The Detectives

Detectives on our screens are always flawed, Unmarried or with superficial lovers Sherlock Holmes was played by Jeremy Brett On set, he kept a massive ‘Baker Street file' Stuffed with the great sleuths mannerisms and ways As Brett explained ‘some actors are becomers— they try to become their characters…the actor's like a sponge, squeezing himself dry..then absorbing the character's like a liquid" Holmes was Brett's ‘dark side of the moon…moody, solitary, dangerous' Poirot is forever David Suchet The more that Suchet read about the Belgian, the more the man enthralled him- His need for order, his carefully groomed moustache His little grey cells always on full drive. ‘A man of faith and morals.' The actor carried a dossier on Poirot around the set for years John Thaw's Morse was solitary, beer soaked, bright A cognitive curmudgeon with his love of classical music, His classic Jaguar, his bouts of melancholy His love of crosswords, pedantic, intellectual With eyes of cut glass blue, hair white as sea frost Brenda Blethyn's Vera is near to retirement An employee of the fictional 'Northumberland & City Police', Obsessive about her work and driven by demons. She is always unkempt a working class Miss Marple wearing wellies The list goes on, John Nettles as Bergerac Racing round Jersey in leather jacket and jeans Or later, tramping the blood-sodden lanes of Midsomer Peter Falk's Columba, in his filthy crumpled mac…. Pick of the crop is a Frenchman, happily married Unlike Rebus, Frost or a plethora of others Rupert Davies as Maigret, Simenon's character Unknotting the psychodynamics of murder In the Paris of cobbled streets and bistros Beginning with a match struck on a wall, Simenon's Maigret: best sleuth of them all