For the suspense drama lovers, there's no better way to unwind than with a murder mystery. Down the years, a beguiling variety of consulting detectives, debonair troubleshooters, hard-boiled private eyes and perspicacious spinsters have graced our cinema and television screens, including several who have made the transition from the pages of drawing-room whodunits and pulp fiction. So let Cinema Paradiso introduce you to the most celebrated sleuths, as well as a few forgotten faces, and get your little grey cells working.
For Those With Long Memories
Despite the academic disputes, detective fiction appears to have begun with Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders of the Rue Morgue (1841), which marked the first appearance of C. Auguste Dupin, whose practised art of ratiocination or reaching a deduction through reasoning would influence many a future sleuth. Among them was the occupant of 221B Baker Street, who actually replaced Dupin in the first screen adaptation of Poe's teasing thriller, Sherlock Holmes and the Great Mystery (1908). Sergeant Cuff has been claimed as the first police detective in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868), which has been adapted on several occasions by the BBC, with the 1972, 1996 and 2016 versions being available through Cinema Paradiso.
The Éclair serial had a major impact on film-making in Europe and America, with Viggo Larsen and Paul Otto taking the leads in the 1910 German serial, Arsene Lupin Contra Sherlock Holmes. Created in the image of Rocambole by Maurice Leblanc in 1905, Arsene Lupin was a gentleman thief with a gift for cracking crimes and, in the course of over 20 big-screen adventures, he has been played by such notable actors as John Barrymore, Jules Berry and Melvyn Douglas. More recently, Romain Duris returned him to his criminous roots in Jean-Paul Salomé's Arsene Lupin (2004).
A number of Lupin-inspired cracksmen solved crimes as well as committing them. We shall remeet E.W. Hoffnung's A.J. Raffles, Louis Joseph Vance's The Lone Wolf and Leslie Charteris's The Saint in due course. But one director who was particularly intrigued by the notion of the good thief was Louis Feuillade, whose Fantômas (1913) favoured René Navarre as Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre's master criminal more than it did Edmund Breon as his nemesis, Inspector Juve. However, Feuillade was fully behind Jacques de Tremeuse (René Cresté) in his bid to exact his revenge on a crooked banker in the 12-part Judex (1916), which inspired Georges Franju's wonderfully atmospheric 1963 remake, with Channing Pollock in the title role. Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep (1996) would similarly revisit Feuillade's Les Vampires (1915), an epic seven-hour serial that followed the efforts of Paris Chronicle reporter Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) to confound an Apache gang.
Such chapterplays and those featuring plucky heroines like Pearl White, Helen Holmes and Helen Gibson did much to make movie-going a habit among audiences seeking an escape from the daily grind. Silents starring such crook-catching canines as Strongheart and Rin Tin Tin brought a touch of novelty to screen thrillers. But, as the six long-forgotten 1920s silents featuring Glen White as Tex, Elucidator of Mysteries seem to suggest, the most influential figure on the sleuthing sub-genre was and still is Sherlock Holmes.
Sheer Luck, Holmes
William Gillette did more than anyone to bring the master detective to life by playing him on the stage in 1899. Among his 1300 performances in the role was a 1916 film version of his famed play, Sherlock Holmes. But Gillette was pipped to the screen by an unnamed actor in Mutoscope's Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900) and by the Hungarian Károly Baumann, who became the first named player to take the role in Sherlock Hochmes (1908).
Fittingly, British actor Clive Brook became the first speaking Holmes in Basil Dean's The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929) and compatriots Arthur Wontner (1931-37) and Basil Rathbone (1939-46) made the role their own in the respective company of Ian Fleming and Nigel Bruce as Watson. These pairings can be seen in action in Philip Gardner's Elementary My Dear Watson (2009). But the Rathbone-Bruce combination remains the one by which all subsequent partnerships are judged and Cinema Paradiso is the place to come to find The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (both 1939), Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (both 1942), Sherlock Holmes in Washington, Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (both 1943), The Spider Woman, The Scarlet Claw, The Pearl of Death (all 1944), The House of Fear, The Woman in Green, Pursuit to Algiers (all 1945), Terror By Night and Dressed to Kill (both 1946).
There is already a list of unmissable Holmes cases on this site in the Drama Films and TV Collection. But, in mentioning such small-screen Sherlocks as Jeremy Brett, Ian Richardson and Benedict Cumberbatch, it would be remiss not to point you in the direction of Peter Cushing in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), John Neville in A Study in Scarlet (1965), Robert Stephens in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Nicole Williamson in The Seven Per Cent Solution, Roger Moore in Sherlock Holmes in New York (both 1976), Peter Cook in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), Christopher Plummer in Murder By Decree (1979), Robert Downey, Jr. in Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Ian McKellen in Mr Holmes (2015). And mention should also be made of the performances of Hans Albers in Karl Hartl's The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes (1937), George C. Scott in Anthony Harvey's They Might Be Giants (1971) and Johnny Depp in John Stevenson's Sherlock Gnomes (2018), which co-stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Dr Watson.
The Heyday of the Series Sleuth
Holmes is the most played fictional figure in screen history, with over 70 actors having taken the part in more than 200 films. However, he hardly had the field to himself during the Golden Age of Hollywood, when the studios churned out crime quickies to fill the lower half of double bills across the globe. Quick and easy to make and cashing in on the continuing vogue for crime fiction, series featuring private eyes and crime-busting troubleshooters were particularly popular, as audiences latched on to the actors in the recurring roles.
The ever-watchable William Powell got to play two suave sleuths in what proved to be a purple patch in his illustrious career. Having proved quick-witted and urban as SS Van Dine's Philo Vance in the Murder Case film series, he teamed with Myrna Loy to play Dashiell Hammett's dipsomanic high-society snoops Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), After the Thin Man (1936), Another Thin Man (1939), The Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) and The Thin Man Goes Home (1944). Profiled in Richard Schickel's documentary, Alias Nick and Nora (1990), Powell and Loy were impeccable in the parts, as they traded witticisms and unearthed clues with the help of their wire-haired terrier, Asta. William is best known, however, for his work as lawyer Perry Mason and thief-turned-tec Michael Lanyard. Created by Erle Stanley Gardner, Mason will be most familiar to many in the form of Raymond Burr, who played him on television between 1957-66. But William was the first to take the role in six Warner Bros outings.
Universal brought another hit radio show to the screen, as Warner Baxter played Dr Robert Ordway in 10 cases in the Crime Doctor series (1943-49). But, despite the success on both page and airwaves of The Shadow, nobody found a way to make it work on screen, as six shorts, five features and a serial were attempted between 1931-46. Even when Alec Baldwin assumed the role of master of disguise Lamont Cranston in order to take on an ancestor of Genghis Khan in Russell Mulcahy's The Shadow (1994), audiences stayed away, even though the picture contains some interesting flourishes.
Warren Beatty also struggled to revive a bygone franchise in Dick Tracy (1990) after Chester Gould's comic-strip character had been reworked as various serials and features in the 1930s. In his best-known role, Ralph Byrd had played the tough cop in seven outings between Dick Tracy (1937) and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), while Lloyd Nolan and Hugh Beaumont essayed respectively Michael Shayne for Twentieth Century-Fox (1940-42) and PRC (1946). These low-budget pictures were based on stories written by Davis Dresser under the pseudonym Brett Halliday and Shayne Black reworked one of them, Bodies Are Where You Find Them, for the cult neo-noir comedy, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005), which pitted actor Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey, Jr.) against eccentric gumshoe Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer).
While Kent Taylor enjoyed limited success as Blackie on television in the early 1950s, Richard Hart, Lee Bowman, Hugh Marlowe, George Nader and Peter Lawford all failed to carry off the part of Inspector Queen's boy before Jim Hutton took over in Ellery Queen Mysteries (1975-76).
Earl Derr Biggers meant well when he created Hawaiian detective Charlie Chan as a means of countering American culture's obsession with the so-called 'Yellow Peril' and the first screen adaptations sought to honour his intentions. Later, he remained attached to the Honolulu police force, but became something of a globetrotter, solving crimes in tandem with his No.1 (Keye Luke) and No.2 (Sen Yung) sons. Oland solved 14 cases between 1931-37, with Cinema Paradiso affording users the chance to see Charlie Chan in London (1934), Charlie Chan in Paris (1935), Charlie Chan at the Opera, Charlie Chan's Secret (both 1936) and Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937). It also offers The Charlie Chanthology, which contains six of the 22 cases that Toler cracked between 1939-46: Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, The Chinese Cat, Meeting At Midnight (all 1944), The Jade Mask, The Scarlet Clue and The Shanghai Cobra (1945).
It is possible to see Peter Ustinov in the title of Clive Donner's Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981) and Peter Sellers parody the character in playing Sidney Wang in Robert Moore's Murder By Death (1976), which also saw David Niven and Maggie Smith play Dick and Dora Charleston, while Peter Falk, James Coco and Elsa Lanchester spoofed Sam Spade (Sam Diamond), Hercule Poirot (Milo Perrier) and Miss Marple (Jessica Marbles).
When Oland died, the script for Charlie Chan At the Ringside was repurposed as Mr Moto's Gamble (1938), the third of the John P. Marquand novels about Japanese agent, I.A. Moto, to feature Hungarian actor, Peter Lorre. He also headlined Think Fast, Mr Moto, Thank You, Mr Moto (both 1937), Mr Moto Takes a Chance, Mysterious Mr Moto (both 1938), Mr Moto's Last Warning, Mr Moto in Danger Island and Mr Moto Takes a Vacation (all 1939) before Fox ditched the series amidst growing diplomatic tension with Japan. Somewhat lost beside Chan and Moto is James Lee Wong, despite the fact that he was played by Boris Karloff in three Monogram outings: Mr Wong, Detective (1938), The Mystery of Mr Wong and Mr Wong in Chinatown (both 1939).
Another sign of the changing times was the appearance of a new breed of hard-boiled detectives in the mould of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Spade first cracked wise in the 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon, which spawned two film adaptations before Humphrey Bogart immortalised the character in John Huston's masterly 1941 adaptation, which is commonly considered the first film noir. Ricardo Cortez played Spade in Roy Del Ruth's 1931 take, while Warren William essayed Ted Shane opposite Bette Davis in William Dieterle's unofficial remake, Satan Met a Lady (1941). Edward G. Robinson took the part on radio in 1943. But, while his creator turned detective in the form of Frederic Forrest in Wim Wenders's Hammett (1982), the only subsequent screen sign of his no-nonsense hero remains George Segal's Sam Spade, Jr. in David Giler's lampoon, The Black Bird (1975).
By contrast, Marlowe has enjoyed a lengthy screen career since stumbling his way through the maze that was The Big Sleep (1939). As with Spade, the character got the Bogie treatment in Howard Hawks's 1946 adaptation before Robert Mitchum took over in Michael Winner's 1978 remake, which featured James Stewart as General Sternwood. However, Marlowe was pushed aside in favour of Gay Lawrence when RKO borrowed the plot of Farewell, My Lovely (1940) for Irving Reis's The Falcon Takes Over (1942). Dick Powell restored the gumshoe to his rightful position in the self-directed Murder, My Sweet (1944) before the role passed back to the wonderfully world-weary Mitchum in Dick Richards's Farewell, My Lovely (1974). Robert Altman cast Elliott Gould as Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1973), which appeared 20 years after the original novel.
Since James Caan played Marlowe in Bob Rafelson's Poodle Springs (1998), only Playback (1958) remains unfilmed. But the spirit of Chandler is evident in the 1986 Powers Boothe TV series, Philip Marlowe: Private Eye, while there's always the five films to which Chandler contributed during his time as a writer for hire in Hollywood: Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, Irving Pichel's And Now Tomorrow (both 1944), Lewis Allen's The Unseen (1945), George Marshall's The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), which was adapted from a novel by the peerless Patricia Highsmith.
Female Intuition
The first skirted sleuths to appear in print were Mrs Gladden in Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (c.1864) and Mrs Paschal in W.S. Hayward's Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864). However, with the notable exception of the heroines of such serials as The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine (both 1914) and The Hazards of Helen (1914-17), cinema-goers had to wait until the sound era to see some female intuition at work in the crime genre.
Created by Edward Stratemeyer, Nancy Drew was originally played by 15 year-old Bonita Granville. But the series folded when Granville left Warners and four decades were to pass before Nancy returned, in partnership with another Stratemeyer creation in The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (1977-79). Despite their literary popularity, Frank and Joe Hardy never made it on to the big screen. But Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy gave ABC a hit with Pamela Sue Martin before she was replaced by Janet Louise Johnson.
But we've not seen the last of the intrepid junior sleuth, as Emma Roberts's outing in Andrew Fleming's Nancy Drew (2007) looks set to be followed by Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, with Sophia Lillis in the title role.
Initially confined in Agatha Christie's whodunits to the village of St Mary Mead. Miss Jane Marple has latterly spread her wings. She has primarily been a denizen of the small screen since Gracie Fields played her in A Murder Is Announced on American television in 1956. Indeed, while Margaret Rutherford and Angela Lansbury have put their inimitable spin on the character in the cinema, TV incarnations Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie have reached much wider audiences since the first two debuted respectively in 1984 and 2004 versions of The Body in the Library, and the last took over in A Pocketful of Rye in 2008.
Cast at the age of 79, Hickson is unanimously regarded as the best fit for the role. However, Rutherford has her adherents, although Christie was not among them. She tolerated George Pollack reworking 4:50 From Paddington as Murder She Said (1961) and Mrs McGinty's Dead as Murder At the Gallop (1963). But she was most unamused when the Hercule Poirot mystery, After the Funeral, was reimagined as Murder Most Foul (1964); and screenwriters David Pursall and Jack Seddon concocted a case of their own for Murder Ahoy! (1964). No Marple story has been filmed since Lansbury headlined The Mirror Crack'd in 1980. But Helen Hayes essayed the sagacious spinster in the teleplays of A Caribbean Mystery (1983) and Murder With Mirrors (1985).
The marvellous Angela Lansbury is, of course, renowned for playing another female sleuth. Bestselling crime novelist Jessica Fletcher was the brainchild of writer-producers Peter S. Fischer, Richard Levinson and William Link and she appeared in 264 episodes over 12 seasons of Murder, She Wrote between 1984-1996. In all, Lansbury was nominated for 10 Golden Globes and 12 Emmys for her work on the series and she returned in four TV-movies.
The action was a good deal more pugnacious in Charlie's Angels, which was created for television by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts. Running for 110 shows between 1976-81, the episodes centred on the private detection agency run by Charlie Townsend (John Forsythe), who remained unseen and left the day-to-day running of the operation to his sidekick, John Bosley (David Doyle). The original trinity was Sabrina Duncan (Kate Jackson), Jill Munroe (Farrah Fawcett) and Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith), although Kris Munroe (Cheryl Ladd), Tiffany Welles (Shelley Hack) and Julie Rogers (Tanya Roberts) stepped into the breach at various times during the run.
Forsythe remained the voice of the boss when Bill Murray assumed the role of Bosley in McG's Charlie's Angels (2000) and Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle (2003), which introduced three new faces, Natalie Cook (Cameron Diaz), Dylan Sanders (Drew Barrymore) and Alex Munday (Lucy Liu). Some time next year, we'll get to see what Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska do with their roles in Elizabeth Banks's reboot.
Although Kathleen Turner took the role of Sara Paretsky's tough-talking Chicago shamus in Jeff Kanew's V.I. Warshawski (1991), female sleuths on the big screen are still comparatively rare. Gillian Anderson followed a lengthy TV stint as FBI agent Dana Scully opposite David Duchovny's Fox Mulder by hitting cinemas in Rob Bowman's The X-Files (1998) and Chris Carter's X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008). Katherine Heigl put plenty of pep into playing Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum in Julie Ann Robinson's One for the Money (2012) - which was possibly the first Hollywood feature about a female sleuth to be directed by a woman - while Kristen Bell reprised her TV role (2004-07) in Rob Thomas's Veronica Mars (2014).
But the majority of female detectives have plied their trade on the small screen. Among them are Jean Darblay (Stephanie Turner and Anna Carteret in Juliet Bravo, 1980-85), Christine Cagney and Mary-Beth Lacey (Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly in Cagney & Lacey, 1982-88), Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect, 1991-2006), Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, 1999-), Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette in NCIS, 2003-), Allison DuBois (Patricia Arquette in Medium, 2005-11), Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer, 2005-12), Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel in Bones, 2005-17), Precious Ramotswe (Jill Scott in The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, 2008-09), Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv in Fringe, 2008-13), Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney in The Mentalist, 2008-15), Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles (Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander in Rizzoli & Isles, 2010-16), Janet Scott and Rachel Bailey (Suranne Jones and Lesley Sharp in Scott & Bailey, 2011-16) and Joan Watson (Lucy Liu in Elementary, 2012-). And let's not forget agents Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman), Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) and Tara King (Linda Thorson) in The Avengers (1961-69) and Purdey (Joanna Lumley) in The New Avengers (1976-77) or Uma Thurman, who played Emma Peel in Jeremiah S. Chechik's refit, The Avengers (1998).
Bring On the Brits
As we have already seen, British writers made a significant contribution to the evolution of the detective story, with Charles Dickens even leaving readers with the conundrum of whether Dick Datchery is a sleuth or something more sinister in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which has been adapted for the cinema in 1935 and 1993 and by the BBC in 1960 and 2012. But writers like H.C. McNeile (who wrote under the name 'Sapper') took the genre in a new direction with gentlemen adventurers like Hugh Drummond, who became a screen regular after Ronald Colman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor in the title role of Bulldog Drummond (1929). Colman played the Great War veteran again in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934), while the same year saw Ralph Richardson take over in The Return of Bulldog Drummond.
After Ray Milland and John Lodge took their turns in Bulldog Drummond Escapes and Bulldog Drummond at Bay (both 1937), John Howard headlined seven cases between 1937-39. But, while Ron Randell (1947), Tom Conway (1948) and Richard Johnson (1967-69) all had two outings in the part, Drummond slipped out of vogue. Perhaps things would have been different if British International Pictures had allowed Alfred Hitchcock to make Bulldog Drummond's Baby in 1933. In the event, they refused him permission to use the character and Hitch reworked Charles Bennett's screenplay as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).
Numerous attempts were also made to establish police inspectors as movie heroes. Alastair Sim was quick on the uptake as Inspector Cockrill in Sidney Gilliat's Green For Danger (1946) and Inspector Poole in Guy Hamilton's adaptation of J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls (1954).
Unfortunately, nobody thought to build a series around Mary Clare after she excelled in Fred Ellis's Mrs Pym of Scotland Yard (1940). However, Sir Denis Wayland Smith popped up frequently in pursuit of Sax Rohmer's master criminal, Fu Manchu. Nigel Green (The Face of Fu Manchu, 1965), Douglas Wilmer (The Brides of Fu Manchu, 1966 & The Vengeance of Fu Manchu, 1967) and Richard Greene (The Blood of Fu Manchu, 1968 & The Castle of Fu Manchu, 1969) sought to give Christopher Lee a run for his money in five features produced by exploitation specialist Harry Alan Towers.>
Cricketing cracksman Arthur J. Raffles couldn't be more English. Anthony Valentine starred in the ITV series, Raffles (1977), while Nigel Havers tried the role for size in The Gentleman Thief (2003).
Viewing crime more from a Robin Hood perspective, Simon Templar was created by Leslie Charteris in 1928. South African Louis Hayward took the role in the first of RKO's eight outings, The Saint in New York (1938), and he would be Hammer's surprise choice for the lead in The Saint's Return (1953). But the part became synonymous with the cynically insouciant George Sanders after The Saint Strikes Back, The Saint in London (both 1939), The Saint's Double Trouble, The Saint Takes Over (both 1940) and The Saint in Palm Springs (1941). Hugh Sinclair completed the RKO run with The Saint's Vacation (1941) and The Saint Meets the Tiger (1943), but Templar wouldn't return to the big screen until Val Kilmer was cast in Philip Noyce's The Saint (1997). Instead, he became a preserve of the small screen, with Roger Moore being so perfectly cast in ITV's cult series, The Saint (1962-69), that Ian Ogilvy, Andrew Clarke, Simon Dutton and Adam Rayner were subsequently unable to fill his shoes.
Needing another series to replace The Saint, RKO turned to Gay Stanhope Falcon, who had first appeared in a Michael Arlen story for Town & Country magazine in 1940. Renamed Gay Lawrence (although 'Laurence' in the first picture), the character so offended Charteris that he sued the studio for plagiarism. But George Sanders carried off the part to typically suave effect in The Gay Falcon (1941), A Date With the Falcon, The Falcon Takes Over and The Falcon's Brother (all 1942) before handing over the role to his actual brother, Tom Conway. As Tom Lawrence, Conway headlined The Falcon Strikes Back, The Falcon in Danger, The Falcon and the Co-eds (all 1943), The Falcon Out West, The Falcon in Mexico, The Falcon in Hollywood (all 1944), The Falcon in San Francisco (1945), The Falcon's Alibi and The Falcon's Adventure (both 1946).
The small screen proved the final destination for Dick Barton, who had been essential listening for all ages on the BBC between 1946-51. Noel Johnson had played the character on air, but he was replaced by Don Stannard for the movies Dick Barton: Special Agent (1948), Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949) and Dick Barton at Bay (1950) and can be found as part of The Dick Barton Trilogy. But the series was cancelled after Stannard was killed in a car crash and it wasn't until 1979 that Tony Vogel stepped into the breach for ITV's Dick Barton: Special Agent.
John Bentley might well have made a decent fist of playing Barton, as he showed to good effect as John Creasey's Richard Rollison in Salute the Toff and Hammer the Toff (both 1952) and as Francis Durbridge's Paul Temple in Calling Paul Temple (1948), Paul Temple's Triumph (1950) and Paul Temple Returns (1952), after Anthony Hulme had launched the brief Butcher's series in Send for Paul Temple (1946). Francis Matthews took the reins for the 52 adventures produced by the BBC between 1969-71, with the surviving episodes being available from Cinema Paradiso in The Paul Temple Collection.
Featuring in 53 short stories between 1910-36, Father Brown was modelled on the Bradford priest who had helped author G.K. Chesterton convert to Catholicism. He was first played on screen by Walter Connolly in Edward Sedgwick's Father Brown, Detective (1934) and Alec Guinness in Robert Hamer's Father Brown (1954). In addition to Austrian, Italian and German incarnations, the cleric has been played by Kenneth More in a 13-episode series for ITV in 1974 and in an ongoing BBC series, also called Father Brown, that has seen Mark Williams solve 70 cases since 2012. Moreover, the dog-collared detective almost certainly influenced the US series, The Father Dowling Investigates (1987-91), starring Tom Bosley, and Cadfael (1994-98), which saw Derek Jacobi follow in the sandal-steps of Sean Connery's William of Baskerville in Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1986) in solving medieval crimes based on the much-loved whodunits by Ellis Peters.
First appearing in 1923, Dorothy L. Sayers's aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, solved crimes in conjunction with butler Mervyn Bunter and his eventual wife, Harriet Vane. Ian Carmichael was an inspired choice for five cases on the BBC between 1972-75: Clouds of Witness, The Unpleasantness At the Bellona Club, Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors.
Crime doyenne Margery Allingham supposedly created Albert Campion as a parody of Lord Peter Wimsey. He was most memorably played on television by Peter Davison in the BBC's Campion series (1989-90), with Brian Glover as his valet, Magersfontein Lugg, and Andrew Burt as his policeman pal, Stanislaus Oates. Another contender for the Queen of Crime crown, New Zealander Ngiao Marsh, also created a recurring detective in Roderick Alleyn, who was played by George Baker in four TV-movies before Patrick Malahide took over from Simon Williams after a single case in ITV's The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries (1993-94).
P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh was also a regular on British television, with James Marsden playing the role between 1983-98 before Martin Shaw took over from 2003-04. Shaw has also headlined the crime shows Judge John Deed (2001-07) and Inspector George Gently (2007-17), which form part of a rich tradition of small-screen sleuthing by members of Her Majesty's Constabulary. Among the most fondly remembered are Mark McManus's Jim Taggart in Taggart (1983-94), David Jason's Jack Frost in A Touch of Frost (1992-2010), Warren Clarke's Andy Dalziel and Colin Buchanan's Peter Pascoe in Dalziel & Pascoe (1996-2007), Alan Davies's lead in Jonathan Creek (1997-2016), Nathaniel Parker's 8th Earl of Asherton in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2001-08), Michael Kitchen's Christopher Foyle in Foyle's War (2002-15), Philip Glenister's Gene Hunt in Life on Mars (2006-07) and Ashes to Ashes (2008-10), Idris Elba's John Luther in Luther (2010-) and Ben Miller's Richard Poole, Kris Marshall's Humphrey Goodman and Ardal O'Hanlan's Jack Mooney in Death In Paradise (2011-).
Special mention should be made of Trevor Eve for creating the roles of Eddie Shoestring in Shoestring (1979-80) and Peter Boyd in Waking the Dead (2000-11), John Nettles for passing so seamlessly from Jim Bergerac in Bergerac (1981-91) to Tom Barnaby in Midsomer Murders (1997-), and Dennis Waterman for switching from George Carter in The Sweeney (1975) to Gerry Standing in New Tricks (2003-15), alongside Amanda Redman's Sandra Pullman, James Bolam's Jack Halford and Alun Armstrong's Brian Lane. But the most chameleonic TV cop has to be John Thaw, whose rough-and-ready Jack Regan in The Sweeney couldn't have been more different to the classical music-loving Endeavour Morse, whom he played in 33 episodes of ITV's exceptional adaptation of Colin Dexter's Oxford-set whodunits, Inspector Morse (1987-2000). Such was the popularity of the show that Kevin Whateley's loyal sergeant, Robbie Lewis, was given his own series, Lewis (2006-15), while Shaun Evans continues to play the young Morse in Endeavour (2012-).
Sleuthing Around the World
Second only to Sherlock Holmes in terms of quirky traits and investigative ingenuity, Belgian Hercule Poirot appeared in Agatha Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920).
Having excelled as a shamus of a more mundane variety in Stephen Frears's Gumshoe (1971), Albert Finney won a BAFTA for his portrayal in Sidney Lumet's 1974 thriller, while Ingrid Bergman became the only performer to win an Oscar in a Christie picture for her supporting turn as Greta Ohlsson. But Finney priced himself out of John Guillermin's Death on the Nile (1978) and the part went to Peter Ustinov, who displayed a whimsical wit in Guy Hamilton's Evil Under the Sun (1982) and Michael Winner's Appointment With Death (1988).
Buried beneath an outrageous moustache, Kenneth Branagh directed himself as Poirot in a new version of Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and has a reworking of Death on the Nile in the pipeline. But, mention Poirot, and most people will think of David Suchet. Between The Adventure of the Clapham Cook (1989) and Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (2013), he solved 70 whodunits on ITV, often with the assistance of Hugh Fraser as Captain Arthur Hastings and Philip Jackson as Inspector James Japp, which was the role that Suchet himself took opposite Ustinov in Thirteen at Dinner (1985).
The first Christie characters to reach the screen were actually Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, who were reinvented by Carlo Aldini and Eve Gray as Pierre Lafitte and Lucienne Fereoni in Fred Sauer's Adventure Inc. (1928). They were further reformulated as Bélisaire and Prudence Beresford by André Dussollier and Catherine Frot in Pascal Thomas's lively French capers, By the Pricking of My Thumbs (2005), Crime Is Our Business (2008) and Partners in Crime (2012). The pair have appeared under their own names in the guise of James Warwick and Francesca Annis in the 1983 series, Partners in Crime, which was also the title that David Walliams employed when reviving the duo alongside Jessica Raine for the BBC in 2015.
Charles Laughton had become the first English-speaking Maigret, a commissioner of the Paris Brigade Criminelle, in Burgess Meredith's The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949). He was followed by Rupert Davies, who fronted 52 episodes in the BBC's Maigret series between 1960-63. Aware that Simenon had described Davies as the 'perfect Maigret', Richard Harris took the lead in Paul Lynch's teleplay, Maigret (1988), before a bit of Dumbledoring saw Michael Gambon assume his mantle in 12 ITV Maigret episodes between 1992-93. In an intriguing piece of casting, the same channel recruited Rowan Atkinson to headline Maigret Sets a Trap, Maigret's Dead Man (both 2016), Night at the Crossroads and Maigret in Montmartre (both 2017).
Back in La Patrie, Jean Richard starred in 80 episodes of Les Enquêtes du Commissaire Maigret (1967-90) before Bruno Cremer pieced together the clues in 54 cases in Maigret (1991-2005). But Italian Gino Cervi (1964-72), Russian Boris Tenin (1973-74) and Japanese Kinya Aikawa (1978) have also played variations on the role. Two Brits, two Americans and an Italian have played Jacques Clouseau of the Sûreté. Created by Blake Edwards, he was more of a flathead than a flatfoot, with Peter Sellers revelling in the role in The Pink Panther (1963), A Shot in the Dark (1964), The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) and Trail of the Pink Panther (1982), which made posthumous use of unused footage from earlier entries.
Sellers also appeared in photographic form, as Roberto Benigni essayed Jacques, Jr. in Son of the Pink Panther (1993), which saw Edwards finally give up the ghost after coaxing Roger Moore into an unbilled cameo as Clouseau after extensive plastic surgery in Curse of the Pink Panther (1983). Alan Arkin had taken the role in Bud Yorkin's Inspector Clouseau (1968) after Sellers and Edwards had stepped aside. But, while it drew lukewarm reviews, it was more positively received than Steve Martin's ill-conceived bid to revive Clouseau in Shawn Levy's The Pink Panther (2006) and Harald Zwart's The Pink Panther 2 (2009).
Among France's other popular flics is Lemmy Caution, Curiously, this American gumshoe created by British writer Peter Cheyney has yet to appear in an English-language movie. Los Angelino Eddie Constantine took the role in 10 adventures between 1953 and 1991, the most celebrated of which is Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), which typified the nouvelle vague's habit of taking inspiration from pulp fiction. Godard would revisit the form in Detective (1985), while fellow new waver, Claude Chabrol cast Jean Poiret in Cop au Vin (1985) and Inspector Lavardin (1986) and Gérard Depardieu in what turned out to be Chabrol's swan song, Inspector Bellamy (2009).
As played by Caroline Proust, police captain Laure Berthaud has become a firm favourite with audiences around Europe in the 64 episodes of Spiral that have been broadcast since 2005. Moving to the fictional Sicilian town of Vigàta, Luca Zingarelli has become familiar to viewers as Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano (1999-), while Michele Riondino played Salvo at the start of his career in Young Montalbano (2012-15). Harking back to the Fascist era, Inspector De Luca (2008) was based on the novels of Carlo Lucarelli and starred Alessandro Preziosi as Achille De Luca, the commisario striving to uphold law and order in Bologna between 1938-48.
The dark tone of these stories chimes in with the bleakness that has come to be associated with Nordic Noir. Most critics agree that the Martin Beck novels written by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö launched the Scandi Crime genre and this Swedish cop has been cropping up on film since 1967. He was most memorably played by Gösta Ekman in six features between 1993-94 and by Peter Haber in the TV series, Beck, which started its ongoing run in 1997. However, it was Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (2005-07) that fired imaginations across the world, with the part of Lisbeth Salander being taken by Noomi Rapace in Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Daniel Alfredson's The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (all 2009) and by Rooney Mara in David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Claire Foy in Fede Álvarez's new cinematic release, The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018).
The emphasis remained on strong female characters like Copenhagen police inspector Sarah Lund in The Killing (2007-12) and Malmö homicide detective Saga Norén in The Bridge (2011), which have had a profound influence on British shows like Broadchurch (2013-17), River (2015) and The Missing (2016-17). Yet the best-known Scandinavian detective remains Kurt Wallander, the Malmö cop who first appeared in 12 novels by Henning Mankell. Rolf Lassgård took the role in nine features between 1994 and 2007, while Krister Henriksson (2005-15) and Kenneth Branagh (2008-16) have continued in Swedish and English series sharing the title, Wallander.
However, it's also worth checking out the films spun-off from Jussi Adler-Olsen's Department Q series, with Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Danish cold case inspector Carl Mørck in Mikkel Nørgaard's The Keeper of Lost Causes (2013) and The Absent One (2014). Mørck's Syrian assistant, Assad, is played by Fares Fares, who excels as a Cairo cop trying to solve a murder while keeping the rich and corrupt sweet in Tarik Saleh's The Nile Hilton Incident (2017).
And we should finish this section by dropping in on Bollywood, where detective films have been growing in popularity since the first of the 18 features based on Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi was released in 1967. The franchise is still going strong, as are those centred around Sunil Gangopadhyay's Raja 'Kakababu' Roychowdhury (5; 1979-), Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's Shabor Dasgupta (3; 2015-) and Nihar Ranjan Gupta's Kiriti Roy (4; 2016-). But Cinema Paradiso users can check out The Elephant God (1979).
Call in the Mavericks
As film noir went into abeyance in the 1950s, private eyes made fewer appearances on American cinema screens. The novels of Mickey Spillane provided a last hurrah, however, as Mike Hammer offered a growling alternative to rulebook cops like Jack Webb's Joe Friday in the hit TV show, Dragnet (1951-59). Ralph Meeker (Kiss Me Deadly, 1955) took a crack at playing Hammer before Spillane himself became the only author in our survey to play his own gumshoe in The Girl Hunters (1963). This proved to be Hammer's last big-screen appearance, but he has been a TV regular, with Stacy Keach bringing the requisite pugnacity to the role in a clutch of series and teleplays between 1984-98.
By the 1960s, detectives had assumed a laconic hipness that was epitomised by Frank Sinatra in Tony Rome (1967) and Lady in Cement (1968), and Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968). But a new type of investigator emerged with blaxploitation, as Richard Roundtree's John Shaft sprang out of Harlem in Shaft (1971), Shaft's Big Score (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973). With a pounding Oscar-winning theme by Isaac Hayes, this series contrasted with Sidney Poitier's homicide cop Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night (1967) and They Call Me Mr Tibbs! (1970) and inspired a string of copycat pictures, with Tamara Jones giving as good as she gets in Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975). Teresa Graves proved equally fearless going undercover in Get Christie Love! (1974), while Pam Grier became such iconic figure in pictures like Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), Friday Foster and Sheba, Baby (both 1975) that Quentin Tarantino paid homage to her in Jackie Brown (1997).
Meanwhile, as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry Callahan ran riot on the same beat being patrolled by Detective Mike Stone (Karl Malden) and Inspector Steve Keller (Michael Douglas) in The Streets of San Francisco (1972-76), the flatfoot migrated to television. Some were card-carrying cops like Raymond Burr's Robert T. Ironside (Ironside, 1967-75), Jack Lord's Steve McGarrett (Hawaii Five-O, 1968-80), Peter Falk's Frank Columbo (Columbo, 1968-2003), Telly Savalas's Theo Kojak (Kojak, 1973-78), and Paul Michael Glaser's Dave Starsky and David Soul's Ken Hutchinson (Starsky and Hutch, 1975-79). Others put new spins on the Spade/Marlowe shamus, including Darren McGavin's Carl Kolchak (Kolchak: The Night Stalker, 1974-75), James Garner's Jim Rockford (The Rockford Files, 1974-80), Robert Blake's Tony Baretta (Baretta, 1975-78) and Tom Selleck's Thomas Magnum (Magnum, P.I., 1980-88).
There were also medical sleuths like Jack Klugman's LA medical examiner in Quincy, M.E. (1976-83) and Dick Van Dyke's Dr Mark Sloan in Diagnosis: Murder (1993-2001), which was spun-off from another William Conrad series, Jake and the Fatman (1987-92). Sloan solved cases in tandem with his cop son, Steve (Barry Van Dyke), and Buddy Ebsen (Barnaby) and Lee Meriwether (Betty) formed the father-daughter detecting agency in Barnaby Jones (1973-80). This was one of several double-act series that followed in the wake of McMillan and Wife (1971-77), which starred Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James as Stuart and Sally McMillan. Among the others were Hart to Hart (1979-84), with Robert Wagner (Jonathan) and Stefanie Powers (Jennifer); Remington Steele (1982-87), with Pierce Brosnan (Remington Steele) and Stephanie Zimbalist (Laura Holt), and Moonlighting (1985-89), with Cybil Shepherd (Maddie Hayes) and Bruce Willis (David Addison).
Since the end of the Studio Era, screen sleuths have come in all shapes and sizes and varying degrees of hard-boiledness. A number continue to make the transition from pulp novels, including Chevy Chase's Irwin M. Fletcher in Fletch (1985) and Fletch Lives (1989), Denzel Washington's Ezekial 'Easy' Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Brendan Frye in Brick (2005), Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan's Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro in Gone Baby Gone (2007), and Tom Cruise's Jack Reacher in Jack Reacher (2012) and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016). Then, there's James Patterson's Alex Cross, who was played by Morgan Freeman in Kiss the Girls (1997) and Along Came a Spider (2001) and by Tyler Perry in Alex Cross (2012).
However, there's still a steady supply of screen originals, among them Jack Nicholson's J.J. Gittes in Chinatown (1974) and The Two Jakes (1990), Gene Hackman's Harry Caul in The Conversation (1974), M. Emmett Walsh's Loren Visser in Blood Simple (1984), Bob Hoskin's Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Jim Carrey's Ace Ventura in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective (1994) and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995).
But you can't change a channel these days without alighting on a cop show. While these don't exactly fit the private eye profile, we shall name-check the following for the sake of completeness, as they're all available to watch via Cinema Paradiso: Hill Street Blues (1981-87), Miami Vice (1984-89), MacGyver (1985-92), Sledge Hammer! (1986-88), Matlock (1986-92), Law and Order (1990-), Twin Peaks (1990-2017), Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-99), NYPD Blue (1993-2005), CSI (2000-15), CSI: Miami (2002-12), CSI:NY (2004-12), The Wire (2002-08), Monk (2002-09), NCIS (2003-), NCIS: Los Angeles (2009-), NCIS: New Orleans (2014-), Criminal Minds (2005-), Bones (2005-17), Psych (2006-14), Dexter (2006-13), Burn Notice (2007-13), Castle (2009-16) and True Detective (2014-15).
Interested in even more adrenaline-filled films and TV series? Check out our Action and Adventure and TV section!
