BBC’s Ripper Street

Last year BBC America had it’s own program called Copper.  It’s a good show about cops and killers in New York in 1864.  Ripper Street is a BBC show that looks and feels a bit like Copper.  It’s the story of  cops, whores, and steam-punk CSI. The BBC is a bit more graphic in it’s display of mutilated bodies than CSI and the high tech used to solve crimes is a microscope instead of a laser.  Like most cop shows we have a Crime, a Detective, and a Solution.  The window dressing is Victorian London, Whitechapel to be specific.  The…

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The Last Sherlock Holmes Story

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.  Sherlock Holmes/Arthur Conan Doyle Michal Dibdin has done an excellent job of invoking the feel and tone of a Holmesian story.  The snide and condensing way that Holmes treats everyone he meets.  The kindness and slight dimwittedness of Watson.  The grudging respect of Detective Lestrade.  And the many small ways in which Sherlock Holmes shows himself to be of a superior mind. There is the common enough ploy of having a lost manuscript surface in which one more tale of the Great Detective comes to light. …

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