Homicide: Life on British Beats

Nothing on TV rewards quite like a killer instinct.

Cable’s Arts & Entertainment network starts another round of weekly mysteries Sunday, its newest batch, based on Caroline Graham’s Inspector Barnaby novels, arriving as a five-program set titled “Midsomer Murders.”

Murders most pleasing, you might say, occurring in a sleepy English village in a county named Midsomer, where good old-fashioned evil lurks behind the kind of picturesque exterior you find in tour books. In the opener, the able Barnaby (John Nettles) and his thudding assistant, Troy (Daniel Casey), get to the bottom of a pair of slayings that shake up the quaint neighborhood. Very nice stuff. Better still is episode No. 2, when grisly murder visits Midsomer’s coven of local mystery writers.

And more good news, for returning to A&E; on July 26 is Samantha “Sam” Ryan, the Irish forensic pathologist deluxe of “Silent Witness,” whose personal demons and talent for solving difficult homicides never cross wires. She’s again played by the intriguing Amanda Burton.

These are imports, naturally, once more from the isle of stiff upper lips, affirming that no one does TV whodunits, or even whydunits, like the Brits.

Certainly not Americans.

Wrong genes, apparently.

Just as actual violent crime has transfixed a bloodthirsty U.S. and its media in the ‘90s, detective fiction is one of the most enduring forms of literature. We buy mysteries by the gobs and celebrate both amateur and professional sleuths as they try to bring order to chaos. And no wonder. As noted by P.D. James, the grandest dame of living British whodunit writers, whose own stories have resonated via British imports on American TV: A classic mystery offers “excitement, suspense and vicarious danger.”

To say nothing of a story that’s puzzling enough to challenge your noodle, all of these traits inevitably absent from the paltry number of mysteries produced exclusively for U.S. television.

It must be genes. “Barnaby Jones” we do, real mysteries we don’t.

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A notable exception is next month’s “Poodle Springs,” a pretty fair little Philip Marlowe number on HBO starring James Caan as Raymond Chandler’s famed detective (although the teleplay is from a Robert Parker novel). Although it’s Marlowe lite, this is good fun. It’s the 1960s, you see, and though Marlowe is years past his prime and a candidate for Grecian Formula, he still packs a heater and doesn’t hesitate to give a smartass cop a kick in a spot where it could raise his voice three octaves.

Otherwise, U.S. television is a nearly barren moonscape for home-grown mysteries. While contemplating this slight, your own homicidal tendencies emerge.

ABC’s “NYPD Blue” and “The Practice” and NBC’s “Law & Order” and “Homicide: Life on the Street” contain elements of mystery, as do some other crime series. And Fox’s “The X-Files” is nothing if not murky.

The only present prime-time series coming close to being a bona fide mystery, though, is “Diagnosis Murder,” which has Dick Van Dyke as a sleuthing physician in a generally cheery CBS hour that has attracted a sizable following despite scripts thin enough to slide under a brick. Which this series pretty much is.

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When it comes to taste in crime, art and life mingle freely. Just as Americans often pursue facile answers to real crime, so are most enamored of TV mystery plots that can be swiftly resolved by connecting a few dots before the credits roll.

Why else were they so hot so long for the cozy but mundane yarns headed by Angela Lansbury on CBS in “Murder, She Wrote,” whose mayhem in Maine’s tiny Cabot Cove never even approached the small-town addictiveness of TV’s murderous Brits? And why did ABC’s new “Cracker”--although sunnier than the dark British series from which it came--flop this season if not for the complexity of its protagonist, a police psychologist with flaws like potholes?

Too much of an unsettling character for most U.S. viewers?

When not finding it in books, mystery buffs with a yen for inky enigma may be watching A&E; or PBS. The latter’s extraordinary “Mystery!” series has been present since 1980, before which “Masterpiece Theatre” was public TV’s venue for sleuths, the first one coming to mind being Dorothy L. Sayers’ refined and amusingly dilettantish Lord Peter Wimsey. The bespectacled old boy solved cases in the ‘20s through ingenuity and sheer force of wit and elegance.

Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s dandified Hercule Poirot (David Suchet) and steely Miss Marple (Joan Hixon) are surely the most famous of the Brit-bred crime fighters to appear steadily on U.S. television through the years. The most complicated, though, are the dysfunctional police shrink played indelibly by Robbie Coltrane in the original “Cracker,” which ran on A&E;, and Jane Tennison, the police inspector that Helen Mirren has portrayed so stunningly in Lynda La Plante’s “Prime Suspect,” which began its sparking stateside run on “Mystery!” What extraordinary characters both are, matched on U.S. television only by Dennis Franz’s disquieting Andy Sipowicz on ABC’s “NYPD Blue.”

Not far behind, though, is the eternally morose, ever-pensive, Oxford-educated, choir-singing Thames Valley cop played by John Thaw in Colin Dexter’s “Inspector Morse,” which American viewers first encountered on PBS before it moved on to A&E.;

Although he has an eye for women (who sometimes turn out to be murderers), Morse is as much a confirmed bachelor as Caroline Graham’s newly arriving Inspector Barnaby is an amiably married family man who never skips dining with the wife. One thing they have in common, though, is a corking good mystery.

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* “Midsomer Murders: The Killings at Badger’s Drift” airs Sunday at 6 and 10 p.m. on cable’s A&E.;