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Living 3000 miles from where I was raised, Britbox is my portal back home. A streaming service that's not jammed full of adverts, but instead loaded up with British television. I get my money's worth out of it, more than most others.
It's full of crime shows. The British love a murder mystery almost much as fish & chips or pissing in phone boxes. There's a spectrum, from Miss Marple and Death in Paradise on the cosy end, to Happy Valley and Luther on the not-so-cosy.
I skew towards the latter, but enjoy both. Shows from the 90s have some blistering writing; Cracker is second to none. Currently we're binging Jonathan Creek. A show about a magician's assistant, played by British panel show royalty Alan Davies, who figures out how impossible crimes are done by knowing how magic tricks are done. Meaning a lot of the stories are locked room mysteries, variations on how a murderer got into a place undetected, or a priceless artifact vanished without a trace.
What's interesting to me is Creek's general reluctance to explain the solutions, both to crimes and magic tricks. He repeatedly complains that the answer is always mundane once you know how it's done; that the magic is in the mystery, not the solution. We always want it to actually be magic, to break the world open and make it a more special place, so are always disappointed by the hidden mirror and secret compartment, or the long lost twin brother who really dunnit.
It's a bold statement for a mystery show to make. Telling us up front that the solution isn't going to be as exciting as we're hoping it will be. That Occam's Razor is always raised, ready to hack away wonder from the story, piece by piece. Though the fact that the show gets away with doing this proves its point. We get each solution, which is inevitably complex, teetering towards convoluted, and come away oh so slightly dissatisfied. So we move onto the next mystery. Hoping this one will be magic. Will teach us something new about how the world works.
The show is definitely on the cosier end of the British crime show. It's a portal home both in portraying the UK itself, but also a particular version of it. It first aired in 1997, and the country it portrays in its early series (series, not seasons, this is British TV) feels like an alien planet at this point. A place where cigarettes are chain smoked in pubs, magicians are TV celebrities, and freelance journalists can afford to rent houses. Perhaps nostalgia is sharpened by distance both chronological and longitudinal, but it's a pleasant enough past to visit. Even if the odds of being bumped off and shoved in a locked wardrobe seem alarmingly high.
Out tomorrow: Nightwing 123. Nightwing answers a distress call from the Flyboiz, the gene-modded drug gang who seem to be dropping like... Well, you get it.
This issue is my favourite we've released so far- a dark dive into tunnels under the city of Bludhaven, and also into Bludhaven's past. Once I started exploring that, big things that affect the book going forward started to click into place, particularly thematically- so I hope people enjoy it.
I just turned in the script for issue 128, which fell out of my head onto paper in two days flat. I don't usually write that quickly, nor do I think it's generally a good thing to do so- that way lies over reliance on trope over truth, and careless dialogue. But in this case the story just knew where it wanted to go, which tends to be a good sign.
My mate Will O'Mullane sent me an advance PDF of the comic he's about to launch a Kickstarter for, Dead Men's Laughter. Will and I used to run a writing workshop- more of a writer's support group in a pub, to be honest- around the time I was writing Limbo, and comes from the same gaggle of miscreants as me, Caspar Wijngaard, and Ryan O'Sullivan.
He now works for Titan Comics, meaning I still get to collaborate with him on Doctor Who marketing. It's a good thing to come up with people and still work together almost a decade later.
Dead Men's Laughter is a short, bitterly sharp crime story. A stab through the eye with a pickaxe in the dark. It's an easy recommended if you like the kind of things I like. Though cosy crime, this is not.
I've just finished reading... Oh.
More crime.
Can you tell I'm working on Dark Patterns right now?
I've just finished reading Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast. This is the one that won all the awards, and it's easy to see why. A good detective story and a hell of a historical story- delving into a nation's quiet shame. Norway is an interesting place; I wrote about its black metal scene here just last month. I visited a few years back for a friend's wedding, and I think I expected it to feel more... Vikingy? Maybe that's a stereotype, but not a bad one as stereotypes go. What I did get a sense of was a culture of privacy. Keeping oneself to oneself. That seems at the forefront here thematically in Nesbo's writing. Things too terrible to be kept to oneself, repressed until they can finally only spill out in bloodshed.
Took the weekend off from script writing, which feels like skiving when I look at the workload in front of me for the week. What I did manage to do is solidify the next two creator owned books I'm planning to make. I never want to make books just for the sake of making them, and I always want to give a project the time it needs to develop.
I've said yes to a fair amount of work for hire in the last year because I keep being offered the chance to make cool stuff I want to make. But this has meant that though I knew I wanted to break ground on new creator owned, I had to find space to percolate the right project. To find the thing worth saying. Hence my surprise two came along at once. Both involved taking ideas I've had a long while and recontextualizing them in a way that made them immediately roll over and and their bellies. And now I'm worried this sounds like David Lynch meditation idea-fishing and I sound like a bloody hypocrite after last week.
Sod it. I'm off to write Dark Patterns.
This has been thedeadairchannel. A coagulation from the desk of Dan Watters. Please do subscribe.
