Dalgliesh (Channel 5)
All serial killers whistle. It’s a well-known fact. How else would victims know they were about to be butchered?
Commander Adam Dalgliesh is on the trail of a whistler in Devices And Desires, the latest of the two-part adaptations starring Bertie Carvel as P.D. James’s urbane poet detective.
The murderer is preying on women who work at a nuclear power station called Larkshill, on the Kent shoreline, and carving a gruesome letter ‘L’ into their foreheads in case anyone fails to make the connection.
For extra effect, and as an added taunt to the police, eerie whistling echoes at every crime scene.
We’ve seen this in so many crime dramas — for example, an episode of Endeavour starring Shaun Evans, in which the villain whistled the jaunty music hall tune Oh Oh Antonio.
Yet, in real life, multiple killers don’t whistle. The trait was invented by brilliant German movie director Fritz Lang.
After a series of innovative silent films, including Metropolis, he made his first foray into sound-and-pictures in 1931 with the chiller M.
Peter Lorre starred as a maniac who whistled the Hall of the Mountain King motif from Grieg’s Peer Gynt as he stalked children on the streets of Berlin.
Commander Adam Dalgliesh played by Bertie Carvel
Commander Adam Dalgliesh is on the trail of a whistler in Devices And Desires, the latest of the two-part adaptations starring Bertie Carvel as P.D. James’s urbane poet detective
It’s hard to imagine Dalgliesh himself ever pursing his lips to trill a carefree tune. Other coppers might — Dixon Of Dock Green, famously. But Sergeant Dixon was a salt-of-the-earth type, and the Commander is rather more refined.
After the killer claimed a second victim — a young woman walking home through woods after a village disco — Dalgliesh was briefed in the wood-panelled surrounds of a London gentleman’s club . . . much more his natural milieu.
As he sank into a leather armchair and murmured his regrets at the macabre news, he looked like a senior civil servant hearing an unwelcome report of some ministerial innovation.
He was equally sorrowful as he interviewed the head of the power station, Dr Alex Mayer (Adam James). But this mournful manner hides a sharply observant mind, and it took him only moments to notice that an atomic fusion reaction was bubbling away between the boss and his head of PR, Hilary Roberts (Liz White).
Dalgliesh also spotted that his former protege Kate Miskin, now an acting DCI, was wearing an engagement ring. But he said nothing about her being 20 weeks pregnant — to remark on that would be vulgar.
Instead, he accepted an invitation to a dinner party with Mayer and Hilary, both obvious suspects. At this point, I began to feel I was not watching a crime mystery, but the dramatised social engagement diary of a rather dull man.
As if realising this, writer Helen Edmundson ended the episode with a flurry of corpses. Another monogrammed body turned up in the woods, and a missing scientist was discovered in the bedroom of a local pub with his wrists cut.
And Hilary washed up dead on the beach. Perhaps the killer hides underwater. Dolphins can whistle, can’t they?