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Three of My Favorite Mystery TV Shows that are based on Book Series: Murdoch Mysteries, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and Bones

18 Jun

I love reading and watching mysteries.  My husband jokingly refers to the many TV shows I watch as “your shows where people get murdered”, but I think there is something satisfying about trying to puzzle out whodunnit and seeing the guilty party caught and justice served at the end.  If it is a mystery series, I’ve probably given at least one or two of its episodes a try.  For this post I decided to discuss three of my current favorites that are from three different countries, but all based on book series: Murdoch Mysteries (or The Artful Detective) from Canada, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries from Australia, and Bones from the United States.  You can borrow the TV series and the books they are based on from BCCLS libraries.

Murdoch Mysteries 

murdoch-mysteries

The Murdoch Mysteries are based on the Detective Murdoch series by Canadian author, Maureen Jennings.  I first watched some of the episodes on the Ovation network where it was shown under the title The Artful Detective.  The series takes place at the turn of the last century in Toronto and focuses on the policeman and amateur inventor William Murdoch played by Yannick Bisson. Murdoch has a keen interest in science and he often rigs up contraptions like lie detectors that look forward to our modern technology.  This has led to the show sometimes being labelled “steampunk,” but I think that can be misleading since steampunk is often set in an alternate world with greater anachronisms and more fanciful depictions of clothing and technology than are found in the series.  Think more Victorian MacGyver and less gears and goggles.  The show does highlight how that time period was a turning point socially and technologically into the 20th century.  The character of Coroner Doctor Julia Ogden, played by Hélène Joy, provides not only a love interest for Murdoch, but also a strong female character that must fight the limitations put on her by the Victorian era.  I also enjoy the comic relief provided by Jonny Harris’s bumbling but good-hearted Constable George Crabtree.  The series just finished its seventh season and has been renewed for an eighth season.  The first six seasons are currently available on DVD from BCCLS libraries.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

miss-fishers-murder-mysteries
I was thrilled when I learned one of my favorite books series, Phryne Fisher Mysteries by Kerry Greenwood, had been adapted as a television series.  You may remember Librarian Rosary Van Ingen had written about one of the books in the series in a previous blog.  I couldn’t wait to be able to view the TV show here in the United States.  The books center on Phryne Fisher, a very modern female detective, and her friends and family in 1928 Australia.  The adaptation changes a few things from the book; there is no Mrs. Butler and so far in season one only Jane has made an appearance as Phryne’s adopted daughter.  However Essie Davis (best known for her roles in The Matrix sequels) brings Phryne dramatically to life and the spirit of the show is definitely captured in a way that should satisfy fans.  Although many of the episodes in the first season adapt specific stories from the books (including one of my favorites Blood and Circuses), an intriguing storyline about the childhood murder of Phryne’s sister has also been added that connects several episodes.  The first season is available on DVD from BCCLS libraries and the second season was released in the United States on May 27.

Bones

bones
Bones focuses primarily on the partnership between The Jeffersonian Institute’s (a fictionalized Smithsonian) Dr. Temperance Brennan aka “Bones” (Emily Deschanel) and FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) as they solve crimes from the skeletal, often at first unidentified, remains. Forensic Anthropologist Kathy Reichs’s crime series about Temperance Brennan has been one of my mom’s favorites, and I was a fan of David Boreanaz from his work on Angel so I was eager to check out Bones when it debuted in 2005.  The crime scenes can be a bit grisly at times, but overall the tone has a gentle dark humor that keeps it from being too macabre.  The show just finished its 9th season and will be entering its 10th season next year.  I have had other TV shows lose my interests after much less time, but the cases continue to be interesting and the friendship between Bones and the other cast members continues to be captivating.  The show also avoided the “Moonlighting curse” and has successfully transitioned from the romantic tension between Seeley and Bones to the drama from their being a couple raising a child.  The show also allowed two of my favorite characters, and colleagues and friends of Brennan, T. J. Thyne’s Dr. Jack Hodgins, a bug expert, and Michaela Conlin’s Angela Montenegro, a forensic artist, to find love together as well.  You may recall from a previous blog I mentioned John Francis Daley’s role as an often hazed newbie chef on the short lived Kitchen Confidential; starting in season three, he is equally charming as psychologist Dr. Lance Sweets.  The first eight seasons are available on DVD from BCCLS.

-Written by Aimee Harris, Head of Reference

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Celebrate LGBTQ Pride Month with Books by Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, and Armistead Maupin

4 Jun

In honor of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Pride Month, I thought I’d look at three of my favorite authors who have written some great fiction focusing on LGBT characters, and who just happen to also be gay themselves.  Stop by the library and check out one of their books this month!  You can also see a display of LGBTQ resources in the glass display cases in the second floor vestibule.

Armistead Maupin

tales-of-the-city

I’ve never been to San Francisco, but I fell in love with the city when I was a teenager reading Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.  The series started out as a serial in The San Francisco Chronicle in the late 1970’s and focuses on a diverse group of residents with a variety of orientations, who live in an apartment building at 28 Barbary Lane.  Although the characters are clearly meant to represent the archetypes that you would have bumped into in the city at the time (innocent Mary Ann, hippy Mona, and lady’s man Brian) you will still find yourself caring about their lives throughout the years.  The sweet, caring, and proudly gay Michael Tolliver, or Mouse as he is known to his friends, was my favorite.  The Days of Anna Madrigal, the ninth and final book in the series, was just published in January.  I stayed up late to watch the television adaptation of Tales of the City starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis, when the miniseries first aired on PBS in 1993, but you can borrow it on DVD from BCCLS libraries.  When I was in Graduate School, I was delighted to meet Maupin when he was doing a reading and talk at Harvard for a standalone novel The Night Listener.  The Tales of the City series is best read in order since some of the characters, especially Mary Ann, change considerably through the span of the years the novels cover.

Jeanette Winterson

passion
I read Winterson’s Venetian set The Passion as part of a literature class in college and quickly devoured her other works including two of my other favorites of hers: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry.  Her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit brings in autobiographical elements and the character’s name like Wintereson’s is Jeanette, however, for those wanting a more direct memoir you can read her 2011 autobiography Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?.  Both deal with the ramifications of coming out as a lesbian in a very religious family.  If you like reading books with straightforward narratives, then Winterson may not be your favorite author, but I find her work’s mix of intertextuality, metafiction, manipulation of history, satire, and magical realism intriguing and often insightful.  She has won two Lambda Literary Awards for Written on the Body and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?.  I’m looking forward to reading her latest novel The Daylight Gate, which deals with the witch trials in the 1600’s.

Sarah Waters

fingersmith

I coincidentally picked up Sarah Waters’ first novel when I was at a book signing for Jeanette Winterson’s The Power Book.  At the time I was unfamiliar with Waters’s work, but the description on the back cover of a young woman who leaves her family’s oyster restaurant after she falls in love with a male impersonator and becomes a music hall performer herself, hooked me.  Tipping the Velvet is still my favorite of her works, but I would recommend checking out her other books as well.  As you might have noticed from previous blog posts I’ve written, I enjoy historical fiction, especially those set during Victorian times.  Sarah Waters’s first three novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith are all set during that period.  They bring some of the social issues as well as the atmosphere of the time to life along with the imaginings of the lives of lesbian characters who could have lived during that period.  Her two most recent books The Night Watch and The Little Stranger are set in the 1940’s.  Her next novel The Paying Guests is scheduled to be released in September and is set during the 1920’s.  Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith were turned into UK miniseries and are available from BCCLS libraries.

When asked about being a lesbian writer, Waters said something in an interview I feel holds true of all three of these authors, “It’s right there at the heart of the books. And it’s both at the heart of the books and yet it’s also incidental, because that’s how it is in my life, and that’s how it is, really, for most lesbian and gay people, isn’t it? It’s sort of just there in your life. So I feel it makes absolute sense to call me a lesbian writer, but at the same time, I’m just a writer.”

-Written by Aimee Harris, Head of Reference

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