Mini reviews #30

My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018) by Oyinkan Braithwaite. This is truly a stand-out debut. A short and witty novel written as part of an undergraduate creative writing degree, it tells the story of Korede, who constantly finds herself cleaning up (literally and figuratively) after her beautiful, pampered serial killer sister, Ayoola.

Secret Obsession (2019), directed by Peter Sullivan. I hope SJ Watson is suing Netflix over this production. It’s like someone has seen Before I Go to Sleep, missed the point entirely, and decided to rewrite it.

The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective (2019) by Susannah Stapleton. An entertaining and illuminating look at the life and career of Maud West, who is probably well-known to geeks like me (and, let’s face it, you) but now unknown to most of the world. We get a glimpse here, not just of how  the detection business worked, and how a woman succeeded in a man’s world, but also at the fuzzy lines between criminality and respectability, between ethics and expediency. It’s an eye-opener and an etertaining read, interspersed with West’s florid accounts of her own cases. It’s also a beautiful book to behold.

Escape Room (2019), directed by Adam Robitel. There are a lot of films (and books) called Escape Room, and this is the only one I’ve experienced. It’s dumb as hell but oddly compelling and enjoyable. You can guess the premise. Apparent strangers are invited to experience the toughest escape room of them all, and they soon find out that the challenge has deadly implications… Will the real And Then There Were None please stand up?

The Turn of the Key (2019) by Ruth Ware. Ruth Ware is the writer I find myself recommending to other people more than anyone else. She really is the closest thing we have in print to a love child of Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier. And I don’t think she’s ever written a bad book. Her latest, as you can guess from the title, is a bit of a ghost story, but at its heart it’s a mystery thriller. And, in grand tradition, it’s epistolary. A nanny with a secret gets a suspiciously cushy job in Scotland, where she immediately gets charged with looking after three problem children for a week. And, possibly, a ghost. And, in the meantime, she tries to solve the mystery of why all the previous nannies have scarpered so soon after taking up their posts. It all takes her back to old myths and tragedies surrounding the property, a gothic building converted into a smart house, and the tension is palpable with every flying page.

High Seas (Netflix, 2019)

I have often wondered what an Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of Agatha Christie would look like, and I think that we've got closest to an answer in the most unexpected thing: a Spanish Netflix miniseries. Netflix has released High Seas (or Alta Mar) worldwide with dubbing - but do yourself a favour and stick to subtitles. The English dubbing is so, so unbelievably bad that I was praying the traffic accident in the first 20 seconds would be the end of the story. However, once I'd switched to Spanish, I happily endured the remaining 9 hours of silliness.

It’s the late 1940s, and a bunch of rich pretty people with dark secrets board a majestic ship sailing from Spain to Brazil. On the way to the harbour, two young women, Caroline and Eva, almost run over a third, harassed and anxious young woman, who says they need to get her on board or she will die. A tricky enough proposition but ten times trickier when Caroline is engaged to marry the owner of the sealine (is sealine a word? I mean the maritime equivalent of an airline).

Of course, no sooner is the intruder safely stowed when she starts acting very suspiciously, and then disappears. There’s a scream, a splash, and a murder investigation. Then, despite the close quarters in which all action takes place – namely, a moving ship – we also manage to plough through more murder, manslaughter, arson, divorce, adultery, rape, fraud, dancing, identity theft, suicide, deformity, false imprisonment, corrupt police investigations, and, of course, lashings and lashings of Nazi gold, all culminating in an on-board wedding at which, somehow an elaborate antique wedding dress that had burnt to a cinder has been repaired below-deck in two days to look even more stunning than before. Do not take High Seas seriously. It is the very definition of escapism, and all the better for it.

There is absolutely no innovation in this story. All the women are young and beautiful. LGBTQIA people do not exist. The rich are kind and clever or corrupt and greasy and the poor are either simple-but-honest or resentful-and-destructive. It's set in the late 1940s, and in many ways feels as if it was made in that time, although there is a bit of standing up to abusive men. The main thing here is getting swept up in the pretty sets and costumes, the swinging melodrama (exhibit A is the bride's arrival at the wedding), and the many out-of-field plot twists.

In the final episode, about sixty per cent of loose ends have been tied up but we still have a lot of questions. And then, in the last two minutes, everything changes again and about a zillion new storylines are opened up. Spanish media reports that the second series of HIGH SEAS is currently being filmed, and the telenovela-style storytelling combined with Hitcockian suspense, silliness, and cinematography will ensure a loyal audience.

META MATTERS

Eva is a writer.

Mini reviews #25

Today’s mini-reviews, the twenty-fifth set brining the total number of this pithy summaries to 100, are all television productions!

Case Closed (YTV, 1996-present). Also known as Detective Conan and based on the manga series of the same name, this is a fun, long-running murder mystery anime with a ragged bunch of child detectives and plenty of allusions to Golden Age detective fiction. If you like anime or classic crime, if you’re a child or an adult, Case Closed is worth a watch.

How to Get Away with Murder (ABC, 2014-present). Overblown, preposterous, and compulsively watchable series about illogically sexy postgraduate law student and their intense relationships with barrister-cum-law professor Annalise Keating (played by Viola Davies, who singlehandedly elevates the programme from utter rubbish to must-see television).

You Get Me (Netflix, 2017). Frothy, silly teen psychological thriller from Netflix. You Get Me owes a great deal of its plot to Swimfan (2002) following a young couple whose relationship descends into bloodshed with the arrival of an obsessive Other Woman. Interestingly, I recently read an upcoming novel by a bestseller (not to be reviewed on this blog), which routinely rips off this rip-off TV film. Half the cast are Youtubers, which should tell you enough.

You (Netflix, 2018). Engrossing ten-part Netflix adaptation of the novel by Caroline Kepnes, charting a bookseller’s obsession with a young writer, as it descends through social media stalking into very dark places.

Agatha and the Truth of Murder (Channel 5, 2018). In my December post, I mentioned that I thought this drama was not terrible and some of my friends let me know that I was wrong. But I stand by what I said: while the budget is clearly not great, Tom Dalton’s script mishmashes real events in a bizarre way, and Ruth Bradley’s performance as Christie is underwhelming, I thought the whole thing was fine. Agatha Christie as detective — especially in those missing days in 1926 — has been done to death, and this Channel 5 drama doesn’t offer anything particularly new. But it’s relatively inoffensive, and the plot is structured along the lines of an Agatha Christie novel of the period. That is a first for one of these projects, and makes it worth watching. Bradley has indicated that she might reprise the role. With Andrew Wilson’s series along similar lines expecting a TV home soon, that would be interesting.