alibi asunder without a proper crime to go with. At least, not a legal one. The motivation behind it all was very well done, even better than the solution itself, but Renwick's biggest achievement with this episode was showing a modern crime story that integrated a completely impossible situation, crossing space and time, in a believable scenario – and understanding what makes Norman ticks is key to understanding what actually happened. It's also what made me enjoy this episode even more. Norman dreads the passing of time and as a bit of chronophobiac myself, I felt empathy for the poor sod and loved the idea that it was used as a basis for an impossible crime story.

In my opinion, Time Waits for Norman is a criminally underrated and overlooked episode from this series.

Columbo: Miracles for Sale

"Few things are impossible to diligence and skill."

- Dr. Samuel Johnson

Columbo Goes to the Guillotine (1989) was the opening episode of the eight series and marked the return to the airwaves of the disheveled homicide detective after a hiatus that lasted more than a decade, but the intervening period had not dulled the lieutenants prey drive or his duplicitous appearance – never missing a beat as he doggedly pursues an opponent who's in the business of selling miracles.  

Elliott Blake is a self-professed psychic medium, who’s trying to weasel his way into a well-funded military think-tank program that studies claims of extraordinary sensory perception and finding a military purpose for it. Naturally, Blake's claims are as a legit as a stack of counterfeit bank notes and the only reason he has been getting away with his duplicity is because he has someone on the inside, Dr. Paula Hall, to help him achieve the desired results. But it also gives the heads of the think-tank hope that they finally got their hands on a genuine psychic specimen, who can perform miracles on demand and plan to stage another test conducted under the supervision of Max Dyson – an ex-magician exposing fraudulent mediums and explaining supernatural phenomena. 

Before the test, Blake and Dyson meet on a bridge cloaked in the rags and tatters of a misty evening and we learn that the gentlemen were imprisoned together in an African goal, where Dyson got out of before Blake, and the two opponents part ways like two duelists taking their paces. A very Doylean scene, if you ask me, somewhat reminiscent to Jonathan Small's story in Sign of Four (1890).

Dyson's experiment involves distant viewing and Blake is positioned in an isolation chamber, while three soldiers are scattered throughout the city in unmarked cars each with a small suitcase consisting of a blind fold, a marker, a city map book, a rubber band and a Polaroid camera. The soldiers have to blindfold themselves, flip through the book to mark a random location and drive to it in order to snap a picture and send it to HQ. Meanwhile, Blake is probing the minds of the soldiers, drawing pictures of what they photographed, and they match up pretty good! What I liked about the solution is that's basically textbook stuff, as Jonathan Creek would've said, that only works on paper, but what made it work here was that the trick was pulled-off under rigorous test conditions. It's so clever that the one trick that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to pull off becomes possible when you put a few obstacles in its way to prevent cheating. 

One, none-spoilorish, question though: were the really handheld scanners like that back in 1988/9?

The penetrating stare of a first-rate mind.

Anyway, performing a magic trick in front of a captivated audience, insistent on being fooled, is not, necessarily, a crime that garners the attention of one of the homicide squads finest, but Blake went back to Dyson when he was tinkering with his guillotine and leaves his old cellmate headless in his sealed apartment – and before long Columbo comes knocking on his door.

When the lock is cut out of the door, the lieutenant is confronted with what appears to be either a bizarre accident or a grotesque suicide, but the detective makes a few astute deductions that convince him that he's dealing with a murder. A magician friend of Dyson, Bert Spindler, puts Columbo on the trail of Elliott Blake and a battle-of-wits and deceit commences. Even though we know the murderer's identity from the outset, Columbo's observations on a screwdriver, groceries, tears shed at a funeral and the fact that Dyson died a day after his first defeat at the hands of a psychic are more clues and hints than is necessary for inverted mystery that plays out in front of your very eyes, but I love that the writer took the time to explain his suspicions. Not as much attention is bestowed on the problem of the locked doors and windows, Columbo finds the solution in a book entitled Locked Room Magic, however, I can forgive this since there was already a grand trick in this episode with Columbo reconstructing it towards the end. So I was already more than satisfied in that department.

Unfortunately, Blake is a lousy foil for the Great Detective, but only because he was accurately characterized. Blake's whole shtick is essentially being this enlightened being who unlocked the secret powers of his mind, but when you take that away you're left with a rather dumb, gullible person who gets by on a few tricks taught to him by Dyson and Columbo played him like a violin throughout the episode. Fun enough, absolutely, but I revel when Columbo has to chase a murderer as clever as him and one who sees right through him – often resulting in a nifty character sketch of the tousle headed sleuth.  

Here's the murderer from Prescription: Murder (1967):

"You never stop, do you? ... The insinuations, the change of pace. You're a bag of tricks, Columbo, right down to that prop cigar you use... I'm going to tell you something about yourself. You think you need a psychologist. Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but you are a textbook example of compensation... Compensation. Adaptability. You're an intelligent man, Columbo, but you hide it. You pretend you're something you're not. Why, because of your appearance you think you can't get by on looks or polish, so you turn a defect into a virtue. You take people by surprise. They underestimate you. And that's where you trip them up."

The killer's opinion on Columbo who was hounded by him in Ransom for a Dead Man (1971):

"You know Columbo, you're almost likeable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it's the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks... The humility, the seeming absentmindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family, the wife, you know... Yeah, Lt. Columbo fumbling and stumbling along but it's always the jugular that he's after. And I imagine that more often than not he's successful."

 And a final character analysis comes from Columbo's opponent from How to Dial a Murder (1978):

"You're a fascinating man, Lieutenant... You pass yourself off as a puppy in a raincoat happily running around the yard digging holes all up in the garden, only you're laying a mine field and wagging your tail."

I love it when Columbo has to fight a duel-of-wits on equal grounds, but that does take nothing away from the pleasure or cleverness of Columbo Goes to the Guillotine and enthusiasts of locked rooms should queue this in their to-watch-list – even if you've already seen it. Murder is just so much more fun when Lt. Columbo is fumbling and stumbling through a case, even in the re-run! 

I also reviewed Columbo Likes the Nightlife (2003).

Colonel March of Scotland Yard: Miraculous Shades of Black and White

"My work in the Department of Queer Complaints is concerned only with the improbable and, well, frankly, the unbelievable."

- Colonel March (The Sorcerer).

John Dickson Carr's Mephistophelean cunning and his incurable romantic disposition proved to be a fruitful union that gave birth to a number of memorable detectives, like the Chestertonian Dr. Gideon Fell and the curmudgeonly Sir Henry Merrivale, but it was his official policeman, Colonel March of Department 3-D of Scotland Yard, who became a regular on the small screen between 1956 and 1957 – finding an explanation for more than twenty cases of the bizarre and impossible.

Col. March has an eye for details

The thirty-minute episodes were (loosely) based on the stories in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), in which Colonel March is called upon to investigate implausible stories in order to determine whether they are exaggerations, hoaxes or cleverly disguised crimes. Colonel March of Scotland Yard follows the pattern of the short stories, but the inescapable modifications are present as well and the most "eye-catching" one is Boris Karloff as March – who doesn't fit the description of a speckled man with bland eyes and a short pipe projecting from under a cropped moustache (which may be sandy or gray). Inexplicably, March was given an eye-patch, which occasionally causes a collision with one of the sets that wobbled in the background, but Karloff played the amiable detective convincingly and actually gave March more of a personality than he had in the original stories.

I finally decided to watch a few episodes and in spite of the dated production values, retooled stories or forgetting to drop a clue here and there it was a blast to watch. It’s basically a direct ancestor of Jonathan Creek with its locked rooms, bizarre occurrences and light-hearted undertone.

The framework of The New Invisible Man is the same as its eponymous story and has March looking into the unbelievable story of Major Henry Rodman, who witnessed a shooting in the apartment of his neighbors and the only description he was able to give of the murderer is that of a pair of floating, disembodied gloves – filled with invisible hands. However, this amusing yarn Carr spun was merely a subplot in the episode and a layer saturated with criminal intent was added to the story, which, IMO, was a mistake. The story from the collection perfectly demonstrated what kind of unusual problems March's department handles and tossing a common garden variety of crime cheapened the plot. But it was fun to see with my own eyes how the trick looks like in real-life. 

"Piltdown Man" hoax inspired the following episode.

An ancient skull called "Damascus Man," known as The Missing Link, which's also the title that was slapped on this episode and opens with an attempted theft of the skull by two museum employees, Tom Grafton and Evelyn Innes, in order to expose Sir Henry Danier as a fraud – except that the skull does end being stolen but by whom and why? This is more a story of crime and archeological skullduggery than of detection, but an enjoyable one at that.

Over the course of the next episode, The Sorcerer, John Cusby suspect his wife's psycho-analyst, Dr. James Patten, of plotting her demise and fumes with malicious intent, but it's his wife who ends up as a suspect when Dr. Patten is stabbed to death with one of her hatpins inside his, locked and windowless, treatment room – with Mrs. Cusby as its only other occupant. I was afraid the entire episode that the plot would hinge on hypnosis with Mrs. Cusby as a remote-controlled assassin, but the trick used to enter the sealed room was surprisingly good. Simple but effective. 

Death in Inner Space is Carter Dickson as conceived by Clayton Rawson or Fredric Brown, opening with March giving a speech for the Society of Interplanetary Communication, where’s invited by Dr. Hodek to spend a few days at his home – where's working on experiments with suspended animation. He’s convinced that he has been receiving radio signals from Mars and that, one day, we will be able to visit our Martian neighbors and his work is the first step. Unfortunately, one of his experiments goes horribly wrong and his volunteer dies due to a lack of oxygen in spite of a perfectly working alarm system that should've warned Hodek in case anything went wrong. Not all that bad, but the premise was more interesting than the solution and the ending was ambiguous.

The Invisible Knife has an unusual take on the multiple spouse-killers: a man who regularly has to bury business partners. Basil Pennacott had them all over the world, from Bombay to Tangier, and he profited from all of them – especially after they died. Four of them appeared to have died of natural causes, but the fifth, Edmund Hays, was stabbed in the proverbial locked room while attempting to summon demons. Pennacott was there with him, but was never charged because the police was unable to find the murder weapon. But now that Basil has come back to England, he finds himself being threatened by the Hays' brother, who mailed him a dead parrot with a poisoned beak, and asks March to protect his life. This gives the story a nice dual conflict of having to protect an unscrupulous murderer on one hand and trying to prevent an innocent man from becoming one on the other. The trick for the vanishing murder weapon was culled from "The Dragon in the Pool," which was a radio play Carr penned for Appointment with Fear.

You can expect more posts on this series in the not-so distant future, but you can also discover them for yourselves on YouTube. 

Guest Blog: Polish Plots

Note: welcome to the third installment of this ongoing, but highly irregular, series of guest posts, in which fellow mystery enthusiasts temporarily usurp this blog for their own devices – and playing the role of supplanter for this entry is Patrick who blogs over At the Scene ofthe Crime. When I first bumped into Patrick, he was still going over the works of John Dickson Carr and was unfamiliar with even some of the more well-known GAD writers. So we made a few suggestions, nudged him in the right direction and you can read the result almost daily on his blog. Yeah, I know I should feel a pang of guilt for my part in the creation of this monster (he didn't know Rex Stout less than two years ago and is now reading Christopher Bush!), but I comfort myself with the thought that we gained a valuable ally and a future scholar to help us defend the detective story in the decades ahead of us. For this article, Patrick will be our guide in the world of the Polish mysteries.

When the Golden Age of Detective Fiction was in full swing, Poland was not really partaking in it. The reason for this is simple, as a quick history lesson will show. Between 1772 and 1795, Germany, Austria, and Russia partook in the Three Partitions of Poland, where they basically divided the country between themselves and made it disappear from the map until the end of World War I. After over 120 years of oppression, Poland was busily trying to build a country again, and thus, the detective story was not particularly popular.

And then World War II began, when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 1^st, 1939. World War II was another turbulent period in Polish history, as an effort was made to suppress Polish culture. A not-so-well-known item on Hitler’s agenda was to get rid of the Polish people and colonize Poland with Germans. Polish culture was once again under attack, and amidst all the fighting, the detective story quite obviously wasn’t about to flourish.

When World War II ended, one dictator was effectively replaced with another, as Stalin took Hitler’s place. The war on Polish culture waged on, as the Soviets basically attempted to suppress Polish identity, religion, etc. An excellent film on the turbulent period is Katyń by legendary filmmaker Andrzej Wajda about the massacre of Polish officers by Soviets in Katyń Forest. It’s a film that would have gotten Wajda killed if he’d made it 30 years earlier.

Obviously, after such a cycle of various oppressions, it would take time for the detective story to flourish in Poland, and for a long time, the only detective stories really published there have been those with an overt political flavour, involving corrupt governments and the like. But in recent years, Poland has seen a sort of rebirth in terms of the detective stories—Agatha Christie has been massively translated, as has been Erle Stanley Gardner. (John Dickson Carr, unfortunately, hasn’t been quite so lucky—in Warsaw’s public library, only a translation of The Devil in Velvet can be found in the catalogue.) With this rise of interest in the classical detective story is linked a rise of interest in Polish people writing their own detective stories.

The first sign of this movement might be seen in the work of Zbigniew Nienacki, who in 1957 began writing his series starring Pan Samochodzik (which can literally be translated as “Mr. Small Automobile”). In total, he wrote 15 novels. Two were completed after his death, and the series proved so wildly popular it’s being continued to this day with the last novel being released in May 2011. I hold this series dear to my heart because it’s influenced my tastes in mysteries very much.

Pan Samochodzik is like a Polish Indiana Jones—his real name is Tomasz N. N., and he holds a position in the Ministry of Culture. His adventures usually involve a hunt for some sort of artefact or other, but this formula allows for many variations. Sometimes Pan Samochodzik is doing the hunting, sometimes it’s the villain, but every time, a rollicking adventure is guaranteed. He is named after his remarkable car, which seems like an old piece of junk, but has a fine engine from a Ferrari on the inside. His inventor uncle also managed to give the car gadgets right out of a James Bond movie, making it a marvellous machine indeed.

When recently revisiting the series, I was struck by just how much it’s influenced me without my realising it. Pan Samochodzik I Fantomas (Pan Samochodzik and Fantomas) is a case in point. There, Pan Samochodzik investigates a mysterious series of thefts in a museum. An art thief calling himself Fantomas announces his thefts beforehand, naming the painting he will steal and the date by which he’ll do it, and he defiantly challenges museums to stop him. Naturally, security is upped, but Fantomas manages to strike again and again, stealing paintings under apparently impossible circumstances.

The situation itself is wonderful and I realized how it’s in the very finest tradition of the impossible crimes I love now. Unfortunately, the solution is in typical Nienacki style very underwhelming. The problem is that Nienacki rarely had a single culprit that you’d have to pick out among a set of suspects. Instead, a gang of international thieves is usually involved, and that suddenly makes everything easy going. The solution to the art thefts is remarkably slapdash, depending on a psychological improbability in order to work.

Another one of my favourites is Pan Samochodzik I człowiek z UFO (Pan Samochodzik and the Person from the UFO). It’s not even a proper mystery per se; Pan Samochodzik basically comes to Bogota to crush an international gang of thieves. But the novel is a fine adventure story, with mishap after mishap occurring. Throughout the proceedings, Pan Samochodzik must deal with a mysterious stranger who claims to be an alien, and he performs several miraculous, seemingly impossible feats—one in particular is impressive, where he puts on a suit that gives him powers of invisibility! Not to be outdone, Pan Samochodzik puts it on and… he gets the same powers! Unfortunately, the ending to this angle is not a particularly good one. Nienacki, instead of explaining the impossibilities, goes with an “ambiguous” ending where you’re not sure what just happened—was the man an actual alien? Or was Pan Samochodzik just high on cocaine?

Translations of these books into English seem very unlikely, but since you never know, I’ll avoid spoilers just in case. Far more interesting is an excellent Polish comedy from 1976, Brunet Wieczorową Porą (literally “Dark-haired man at evening time”, though “Brunet will call” conveys the title’s actual meaning far better). It is my favourite Polish comedy, and as you can tell from the date, Communism was still around in Poland, but the Polish identity was in full rebellion, trying to establish itself. The story’s hero is Michał Roman, a Polish editor who is alone at home— his wife and children have gone on vacation. A Gypsy knocks at the door, having apparently injured her hand, and Michał helps her. In return, the Gypsy tells his fortune—she tells him his lucky numbers, for instance. Then, her face clouds over, and she tells him that the very next day, a brunet will call in the evening… and Michał will kill him!

The next day, strange things begin to happen. The milkman finds Michał’s watch, just as predicted. The “lucky numbers” turn out to be the winning lottery numbers. As prediction after prediction is fulfilled, Michał gets uneasy and tries to isolate himself for the day, but the strategy doesn’t work. A brunet walks into the house and Michał, terrified, gets rid of him. Then, happy that he’s messed up the prediction, he goes to bed. But in the middle of the night, he wakes up, and stumbles to the hallway, where he accidentally knocks a box of knives off of the staircase. When he goes downstairs, he stares in horror: the brunet who came to the house earlier is there, stabbed to death!

Michał turns to his friend Kazik Malinowski, played by Wiesław Golas. He manages to explain the miracle of the Gypsy’s predictions brilliantly— I particularly marvelled at the simplicity of her prediction for the winning lottery numbers. But one question is left: who is the culprit? To solve this, Kazik and Michał rely on a clue of extreme stupidity, but to be fair, that’s the point. The movie is after all a comedy, and the “clue” that gives the killer away is a hilarious generalisation about American crime films that was made earlier in the movie. This all sets up a brilliant final joke, when the milicja asks Michał how he figured it out. He gives them a piece of advice, and as the credits role, they stop a random, perfectly harmless person on the street based on the advice!!!

The sense of humour is very Polish indeed, and jokes are made at the expense of Polish people, Americans, and (especially) Russians. One of the movie’s most memorable scenes takes place in a museum, where all the artefacts are bottles that Russians have used throughout the ages to get Polish people drunk! With a little more work, the film could’ve been had sublime impossible crime while being an excellent comedy, but as it stands, the movie is perfectly fine.

That’s all very well, you might say, but I’ve mentioned some rather old things! What is going on in Poland right now on the mystery front? Well, I discovered that some of our novels are actually crossing the language border, with Zygmunt Miłoszewski getting translated. I have yet to read one of his books (which are proving to be harder for me to procure than I expected). However, although the books are being billed as “Polish noir”, considerable emphasis is placed on his sense of humour and wit, as well as the plotting. Also, I haven’t heard the words “gritty”, “unflinching”, or “transcends the genre” in connection with these books. That raises hopes quite a bit.

Another interesting achievement is Anna Kańtoch’s Diabeł na Wieży (The Devil on the Tower) and Zabawki Diabła (The Devil’s Toys). These are short story collections that combine the classic mystery with the fantasy genre—at least, that’s how it’s understood in Poland! These are wonderfully atmospheric tales that invoke the supernatural, and I have finally managed to get copies of both books. I hope to be able to review them soon on my blog; the arrival of several obscure Interlibrary Loans has unfortunately delayed my reading much more at the moment. However, what I’ve read is brilliant—Kańtoch has a gift for creating atmosphere and for coming up with macabre imagery and situations. In the first story of Diabeł na Wieży, her characters come across a well that is filled with children’s toys… and all of them have their eyes gouged out!!!

Finally, there is a promising television series airing on TV Polonia called Ojciec Mateusz (Father Mateusz). These are blatantly influenced by G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown tales. Ojciec Mateusz is a kind man who has recently been kicked out of Belarus by the authorities, who don’t consider him in a positive light. Mateusz is assigned to a new parish in Sandomierz by the bishop, where he meets a colourful cast of recurring characters, including Peter, the snarky organist, and the housekeeper Natalia, who insists on cooking meals for the priest. (Unfortunately, she has yet to show talent for the subtle art of cooking, and would undoubtedly give Nero Wolfe indigestion!) Mateusz is simply a man of strong faith trying to do what is right and good, and in the process, he comes across several mysteries that he resolves using common sense.

Father Mateusz

The first episode in the series is Obcy (The Stranger). Father Mateusz comes to his new parish, and almost immediately comes into contact with violent death. A member of the Arab community has died, and his wife simply does not believe that he has committed suicide. Mateusz investigates and manages to make the local chief of police very unhappy in the process (although he befriends one of the officers who keeps him up to date). The suspects are not very numerous and the ending is not all that surprising, but unfortunately, it isn’t fairly clued at all. When confronting the culprit, they reply that the priest has no proof, to which he answers he doesn’t need any—that’s for the police.

Episode 2, Eksperyment (The Experiment) is far better. A doctor has apparently botched an operation on a little girl who is now in critical condition, and her father is understandably irate. When the doctor is found dead in the parking lot, the police first suspect an accident—after all, he died when he slipped down a set of dangerous stairs in pouring rain. Mateusz is not convinced, though, and he brilliantly deduces murder in the finest tradition of Golden Age mysteries, with the clue that isn’t there. Unfortunately, this leads to the arrest of the obvious suspect, who protests he is innocent. The ending is excellent, because it manages to be fairly clued and have a very good motive at its core.

Episode 3, Dług (The Debt) is interesting. Father Mateusz tackles ruthless loan sharks who are terrorising parishioners of his, threatening the life of their child. Unfortunately, not much is done with this premise— Mateusz figures out who the leader is (not much of a surprise) and from then on, it’s a game of Ring Around the Rosy until the victims are persuaded to denounce the culprit.

However, even if the mystery is not much good, every episode in this television series is quite watchable. The religious angle is not overplayed, but it is prominent— Polish people are very Catholic after all, and thus, this move is quite understandable. The characters are a true delight and the main character, Mateusz, manages to be a likeable, honest man whom you want to see succeed. Because the main character is so good, the rest of the series follows suit. However, if you look it up on IMDb, it has a shocking low rating of 4.5 stars!!! I have no idea why—the series is not 10-star material, but it is worth at least 6 stars. The low number of votes has probably got something to do with it, and I also can’t find English subtitled versions of the episodes online.

Perhaps the day will come where the Polish imagination is exploited to its full potential in the realm of detective stories. It’s coming soon, I hope—the genre is growing more and more popular in Poland. And after all, don’t the Polish people deserve a mystery craze? The “political” sort of mystery is still very popular in Poland, but the appearance of new forms and excellent authors are promising. The market is youthful and full of potential— let’s just hope it doesn’t get corrupted by the noir craze that has turned the modern mystery novel into character angst combined with graphic violence.

Foreign mysteries discussed on this blog spot:

The Trampled Peony (Bertus Aafjes, 1973)

The Last Chance (M.P.O. Books, 2011)

Death in Dream Time (S.H. Courtier, 1959)

Murder During the Final Exams (Tjalling Dix, 1957)

Elvire Climbs the Tower (Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe, 1956)

Romance in F-Dur (Ben van Eysselsteijn, 19??)

The Black-Box Murder (Maarten Maartens, 1898; reviewed by M.P.O. Books)  

Lead for the Family (Martin Méroy, 1959)

Murder in a Darkened Room (Martin Méroy, 1965)

The Sins of Father Knox (Josef Skvorecky, 1973)

What Mysteries Lie Under the Rising Sun (guest blog by Ho-Ling on the Japanese detective story)
An Amsterdam Policeman: Remembering Appie Baantjer 
An Amsterdam Policeman: Remembering Appie Baantjer II: A Spate of Crimes  

Case Closed, volume 38: On the Ropes (review of Case Closed) 

Case Closed, volume 39: The Scarlet Blaze (review of Case Closed) 

Case Closed, volume 40: A Kiss Before Sleuthing (review of Case Closed)

The Melody of Logic Must Be Played Truthfully (discussing Spiral: The Bonds or Reasoning)

Kindaichi: The Good, The Bad and The Average (dicussing The Kindaichi Case Files)

Amnesia Labyrinth, vol 1 (review)  

Leverage: First Impressions

"Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys."

Last week, I posted a brief synopsis of the BBC series Hustle, in which a team of conmen take on the undesirable elements of society who abuse their wealth and power – and separate these unquenchable Scrooges from a considerable amount of dough. Overall, it's a superb series with fun characters, cleverly constructed, multi-layered plots and a brisk tong-in-cheek style. So when I read there was an American counterpart to this series, entitled Leverage, I perked up and immediately placed an order for the first season box-set. The first disc just stopped spinning and it left me with mixed feelings. 

We provide... leverage

First of all, the series has the same unpretentious, facetious tone (even when there's a darker, more serious edge to a story) and the characters are every bit as much fun as their European brethrens. The main objective of this series evidently lies in filling up nearly an hour with unadulterated amusement, however, it misses the cleverness and labrythine plotting of Hustle.  

But let us begin with lining up the suspects and identifying them: Timothy Hutton assumes the role of the crew's mastermind, Nathan "Nate" Ford, who was an insurance fraud investigator until his employer refused to cough up the cash needed to provide his son with life saving medical treatment – resulting in the kids untimely passing. The aftermath of this domestic tragedy is that Nate not only lost his son, but also his wife and career until a man hires him to lead a crack-team of criminals to do a job that would cost the insurance company who allowed his son to die a lot of money. But when they're double-crossed they band together instead of dissolving and take down their first mark as a team.

The other members of this band of criminals include the reputable grifster, who occasionally nicks valuable paintings and artifacts, Sophie Devereaux; the martial arts, fire-arms and retrieval expert Eliot Spencer; the cat burglar Parker and last, but not least, computer expert and master hacker Alec Hardison. They pool their unique talents and knowledge to provide leverage to those who've been wronged, harassed and bullied by influential individuals and domineering corporations by leveling the playing field for them – and this often includes retrieving what was taken from them or get what their targets morally owe their clients.

This is where the fact that you're watching an American series smacks you in the face. The marks are bigger, richer and wield more power and therefore the stakes and risks are a lot higher – resulting in more action based story lines and less of the Machiavellian scheming I was expecting to find in the only peer Hustle has. The plotting can be downright lazy at time! When they're faced with a hurdle, Alec simply strokes his keyboard and it's solved (because everything is online); where as the other crew work their fingers to the bone when on a long-con and their fixer never solved the really difficult tasks with such ease. Heck, in one of the episodes he was unable to bypass a seemingly perfect security system and they had to cook-up a clever plan to work around it – creating an impossible theft in the process. 

Admittedly, the last two episodes I watched, The Miracle Job and The Bank Shot Job, showed definite improvement over the first three episodes. The first one has them fabricating two miracles, making a statue of St. Nicholas cry and disappear before a full congregation, in order to save a church and the second came closest to matching their overseas counterparts – when Nate and Sophie land smack in the middle of a hostage situation during one of their cons at a small-town bank. Yeah, putting your main characters in a hostage situation is not a very innovative plot idea, but you can churn out something decent if you know how to spin it and that was definitely the case here. And the fact that this is as much a crime fantasy, which refuses to take itself too seriously, as the other series also helped making this plot work and everyone can cheer when the villain-of-the-week received his comeuppance.

Plot-wise, Leverage is just a cut below Hustle, but not any less enjoyable and I'm already foolishly keeping my fingers crossed for a continental crossover project, in which the crews of Nate Ford and Michael Stone chase the same mark. But not something as a trivial as looting a casino or bank. No, no, no! This has to be something on the same scale as Maurice Leblanc's epic 813 (1910).

Oh, one can but dream...