Dial M for Murder: Whatever's Peter Playing At?
Once again an episode from this 1974 anthology series of plays about murder all involving a telephone in some way.
I do like to read other people's opinions before blogging, so that I know that everyone else on the internet is wrong and I can write something completely different; however in this case there is so little about this episode online that I think I might be the first person to blog about it so I'm afraid this is pure me without reflection on anything anyone else may say. That said, the IMDB summary does manage to contain a mistake in that it the titular Peter, Sinon, by mistake.
To summarise without giving away the solution of the mystery: at the beginning of the episode we see precious stone merchant Peter Grady ringing his wife, Linda, to say that he is going to have to go away on business. This means that she will set off without him with their friends Norman and Mary Nugent, to the island of Elba, and he will join them when he can. We see that even as he is having this conversation Peter has another woman curling herself around him and he's obviously a jolly bad sort.
Linda sets off with Norman and Mary. Norman was a school friend of Peter's and is now a crime novelist. Mary is an agony aunt. We see the characters' relationship as they travel. Peter rings his wife periodically and says incomprehensible things to her which make her worry that he is alright or whether he is actually doing what he said he is. She thinks he sounds as if he's being threatened. Norman and Mary don't understand Linda's concerns. Things come to a head after Peter fails to turn up for business meetings which have been arranged, and ultimately his business associates are also worried so ring the police. Then Peter's body is found on a beach, and I'm not saying how it ends because I want you to be able to watch it without this knowledge if you want.
There are a few things to be said about this, and probably the first is that it was witten by Julian Symons, a hugely prolific and popular author, including of crime fiction. Frankly, while there isn't any rubbish in this series, it means that this episode stand out head and shoulders above the others, and the quality of the writing really shows.
The second is that it is unusual for this series in the amount of location filming used. Much of it is apparently actually filmed in Italy (or at least somewhere much more Mediterranean than Albion), which is not the case for the other episodes I have seen. With so little about this show online, I have no way of knowing why this episode got all the location shooting, but it means that this one does look rather different from the rest of the series.
Next is that prolific actor Ronald Fraser was cast as Norman Nugent. This is a personal opinion and obviously not everyone will agree with this, but it's difficult to cast such an immediately recognisable and characteristic actor against other actors because he does rather tend to dominate. That said, to my delight, when we first come across him he is tied and gagged as he rehearses a crime method for a novel. From memory I think there was also a crime writer who amusingly did this in one of Edmund Crispin's novels.
The episode takes its hour-long run time at a rather leisurely pace, which is just fine. There is a possible criticism in that when Mrs Nugent's cousin suddenly appears it feels as if a new character has been introduced in contravention of the strictest rules of crime stories. However I say it looks like that because we've already had enough suspects to think about, but I wonder whether it would annoy detective novel purists.
Another excellent episode of Dial M for Murder which is a bit different from the others, and an interesting murder story written by an expert.
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