Those Lucky Brits

Sometime contributor Mike Ripley sends along this note:

Happy New Year to The Rap Sheet from England.

We saw the new year in with style yesterday with the first showing of “A Scandal in Belgravia,” one of three new Sherlock films for the BBC. This high-tech, very clever (and often very funny) take on the Holmes/Watson dynamic duo has been well worth the year’s wait since the airing of the first, award-winning series created by Steven Moffat (the current Dr. Who supremo) and Mark Gatiss (who also plays Mycroft Holmes). Watch out for the early toe-curling scenes in Buckingham Palace, how Holmes deals with a rogue CIA agent who has roughed up Mrs. Hudson, and on no account miss Lara Pulver’s interpretation of Irene Adler as an up-market dominatrix with royal clients!

It’s great fun and the lead actors, Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) and Martin Freeman (Watson), are to team up again--though not necessarily on the same side--in Peter Jackson’s forthcoming film, The Hobbit.

Next week, Sherlock will offer “The Hounds of Baskerville,” but before then (tonight in fact) comes the premiere of the TV film Endeavour, a prequel to the Inspector Morse series. Set in 1965, the film portrays Colin Dexter’s famous detective, Endeavour Morse, as a young, teetotal Oxford drop-out just beginning his police career as a humble detective constable. This two-hour pilot film also features a cameo appearance from the late John Thaw’s daughter Abigail, and given the Oxford setting and the production values of the highly successful Inspector Morse and Lewis shows, a series is surely in the offing.

My fellow American TV viewers will surely be pleased to learn that the three-episode second season of Sherlock is set to be broadcast as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series, beginning on May 6. PBS reportedly intends to show Endeavour sometime later this year, though a specific date has not yet been announced.

One more thing: If you would like to read more from UK critic Ripley, his latest “Getting Away with Murder” column has been posted in Shots. It’s filled with notes about recent book parties, word of development on the Scandinavian crime-fiction front, and coming releases from Elmore Leonard, Gillian Flynn, and Alex Scarrow.

READ MORE: “Endeavour: Review,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’); “Endeavour, Pilot: TV Review,” by Puzzle Doctor (In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel).