Jonathan Creek Letters Of Septimus Noone

Jonathan Creek Letters Of Septimus Noone – “It makes no sense to use the word impossible to describe something that has clearly happened.” – Douglas Adams (Dirk Gentle’s Holistic Detective Agency, 1987)

After years of one-off appearances in holiday specials, Jonathan Creek appeared on the small screen last night in the first of three regular episodes titled The Letters of Septimus Noone (2014), but David Renwick, the show’s creator and sole writer, took a different approach to the plot this time around—tilting it at an inverted angle.

Jonathan Creek Letters Of Septimus Noone

The first difference between The Letters of Septimus Noone and the specials of previous years is the lack of an atmospheric setting and a background story permeated with supernatural suggestions. There are no bedrooms here that melt their guests overnight or portraits come to life. However, it is not a return to the old form.

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Jonathan Creek and his wife Polly attend a West End performance of Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), and the play’s seemingly impossible attack reverberates backstage. Show star Juno Pirelli is found in her dressing room with a knife wound after they had to break down a locked door, and witnesses in the hallway did not see anyone sneaking in and out of the room – leaving them shocked and confused. Only a viewer at home saw the whole thing unfold, and this was done so they could have a laugh at the expense of Creek’s rival: a young criminology student with a keen eye for detail and a penchant for leaps of logic.

Ridley is a nudge and Wink to Sherlock, and his first encounter with Creek includes a scene where he (wrongly) deduces that he’s just returned from Reykjavik, full of close-ups and zooms of clues, but Ridley was mainly there to provide a nonsensically wrong solution to the attack in the locked locker 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 notice that?

There are also subplots in the background of the episode. An elderly woman, Hazel Prosser, tells Polly an incredible story about the day she brought an urn with her mother’s ashes home and spilled the ashes when the phone rang. He was called away, but when he returned, the pile of ashes had disappeared from the carpet! All the windows were boarded up from the inside and Hazel locked the front door before she left. It’s a small but fun subplot, and one that could be gleaned from my series of posts about real-life, often domestic, locked-room mysteries (Parts: I, II, III, IV, and V ). Another subplot involves Polly’s father, who died, and a stack of old letters written to her mother, and Renwick focused on this plot thread – as almost every clue in this episode points to this issue. The downside is that it is almost impossible to forget the answer. But is it fair to complain about a fair tip?

Anyway, The Letters of Septimus Noonen is a visual collection of separate puzzles that click together through characters and events to create connections, but while this made the plot cooler than the one made from The Clue of the Savant’s Thumb (2013), it also got the characters and the plot to feel insignificant. Juggling between these separate stories meant that some lacked visibility to be fully effective, as Ridley illuminated the modern interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. On the other hand, I have to commend Renwick for how he managed to reinvent the series. Jonathan Creek ditched the duffle coat and left the magic business (and the windmill!) behind and married Polly, making them one of those wise-cracking mystery-solving couples of the 1940s (eg Kelley Roos).

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So all in all a slightly incomplete start to the new series, but hopefully the next episode will have a big (central) impossible problem at the heart of the episode.

By the way, the last episode of this season is now called The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (2014), which has a similar problem to Carter Dickson’s novel of the same name, where a kidnapping victim disappears under the eyes of her captors as if by teleportation. I’m hoping Renwick’s solution doesn’t just fix the gimmick, but I’m afraid that since this might be the last season, Creek will end up doing an impromptu shootout with the kidnappers to save Polly — and we’ll see Maddy. back in a cameo at the funeral. Ridley may actually carry the torch for Creek as the hilariously inept detective who keeps stumbling toward the right solution. “Sleeping Moore” without the soothing dart.

Tags: David Renwick, Impossible Crimes, Reverse Detective Story, Jonathan Creek, Locked Room Mysteries, Mystery Solving Pairs, Theater Mysteries, TV & Movies