VIENE EL OGRO – “The Ogre Is Coming” – is
Diario AS’s announcement that Erling Haaland will play against Real Madrid during the next round of the UEFA Champions League.
World-class ogres are few and far between. Here is another:
Warren Clarke.
As a younger man, he was
one of Malcolm McDowell’s “droogs.” Eventually, he aged into stardom, becoming famous for playing Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel of
Dalziel & Pascoe. (“Dalziel” is pronounced “dee-el” or “D.L.”)
In “An Autumn Shroud” (
D & P series 1, episode 3, 1996), Pascoe, the young sidekick, is away on his honeymoon, and Dalziel – unmarried, surly, aggressively vulgar, and not a little lonesome – embarks upon a motoring holiday. His car breaks down in rural Lincolnshire, in the rain. In a scene both dismal and fantastical, a funeral procession materializes,
punting down one of the
fenland waterways. The mourners and casket drift along in their respective little boats. The widow glances up at Dalziel. He can see through her shroud that she is beautiful. (She is played by Francesca Annis: no longer young, but still a knockout.)
She invites him to stay over in her large country house. He is intrigued. He “fancies” this widow. But he also wishes to follow up on a hunch, even though Lincolnshire isn’t on his policeman’s beat.
It turns out that the deceased is the widow’s second husband to have died by misadventure. He fell off a ladder and onto a power drill which tunnelled into his heart.
There is a distinct possibility that the next person who cozies up to this woman also will die.
Other circumstances are suspicious, too:
A young man of the household has gone missing.
The housekeeper/cook neither cooks nor keeps house, and she appears to have a lover in one of the upstairs rooms. Is it her father, the old groundskeeper? – Dalziel cynically asks.
Unpleasant spongers – adult children of the deceased and his widow – lurk about on the property. Is their mutual hatred genuine? Or does it mask a conspiracy that involves them all? They glare at Dalziel, hoping that his car will be repaired so that he can leave them to perpetrate whatever it is they wish to perpetrate.
Only the widow seems glad for Dalziel’s company – and perhaps also the patriarch, the widow’s father-in-law, a distinguished, egotistical poet. When Dalziel first meets him, he is reciting some Tennyson –
the other Lincolnshire poet, the old man explains. Later, some literati travel over from the United States to award him a prize.
This recognition is long overdue, he proclaims in his acceptance speech. But this bluster is another exercise in misdirection: the patriarch is more calculating than he seems. And it’s likely that the warmhearted, beautiful widow is, too.
“An Autumn Shroud” isn’t groundbreaking. It isn’t even a movie: it’s an installment in a TV show that would play for another decade. What it
is is an excellent genre specimen, a satisfying piece of low-key, cozy, rainy-evening entertainment. And yet it’s a departure for the TV show as a whole. There’s little of the “another day at the police station” vibe; instead, we’re treated to a classic country-house mystery. This would be odd, except that many other serials have taken this same detour – most notably, perhaps,
The Adventures of Tintin, in
The Castafiore Emerald.
Think of a Western (or
Red Harvest). A stranger arrives. It’s his task to “clean up the town,” to trace out how disparate threads make up the same filthy cobweb. But in a country-house mystery, the “town” has shrunk to household size. Economic and political motives still exist, but they’re dwarfed by motives of the heart.
P.S.
I wrote, last month, of
Cold Comfort Farm, in which a similar dynamic is at play. The renowned novelist, academic, and sometime-TV-writer Malcolm Bradbury adapted that novel for the screen. He also wrote the teleplay for “An Autumn Shroud,” adapting Reginald Hill’s novel,
An April Shroud.
