Private Detective Season: Shoestring - Stamp Duty
I seem to have accumulated a number of shows about private detectives on my mental list of possible blog posts so I might as well deal with them as a group. In fact as a result of reading for this post I've discovered the 1980s series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, which I'm looking forward to seeing for the first time.
The private detective has been a staple of pulp fiction for decades - hard-boiled, beyond cynical, might or might not get the woman, usually has an interesting past, and has manners and personal habits which would make him unsuitable for most work places - and so naturally makes the transition to the small screen.
Eddie Shoestring - the former It professional who has had a breakdown and has made his way through being a private detective to working as a private ear on Radio West, who I introduced in a recent post - has these qualities in abundance, and this excellent episode is like a Raymond Marlowe adventure transposed to 1980s Bristol.
It's in large part driven by Andy, a friend who Eddie made while they were both inpatients in a psychiatric hospital. Andy is in the habit of reporting crimes which never happened to the police, and they are so fed up with him that now the only person who will listen to him at all is Eddie Shoestring, and even he doesn't believe Andy's account of having witnessed a murder. This device also deals nicely with the reality that a private detective will immediately not touch any case involving murder - here the police just won't believe it and anyway, Eddie gets personally involved.
It's also plain that Eddie has the essentially unemployable private detective nature down pat, and in fact keep getting brought in tp be yelled at in this one because of the number of solicitor's letters the station is getting about slander. Both he and his friend could be seen as ultimately unstable and unreliable; both presumablly as the result of adverse life experiences.
Eddie is so unsocial that he even has that staple of the misfit, an old boat, although he actually does live with someone in a house share. A bolt hole of some sort is of course essential for anyone who can't get on with society nicely and I suppose a boat is only one step removed from a shed.
Eddie is ultimately completely cunning and gets the evidence in this one, so obviously playing by society's rules is over-rated.
This episode is about a murdered stamp dealer who turns out not to be what he appears to be at all. The episode is somewhat misnamed after stamp duty, because it has nothing to do with the tax paid on house purchases above a certain value, but is about actual stamps.
The stamps themselves have an integral role to play in what the deceased stamp dealer was actually doing, but I'm not going to spoil it, because if you want to see this excellent episode I'd love you to guess as it goes along.
I don't have a criticism of this episode: every role and aspect of the plot is perfectly tuned to fit well into the private eye world and to lead to the conclusion.
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