Tag: DCI Banks

Colorful red & green coleus

Tidy Tidbits: Immersion, Film & Books

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VIEWING

UPLIFTING FILM

On the Basis of Sex (Amazon Prime)

Somehow, I missed seeing this film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s early career when it was first released.  This week seemed the right time.  Based on RBG’s life, it isn’t a documentary, but a wonderfully satisfying success story.  First in her law school class at Harvard and first in her class at Columbia Law, Ruth was nonetheless turned down by law firm after law firm (after all, she was a woman, a Jew, and the wives of the lawyers in the firm would be jealous).  

She became a professor at Rutgers and, from that position, worked with her husband, Marty, and the ACLU to take on a case of discrimination against a man.  She won that case and others that followed gaining more rights for women.  She and Marty were a great team.  Not only did she enable him to complete law school, but he was wholly supportive of her career and her rise to Supreme Court Justice.  Highly recommended!

A side note.  I am of an age that I recall being asked at my first job interview after graduate school if I planned to have children.  The questioner was a man and I was married.  It was a personal and inappropriate question, but not illegal.  I made some sort of oblique answer and was offered the job.  I also clearly remember celebrating when, several years later, I could apply for a credit card in my name only, based on my credit history alone.  I was married and working fulltime and, I didn’t really need that department store card.   I got it more on principle than need!

CRIME SCENE

Van der Valk  (PBS Masterpiece)

(variety.com)

Since most of us aren’t traveling these days, and certainly not abroad, it’s refreshing to see a television series set in a city that is familiar from past visits or future forays.  Yorkshire for DCI Banks, Dublin for Acceptable Risk, and now Amsterdam for chief detective Piet Van der Valk and his somewhat scruffy team of colleagues.  The canals and the streets of Amsterdam, jammed with bicycles, bring back fond memories of a week we spent there five years ago.  

This three-part series is the latest remake based on mysteries by Nicholas Freeling.  The suspicious deaths are complex cases, often political, with a tangled web of connections between family members and suspects.  Unlike some of the other series I’ve watched, the Dutch seem to resort to guns more frequently.  

Commissaris Piet is a striking man with steely blue eyes, a blond thatch, and a very prominent jawline.  Usually serious, with seldom a smile, his eyes look haunted by past tragedy.  Living alone on a houseboat, he has a close relationship with Lucienne, his right-hand person, and while fair-minded, brooks no sloughing off by his colleagues.

READING

TIMELY MEMOIR

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

(vanityfair.com)

Losing a parent to an early death is an event that stays with one ever after; losing a parent to violence is another level of remembrance and anguish entirely.  A former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Natasha Trethewey has written a poignant memoir about her mother’s death more than 30 years ago. Trethewey was just 19.  Her mother didn’t just die; she was murdered by her second husband.   For years, Trethewey carried around a load of guilt.  

In this work, she details her childhood as the offspring of a white father and a black mother and how the experience of walking around with just one of them differed greatly in other people’s responses.  The racism and mistreatment that were rampant during her mother’s childhood and the vestiges that persisted in Trethewey’s own life form the backdrop for this tragic story.  It echoes many of the cases portrayed in No Visible Bruises, an award-winning book by Rachel Louise Snyder.  (~JWFarrington)

CRIME IN YORKSHIRE

Careless Love by Peter Robinson

This is a recent crime novel featuring DCI Alan Banks.  I’d read a bunch of them some years back, but after watching the DCI Banks TV series, decided to re-visit Robinson’s work on the page.  This one starts out a bit too slowly for my taste, but then picks up.  A young woman and an older man are each found dead and abandoned in suspicious circumstances.   Both are dressed up and there appears to be no link between them.  When a neighboring crime team presents the suspicious death of another young woman, the circle widens and the hunt for clues is on.  Both DS Winsome Jackson and DI Annie Cabbot feature in the investigation along with Zelda, Annie’s father’s companion who closely guards her tragic past.  Enjoyable, but I liked some of Robinson’s earlier books more.

Note: Header photo is Florida fall foliage: colorful coleus.

pink hibiscus flowers

Tidy Tidbits: Escaping in Place

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BINGEING ON CRIME

DCI Banks (Amazon Prime)

This detective series is a BBC production from several years ago.  I think it is excellent.  Alan Banks is a middle-aged chief inspector in Yorkshire with a dour demeanor and a sometimes-sour look.  You’d think he’d be hardnosed, but underneath that façade, he is compassionate toward victims and diplomatic when necessary.  Yet, he drives his team forcefully in the hunt for any killer.  His primary colleagues are two women:  DS Annie Cabbot, a smart energetic individual who’s in love with Banks, and DI Helen Morton, a by-the-book precise person dealing with complexities in her own life.  

Banks with Helen Morton & Annie Cabbot (imbd.com)

 Each case is over two episodes.  The cases are complicated with multiple threads which is what makes them engaging.  There are crime scenes, but they are not overly gruesome.   The focus is on identifying suspects, following up links, and arriving at answers as to who killed a person and why.  The TV series is based on author Peter Robinson’s long running book series which now totals twenty-six titles.  Highly recommended!

The Fall (Netflix)

Set in Belfast, The Fall is a crime series about a serial killer and the detective from London who is brought in to oversee an earlier failed murder investigation.  Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson sees linkages between a much earlier murder and more recent ones, but they have no solid leads.  Paul Spector, the serial killer, is smart and ruthless.  He stalks young professional women and then breaks into their homes to do them in.  He leads a double life as a grief counselor and a married father of two young children.  Gibson is a complex character also, a sharp, high-ranking woman in a field dominated by men.  And the setting in Northern Ireland with its political issues adds another layer of tension.

What holds my interest is the police investigative work.  The enactments of the murders are graphic.  At this point, after four episodes of Season 1, I am ready to quit.  The pace is measured, the crime images troubling.  Although it received high praise as a psychological thriller, I don’t really recommend it, unless you are strong-hearted.  For those who are curious, there are three seasons.

CHANGE OF PACE READING

The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali

I stumbled upon a reference to this novel online and ordered it.  It is beautiful.   Set in Tehran in 1953 and in the Boston suburbs in 2013, it’s a love story.  But a love story marked by political upheaval, class distinctions, and the passage of time, decades even.  Roya and Bahman meet in a stationery shop in 1953 just before the coup that ousts the Iranian prime minister.  They are seventeen, passionate about one another, and eager to spend their lives together.  

With the political crisis, everything changes and Roya leaves Iran to attend college in California.  She marries Walter and has a mostly satisfactory life.  When she’s 77, an unexpected encounter opens a floodgate of memories and the chance to re-visit part of her past.  

Kamali has a delicate style. She weaves together strands of politics and Persian food and culture into a novel about parental love, familial obligations, and romance. For more information about Kamali’s childhood in Iran and her life in the States, follow the link on her name above.

MY STATIONERY SHOP

Like Roya and Bahman in the novel above, I too sought quietude, but no romance, in my local bookstore.  G. W. Ockenfels was located downtown.  They sold books, but also greeting cards and stationery.  It was a quiet shop, with a wooden floor and aisles with tall shelves as I recall, and the smell of paper and ink.   Mr. and Mrs. Ockenfels who owned and ran it were always welcoming.

I was in my teens, and didn’t have much spending money.  Customers were few and I could browse uninterrupted for long periods.  Over time, I became a regular, known to them by face and then by name. After I had selected and paid for a book, it was always carefully wrapped in pale blue paper and then meticulously tied up with very thin twine. 

In later years, Mr. O. became a bit confused.  He also began dispensing bear hugs that then were uncomfortable, but today might be reportable.  It was a sanctuary for me that became a little less so and then, as often happens in small towns, the Ockenfels went out of business.

Note: Header and book jacket photo ©JWFarrington.