Three Rendell movies

Here be spoilers...

We've watched three episodes from the ongoing series, Ruth Rendell Mysteries, over the last few days. They're not all from the same year, but have been bundled together as a package. The titles are Master of the Moor, Vanity Dies Hard, and A Case of Coincidence. 

Master of the Moor dates from 1994, and stars a youngish Colin Firth. It was made a year before his appearance in Pride and Prejudice. This was the least satisfactory of the stories. It seemed to be dragged out considerably over the three episodes. Firth plays Stephen Walby, a man whose main love is the moor. After meeting a woman artist working on it one day he's shocked to find her dead body the next. The detective working on the case immediately senses that Walby is the killer, and aims to charge him. Then another woman goes missing and Walby is able to lead the police to her body without difficulty. Meanwhile Walby's lonely wife, Lyn, played by Emma Croft, starts an affair with the young Londoner filling in at the local pet shop his for his sick uncle. He discovers that she's still a virgin, in spite of having been married for four years. Walby, whose mother left him suddenly when he was a boy, has been psychologically affected, and has an odd relationship with women. His father was also badly affected by his wife's departure, and, while he continues to work at his old job, is on medication and seeing a psychiatrist.
It's all a bit heavy going, not helped by the policeman seeming to be as odd as everyone else. A new character is introduced late in the proceedings (new in a sense; we've seen him before without knowing who he was - and he's odd too!) and is briefly suspected by Walby himself, and then Lyn is killed. The whole thing turns upside down and Walby and his Dad prove to be the murderers between them. Not one of Rendall's best - unless it's the adaptation that's at fault. The cast do their very best with it, but since they're all hiding things from each other it becomes a bit overwrought.
We were a bit inclined not to watch the second film, but it turned out to be much better, and keeps you guessing right till the end.
It concerns a wealthy woman who marries a younger man, who's not of the same station (as the woman's unpleasant uncle keeps reminding everyone). The main thrust of the story is that eventually the woman begins to suspect she's being poisoned and finally comes to the conclusion that it must be her husband, because he wants to get his hands on her money. But intertwined with this is a complex story about the woman's friend who apparently goes missing. Halfway through we think it's the husband who's killed her off. The suspicions keep shifting until at the end we realise that we should have known who the murderer was all along (we're kept guessing in part because we're not even sure that there has been a murder!) This was a much more satisfactory piece, with lots of red herrings, some clever casting (it has hints of Hitchcock's Suspicion, especially in the way it casts a handsome young man as the husband, but one who could easily be an outright liar), and a continually involving story.

Michael Fitzgerald, in a
completely different role.

The third film, A Case of Coincidence, is shorter than the other two, and concerns the murder of five women in a marshland area. Four of the women, it turns out, have been murdered by the same man (this is discovered in a rather odd way, and isn't very believable), but whether the fifth was killed by the same man or not, isn't so easy to work out...for the police, that is. We're pretty certain early on that she wasn't. Her husband, a top surgeon, lives something of a separate life from his wife, and after her death keeps fainting or sweating heavily or being given medication and put to bed (by a fellow-surgeon, a female, who's plainly madly in love with him) and not really getting back to work. His over-protective mother turns up and treats the woman surgeon like a kind of high-class maid, but the surgeon herself is equally over-protective. Fatally, as it happens.The half-wit murderer of the other four is accused of the fifth murder as well, and is hung. But the husband, as we guessed, murdered his wife, and seemingly because someone else has been tried and hung for the crime, can't be convicted. This seemed a bit odd.
However, the cast is superb, and does a terrific job with a rather unbelievable story (it's an adaptation of a short story by Rendall, and it seems almost as though the adaptor had got himself in a bit of a tangle). Michael Fitzgerald (see picture), as the 'half-wit' man convicted of the crimes, is marvellously moving.

Listening to stories

We’ve been listening to cassette tapes in the car when we’ve been travelling. We usually tend to wait until we get to a stretch of road that several miles long because it isn’t easy to concentrate while we’re also trying to listen to instructions from our Sat Nav, or when we‘re looking for signposts and turn-offs and so on.
We’ve done this for years in New Zealand when we go on long trips. Because we know the roads there better, we don’t have to interrupt our listening pattern quite so much, and it certainly makes the trips go faster.
However, one of the disadvantages of listening to stories in the car is that you can miss vital bits, especially in mystery stories. We often have to ask: was that character the husband of some other character, or the father? When did that character come into it and why is he now being accused of murder? Is she married to him or the other bloke?
Overall, we manage to make sense of the stories - it can depend on the storyteller as to how clear things are. Most of them tell the stories at a listenable pace, but that’s fine when you’re not trying to drive at the same time. What’s listenable when you’re lying in bed trying to go to sleep is different altogether to what’s listenable in a car, especially when there’s a lot of other noise.
So far on this trip we’ve got through one of Dick Francis’ stories (To the Hilt) which neither of us remembered reading before, although we must have. And then it got to a point about three-quarters of the way through and it all came back to me. We listened to The Marketmaker by Michael Ridpath (not an author I was familiar with) and it turned out to be an exciting story, though complicated by the details of large scale wheeling and dealing. The latest story was Asta’s Book by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendall’s alter ego). This seemed a slow-paced mystery, told partly through diary entries, but as it went on the complications increased and it needed careful listening. We listened to one of Rendall’s Inspector Wexford’s stories, A New Lease of Death, which was written way back in 1967 (the last time I came to England, in fact). This was a rather odd story, in which a man who committed a murder and was hung for it turned out to be the murderer all along, rather than someone else. But the murder was being investigated again by an amateur detective and his son, rather than Wexford, for the most part. We listened to C S Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which had the most delightful and evocative harp music scattered throughout. Michael Hordern was the reader, and the harpist and composer was Marisa Robles.
Finally, we began to listen to Clive James’ autobiography. But by the time he’d begun to describe his fifth or sixth masturbation episode, and the length of other boys’ penises, and the sexual behaviour of other boys he knew, we gave up. There’s only so much of that sort of stuff you can take. And did we really need it at all?