Jonathan Creek: Daemons' Roost

"Revenge is sweet and not fattening."

- Alfred Hitchcock

After an hiatus of five years, Jonathan Creek returned to the small-screen nearly eight years ago with an entertaining and promising New Years special, The Grinning Man (2009), which received irregular followups in the succeeding years – culminating in a short season consisting of three episodes in 2014. Sadly, the quality of these episodes and specials left a lot to be desired.

The Judas Tree (2010) was an abomination of an episode and represents an all-time low in the series. Yes, some of the poorest and mediocre episodes, such as The Seer of the Sands (2004) and Gorgons Wood (2004), were definitely superior to whatever that atrocity was. It was a potential series-killer. There was a gap between The Judas Tree and the next Easter special, The Clue of the Savant's Thumb (2013), which was, regardless of some imperfections, an improvement on its predecessor and everyone seemed to assume the tone was set for the first regular, if short, season since the 2003-04 series – which included the excellent The Tailor's Dummy (2003). Oh, boy, where we wrong!

Jonathan & Polly Creek

David Renwick gave his series and detective-character a thorough makeover: Jonathan Creek shed his duffle coat, moved out of his iconic windmill, stopped working for Adam Klaus and was married off to Polly. Admittedly, this reinvigorated the comedic element of the series and gave the stories a dynamic, somewhat, similar to the wisecracking, mystery solving couples from the 1930-and 40s.

Unfortunately, the plots of these three episodes were either very slight (The Letters of Septimus Noone, 2014), boring and uneventful (The Sinner and the Sandman, 2014) or just average (The Curse of the Bronze Lamp, 2014). So this highly anticipated season quickly turned into a huge disappointment and seemed to be universally hated, even Alan Davies appeared to be bored, which looked as if the series had finally reached the end of its lifespan – ending, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Surprisingly, the story of Jonathan Creek did not end with those three episodes.

Last year, a brand new Christmas special was announced, entitled Daemons' Roost (2016), which impressed me as Renwick's mea culpa for the aforementioned episodes. The special still had some problems with plot, pacing and padding, but it was an improvement over its immediate predecessors. And the story was also written as potentially a final performance for Creek and Polly. It was an introspective story, with a glimpses of Creek's childhood and references to previous cases, but who knows, maybe there will be another holiday special this or next year. But, for now, lets take a gander at the latest one.

Daemons' Roost is the name given to a creepy, decaying mansion, which had once belonged to Sir Jacob Surtees, "a heartless nobleman of dark Satanic powers," who had his private chamber of horrors – where he chained women to the floor and forced them to watch a devilish magic trick. They would see how an invisible force plucked their loved from a cage and fly them through the air into a huge, burning furnace!

A charming homestead to raise a family. Or so a director of "cheesy horror movies," Nathan Clore, assumed when settling down there with his wife and three stepdaughters, but the place soon becomes a house of mourning. One after another, Clore's wife and two of her daughters passed away under mysterious circumstances. So Clore decides to pack up and send away the third one, Alison, who is left with "fifteen years of nightmares" and childhood memories of secretly overhearing the source of mothers fears – a creature known as “the hobgoblin.” After all these years, Clore has summoned Alison and her husband back to the home, to tell her what happened to her mother and sisters all those years ago, but, once again, tragedy struck. Clore suffered a crippling aneurysm and is now unable to communicate.

One hell of a trick!

So, while the story at the mansion slowly progresses, Creek was able to finally sell the windmill and the place had to be cleared out. As long-time viewers remember, the place was stuffed to the rafter with stage props, vintage theatrical posters and magic tricks, but also childhood mementos. We learn for the first time Creek had a brother, Terry, who's responsible for kindling an interest in magic and wonders. But these are not the only memories stalking Creek.

One of his biggest fans, Rev. Wendell Wilkie, tells him that the murderer from The House of Monkeys (1997) was released from prison, but "the monster in his breast is vanquished." Well, not entirely true, as he can be seen stalking Creek throughout the episode with a sharp knife in his hands.

We also learn of a so-called untold case, "The Striped Unicorn Affair," which took place six years ago and had Creek acting as consulting detective in a poisoning case. The wife of a research chemist, Stephen Belkin, had been receiving threatening letters, signed "Anti-Money," which unsettled her and precautions were taken – securely locking and bolting the bedroom door and windows. One night, they took "a brand-new sealed bottle of mineral water” with them, but the glass she poured for herself, somehow, contained poison. And not a trace of it was found in the bottle or his glass of bedside water. So, naturally, the police arrests him on suspicion of having killed his wife, but Creek figured out how a third party could have introduced poison inside the locked and bolted bedroom.

By the way, the flashback shows Creek in his old, trademark duffle coat, which was a nice little nod to the past! Anyhow...

The poisoning trick was not bad, clever even, but there was a single objection against Creek's original explanation and perception of the case. One that could have been smoothed over with the introduction of a simple coaster. After all, when there's a coaster on the table, you're very likely to place your glass or mug on it without a second thought. Just saying.

Old-School JC

In any case, this old poisoning case is connected to the problems going on at

Clore's mansion: Stephen Belkin remarried and his second wife is Alison. So, remembering Creek helped out her husband, she contacts him, but he's unable to prevent a second, baffling impossibility. Alison and Stephen are taken from the home, to the mysterious chamber from the local legend, where Alison sees how figure, dressed in a red, uses magic to pull Stephen from a cage in the wall and make him fly through the air – straight into a burning furnace. Honestly, I loved the grand simplicity of this seemingly impossible situation, which is, somewhat, in the same tradition as Satan's Chimney (2001) and The Grinning Man. And for all his flaws, Renwick really knows how to handle such type of tricks.

Well, that being said, Daemons' Roost is far from perfect: the padding of the plot is murderous to the pace and you can nitpick a thing or two about the overall story. One of them is how the culprits seem to scheme like a bunch of incomprehensible comic-book villains and some viewers will probably have reservations about how Creek was (forced) to dispose of one of them. Or why Creek pretty much threw away his entire childhood. Some of that stuff impressed me as the last tangible memories about his (dead?) brother. But the plot was still miles removed from being the mess that was The Judas Tree nor was the story as sleep inducing as The Sinner and the Sandman. A bit padded and drawn out? Yes. But nowhere near as bad as some past episodes.

So, to cut a long review short, I was not disappointed about Daemons' Roost. Not one of the best in the series, but also far from the worst. I'm glad the series (potentially) ends with this one instead of the previous three episodes.

Jonathan Creek: The Curse of the Bronze Lamp

"Don't think you can hold a man who can use his brain."

- Prof. S.F.X. van Dusen (Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13")

Last night, The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (2014) closed the gate on the fifth season of Jonathan Creek and, contrary to my expectations, the ending of the episode left open a door to possibly a sixth season or another 90-minute television special.

I calculated from the synopsis the episode would end with Creek's funeral after saving Polly from a bunch of kidnappers in an impromptu bullet-catch act to put a permanent end to the series. Instead, we got more of the same, lightweight mish-mash of smaller mysteries thrown together to form an episode – except that here it was stitched in one overlapping story. So that was an improvement over The Letters of Septimus Noone (2014) and The Sinner and the Sandman (2014). 

First of all, there's the kidnapping of the clever wife of a cabinet minister, who's whisked away and kept in chains in a disused bunker in the woods, but clues are beginning to find their way out of the sealed prison: a feat only imaginable if she possessed the power of teleportation. The kidnapping is tied-in with the woman who cleans for Jonathan and Polly Creek, Denise, who begins to regret finding "Aladdin's Lamp" at a car boot sale and wishing for more excitement in her life. 

Be careful what you wish for!

 Polly has to help her dispose of the body of a male gigolo, who died in her bathtub, which is part of the reinvented dynamic of the series I genuinely enjoy – namely the comedic absurdity likely to be found in those original bantering, mystery solving husband-and-wife teams. Unfortunately, the comedy and the plot of this season don't gel as well as Kelley Roos' classic The Frightened Stiff (1942) and the excellent Sailor, Take Warning! (1944). Which, IMHO, is what Renwick should've aimed for this season even if it had come at the expense of the locked room motif of the series. 

There was a minor locked room mystery in last night's episode: after her ordeal with the gigolo in the bathtub, Denise changes the sheets on her bed and locks the door of her bedroom before going to sleep, but the next morning she finds an expensive watch underneath her pillow belonging to cabinet minister's wife! How did it get into the locked bedroom? 

At the end The Curse of the Bronze Lamp, I began to wonder if Renwick had read the criticism in the Jonathan Creek topic on the John Dickson Carr message board concerning one part of his plotting technique (SPOILER: the use of (unknown) accomplices) to create a seemingly impossible situation – which has now been completely phased out and replaced for trivial or coincidence laden impossibilities. The appearance of the wristwatch from a sealed bunker into a locked bedroom is a good example of the latter and the lotto prediction from the previous episode of the former. You can roughly work out how the watch got there, if you recognize the story the kidnap-plot was based on and snatching a book title from Carter Dickson for the episode was just to throw dust in the eyes of any genre savvy person who might be watching.

By the way... is it really that hard to come up with an impossible situation and a reasonably good solution? I'm always happily plotting along and coming up with possibilities how the murderer could've escapes from a locked room and failed to leave any footprints in several inches of snow. 

In lieu of any competition, The Curse of the Bronze Lamp stands as the best of the three episodes, but only because the plot was more focused and the last 40-minutes weren't as excruciatingly boring as the first twenty odd minutes. However, I'm afraid the only thing fans of Jonathan Creek will take away from this season is a kinder feeling towards the third and fourth season of the series.

Jonathan Creek: The Sinner and the Sandman

"Since the Brother of Death daily haunts us with dying mementoes."

- Sir Thomas Browne

Where to begin, where to begin...

The Sinner and the Sandman (2014) is the second episode from the fifth, three-part season of Jonathan Creek, and as much as I hate to say it, the series is dying at its leisure. That much is obvious after tonight. The previous episode, The Letters of Septimus Noone (2014), suffered from having too many plot threads and not enough time to explore them all, but here it was the exact opposite – a five-minute brain teaser stretched into a sixty-minute episode. Nothing happened for nearly an hour!

David Renwick gives, more and more, the impression of being completely out of ideas for seemingly impossible problems for the series and tired comedy bits were thrown in as substitutions. They might as well have re-launched this season (without acknowledging it) under the title One Foot in the Grave and draw a chuckle from confusing their viewers.

Anyhow, Jonathan and Polly Creek are immersing themselves in the plain, drab everyday existence of village life, away from Jonathan’s alternative career, but there’s always a mystery to be found in the British countryside – even if they turn out to be nothing of the kind. Polly is involved with the local community center, where a scandal is brewing, and Jonathan has to make a charitable call on the local recluse, Mr. Eric Ipswich a.k.a. "The Amazing Astrodamus," whose home harbors a feat of clairvoyance from the past. Behind fifty years worth of wallpaper, they find the winning lottery numbers from a local winner with the words "WILL WIN" scrawled underneath it. Unfortunately, the (gist of the) solution should occur to everyone almost immediately, especially after the cross symbol is found, with the real the real problem being how to verify it. Renwick nicely tied a problem to this apparent act of clairvoyance, but coincidence is the key word for both of them. That's why I didn’t tag this review with "Locked Room Mysteries" and "Impossible Crimes" labels.

There are slight, almost residue traces of the supernatural when the arrival of a baby at the vicarage coincides with reports of a shadowy, hunchbacked beast with glowing eyes prowling the garden and going through the trash. Again, there's not much of interest here and presented only to deliver an obvious punch line at the end. Only time Jonathan Creek made me laugh this season was in the previous episode, when one of the characters suddenly realized she had read a text message meant for Polly and bellowed on for a full minute how glad she is it wasn’t her dad who'd just died – with Polly sitting right next to her! So dark. Comedy here hardly deserves a second look.

The "Sandman" from the episode title is a figure from Polly's nightmare and the dream sequence suggests this was a British relative of Uncle Paul who urged Polly to keep grown-up secrets, but whereas comedy was attempted to draw from the other plot-thread, here it was to create a forced, emotional moment to end the show with. It was so sweet... I'm still wiping the diabetes from the corner of my eyes.

I want to stress here how much I normally enjoy Jonathan Creek and actually like how Renwick reinvented the character, but, plot-and story wise, the series has now reached a phase were it could apply for euthanasia had it run in my country. That's really the nicest way I can put it (rewrote and scrapped a lot for this review). I'll watch the last episode for completion, however, I don't even expect it to be traditionally that one good episode every season has had. But, hopefully, I'm wrong and Renwick saved the best for last. 

Finally, I hope to have a regular review up this weekend. Hopefully. 

Jonathan Creek: The Letters of Septimus Noone

"There is no point in using the word impossible to describe something that has clearly happened."

 - Douglas Adams (Dirk Gentle's Holistic Detective Agency, 1987)

After eons of one-off appearances in holiday specials, Jonathan Creek reemerged on the small screen last evening in the first of three regular episodes, entitled The Letters of Septimus Noone (2014), but David Renwick, creator and sole writer of the series, took a different approach to the plot this time around – tilting it at an inverted angle.

Jonathan & Polly Creek

The first difference between The Letters of Septimus Noone and the specials of the preceding years is the lack of an atmospheric setting and back-story permeating with suggestions of the supernatural. There aren't any bedrooms digesting its guest over night or portraits coming to life here. However, it's not a return to the old form either. 

Jonathan Creek and his wife, Polly, are attending a West End musical performance of Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) and the seemingly impossible attack in the play is echoed backstage. Star of the show, Juno Pirelli, is found with a knife wound in her dressing room after they had to break open the bolted door and witnesses in the hallway saw nobody sneaking in-and out of the room – leaving them stunned and baffled. Only the viewer at home saw the whole thing unfold and this was done so they could have a chuckle at the expense of Creek's rival: a young criminology student with a keen eye for details and a penchant for leaps of logic. 

The very Sherlockian Ridley

Ridley is a nudge and a wink at Sherlock and his first encounter with Creek has a scene in which he (wrongly) deducts he just returned from Reykjavik, complete of close-ups and zoom-ins of the clues, but Ridley was mainly there to provide a preposterous false solution for the attack in the locked dressing room. The main components of Ridley’s solution are old hat, but there was one, subtle detail borrowed from one of my favorite impossible crime novels. Did you spot it?

There are also subplots lurking in the background of the episode. An elderly woman, Hazel Prosser, shares an incredible story with Polly about the day she brought the urn with her mother's ashes home and spilled them when startled by the telephone. She was called away, but upon her return, the pile of ash had vanished from the carpet! The windows were all secured from the inside and Hazel locked the front door before going away. It's a minor, but fun, subplot and could be plucked from my series of posts on real-life, often domestic locked room mysteries (parts: I, II, III, IV and V). The other subplot involves Polly's father, who passed away, and a stack of old letters written to her mother and Renwick's focus was on this plot-thread – as nearly all the clues in this episode point towards this problem. Downside is that it's almost impossible to miss the answer. But is it fair to complain about fair clueing?

Anyhow, The Letters of Septimus Noone is a visual collection of separate puzzles, clicking together through characters and events making connections, however, while this made the plot tidier than the patch-work plotting of The Clue of the Savant's Thumb (2013), it also made the characters and plot feel slight. Juggling between these separate stories meant some lacked the exposure to be fully effective such as Ridley lampooning the modern-day interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. On the other hand, I have to compliment Renwick on how he managed to reinvent the series. Jonathan Creek discarded the duffle coat and left the magician business (and windmill!) behind and married Polly, which now makes them one of those wisecracking, mystery solving couples that were all the rage in the 1940s (e.g. Kelley Roos). 

So, all in all, a somewhat imperfect beginning to the new series, but, hopefully, the next episode has a grand (central) impossible problem at the heart of the episode.

By the way, the final episode of this season is now titled The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (2014), which has a similar problem as the Carter Dickson novel of the same title and involves a kidnap victim disappearing under her captor's eyes as if by teleportation. I hope Renwick's solution doesn't simply redress the trick, but I fear, as this may be the last season, Creek will end up doing an impromptu bullet-catch act with the kidnappers in order to save Polly – and we'll see Maddy back in a cameo at the funeral. Ridley may actually take the torch from Creek as hilarious inept detective who keeps stumbling to the correct solution. A "Sleeping Moore" without the tranquilizer darts.   

Lifting a Tip of the Veil: Jonathan Creek vs. "Sherlock Holmes"

"All will be revealed in due course."

- People who plot and scheme

Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) with Joey Ross (Sheridan Smith)

While the BBC hasn't released any official air dates or synopses for the upcoming Jonathan Creek episodes, Radio Times announces yet another incarnation of the immortal Sherlock Holmes as an enticing plot-thread and rival detective for Creek in the opener of the fifth season.

In a third season episode, Miracle in Crooked Lane (1999), Jonathan Creek's investigation of a possible case of astral projection is hampered by a growing legion of fans, who follow him around like a flock of mimicking lovebirds. This new character, Ridley, is studying criminology and also admirers Creek as a detective, however, Ridley takes his cue from another, even more famous sleuth.

Ridley wears "a black coat, has a thick crop of dark hair and an eye for observing details" and the actor playing the part, Kieran Hodgson, studied Benedict Cumberbatch's recent interpretation of Sherlock for inspiration. Unfortunately, for the fans of Holmes' modern day reinvention, series-creator David Renwick reportedly wrote the episode as a spoof. I suspect from the article Ridley will be somewhere along the lines of the oddball Sherlock from Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's The Bughouse Affair (2013), which also happens to be a locked room mystery. Radio Times further reports Jonathan Creek is due to air on BBC1 in February.

Well, to pad out this notification, and in anticipation of the upcoming season, I'll post a short list of my favorite episodes as an excuse to babble about impossible crimes. Also known as the part where you can stop reading without the fear of missing anything of importance. 

Jack in the Box (1997)

The standout episode of the first season with an original, satisfying answer for the problem of the retired comedian found dead in the disused nuclear shelter, heavy door locked from the inside, underneath his home. Creek reasons the truth from a toilet basin and a light bulb. 

Danse Macabre (1998)

A well-known and controversial author of sensational horror stories is shot dead on All Hollows' Eve, and her murderer was dressed for the part, clad in a tight skeleton suit, but during the escape from the house the shooter kidnaps the daughter of the victim and they're eventually trapped in the garage. The place is surrounded, but when the door is opened the shooter has disappeared from a locked, windowless room that was constantly guarded. Even if the police should've solved this one immediately, it's still a good trick and overall a very good episode.

Time Waits for Norman (1998)

Read my full review of this episode here. 

Black Canary (1998) 

A once famous illusionist, known as the "Black Canary," apparently took her own life after chasing away a limping man dressed in rags from the snow covered garden, which was witnessed by her wheelchair-bound husband, but a post-mortem reveals his wife died hours before her committing suicide. The man in rags he saw limping away from his wife must have been lighter than air, because the blanket of snow was bare of any footprints! I still think this the series' masterpiece. 

Satan's Chimney (2001) 

The seemingly impossible murder of an actress during a movie shoot, struck by a bullet fired through a window without breaking the glass, leads Jonathan Creek to an ancient castle with a room where the devil consumed the souls blasphemers. I did not think much of the first plot-thread, but the miraculous disappearance from the dungeon room and the whodunit-aspect were very well put together.

The Tailor's Dummy (2003) 

A truly great episode from the last, regular season until the irregular, seasonal specials took over and begins when a bad review leads a designer to commit suicide, which sets a delightfully piece of a Carrian revenge in motion – in which a man changes his physical appearance in matter of seconds.

Well, I hope to be back before long with a regular review, but a few orders began to arrive around the same time (I was behind on a few series) and now I’m going through something of an existential crisis. I'll sort it out though.

Jonathan Creek: The Clue of the Savant's Thumb

“The locked room is an exercise in illusion – a magician's trick. Otherwise it's impossible, and the impossible can't be done, period. Since it had been done, it must be a trick, a matter of distracting attention, and once you know what you're really looking for, the answer is never hard.”

- Michael Collins' "No One Likes the Be Played for a Sucker" 

The long anticipated return of the sleuth in duffle-coat, The Clue of the Savant's Thumb (2013), aired on BBC One last night and it was an improvement over the last disaster, The Judas Tree (2010), even if parts of the plot echoed previous episodes – and another detective story for that matter. But first things first! 
 

Savant's Thumb opened with a prologue, peeking fifty years into the past, set at Waxwood Hall, a strict convent school, where disobedient girls were locked up in the "Quiet Room" to contemplate and pray. They often emerged with stories of having seen god, but it was also the place where a girl died mysteriously in her bed and other girls woken up to find a red ring on their foreheads – events that have haunted Rosalind Tartikoff ever since.

Rosalind's life, however, has quieted down in the preceding decades and married Franklin Tartikoff, writer-producer and polymath, and together have an adopted daughter, Fariba, but when we met them life has become a bit knottier and complicated. She has a relation with the family doctor and Franklin is plotting something, but then murder in one of his miraculous guises steps in. Rosalind has to look through the keyhole of her husbands study to see Fariba hunched over the bloodied remains of Franklin, before slumping to the ground herself, and snaps a picture of the crime scene with her phone through the keyhole, however, when the door is finally opened they only find Fariba!

A honey of a problem that eventually attracts the attention of two detectives and they both have changed since their last appearance. Rik Mayall reprises his role as D.I. Gideon Pryke from the series masterpiece The Black Canary (1998), but a bullet landed him in a wheelchair – giving him shades of another locked room expert, Cyriack Skinner Grey. However, Jonathan Creek's metamorphosis from an inventor of stage illusions to the world of marketing and having married a wealthy wife is the more astonishing one of the two. And at first, Creek is a bit reluctant to pick up his old hobby, mainly due to his wife, but the problem of a body disappearing without a trace from a locked and watched room proved to be too much of a temptation.

Creek, Pryke and Ross are an excellent threesome to sort out the clues that will, somehow, uncover a secret buried for half a century in a now derelict Catholic girls' school, how a murder victim was spirited away, tell them what was written in a coded message and lead them to a mysterious society, but I also have a big issue with the solution.
 

SPOILER, select or press CTRL+A to read:

The entire explanation felt like a best-of compilation of the series: the disappearing act with a fainting witness in a locked and watched room was done in Danse Macabre (1998) and the solutions even share some similarities, but the main gist of the trick was eerily similar to one from The Kindaichi Case Files – right down to the clue of the victims hands. That's what put me on to the solution so quickly. Next is the botched magic trick (with a saw) that was also at the heart of The Black Canary and we have seen that ridiculous government conspiracy before in The Curious Tale of Mr. Spearfish (1999). 

I was also a bit under-whelmed when I learned how Franklin died. Surely, that could've been done a tad-bit more convincing. Really hope that at least one or two of the new episodes is a return to brilliant and original plotting of Jack-in-the-Box (1997), Danse Macabre, Black Canary, Satan's Chimney (2001) and The Tailor’s Dummy (2003) 
 

In spite of this "patchwork-plotting," I enjoyed most of what Savant's Thumb had to offer, and while I wouldn't rank it among the best in the series, it had its moments that gave me that feeling what proper adaptations of John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot may look like – which is not a bad thing at all. 

Conclusion: not a perfect but nonetheless promising re-start of this series and looking forward to 2014. 
 

In case you missed it, I posted a list of real-life, but little known, locked room mysteries and impossible situations over the Easter Weekend and might be fun follow-up to this review: Just About As Strange As Fiction: Day to Day Miracles. I also reviewed the Jonathan Creek episode Time Waits for Norman (1998) last year.