Playing with Fire: Excellent Mystery, Terrible TV

 

So yes!

So no!

  

 

PLAYING WITH FIRE (2004)

By Peter Robinson

Avon Books, 405 pages.

★★★★★

 

I doubt I need to tell the readers of this blog that books are almost always superior to movies made about them. TV is a little bit more complex. We subscribe to Brit Box off and on. Right now, it’s on because we wanted to binge watch the excellent Shetland series, which is based on novels by Ann Cleeves. I liked the TV productions better. I was hopeful that the BBC series Inspector Banks would be equally good. Alas, no! Not even close.

 

To further test my belief, I re-read # 14 of the DCI Banks novels by author Peter Robinson, Playing with Fire. Then I watched the two-part BBC dramatization of the same book. I hated it! But to make sure I wasn’t overly biased because I loved the book so much, I watched a few episodes made from books I’ve not yet read. Same verdict. Part of it is that actor Stephen Tompkinson was unconvincing as DCI Alan Banks. His performances were so wooden that it often looked as if he knew he was miscast. He would have been better off playing a hard-boiled American detective the sort whom likes to throw his weight around. The problem is that Robinson’s Banks is both cerebral and on the world-weary side of life. He’s a music aficionado with a massive record collection and a near-photographic memory of who played with whom, which recordings are definitive, and can even recall labels and their catalog numbers. The genres seldom matter, as he loves rock, classical, punk, jazz, and opera. That guy isn’t Tomlinson.

 

I also fault the ITV’s production choices. Robinson’s writing is more subtle, even when presenting horrible situations. Playing with Fire involves a possible serial arsonist and begins when two canal boats are burned at their moorings in Yorkshire Dales. A burnt body is found in each. The first victim involves an investigation of its own as it was the home of a recluse surmised to be a painter because of the boat remains; the second is 16-year-old Tina Aspern, an emotionally damaged runaway who despises her stepfather. The first suspect is her boyfriend, Mark Siddons, who lived on the boat as well but spent the night in question in a pub and in the arms of another. He is wracked by guilt, both for his infidelity and for his belief that he could have saved Tina if he had been there. The stepfather, a doctor, is perfectly willing to believe that Mark, whom he sees as a rock-the-cradle freeloader, set the fire but Banks doesn’t think so. Is it because he believes Mark or that he sees something of his own son, Brian, in Mark? (Banks has long been divorced and his wife got custody of their two children. He has since been quite unlucky at love.)

 

Robinson gives us meticulous detail on how police investigate arson. Cranky egoist Geoff Hamilton shows how he knew that the first boat was set afire while Tina slept in the second one. That first boat’s resident was Thomas McMahon, who was indeed a local painter, but of little renown. This stands in marked contrast to the TV show, which goes for the gore, showing us McMahon’s charred body and Tina’s as a grotesque “floater.”

 

You name it and Banks’ life is complicated by it. Another fire, Mark’s preference for jail–he’s hard worker but also homeless after the fire–Tina’s stepfather’s arrogance, his own bumbled pursuit of DI Annie Cabot, the emergence of a possible lost painting by J. M. W. Turner, the fact that an old flame is dating an art expert who makes Banks queasy (or is it jealousy?), his sadness over Tina’s life (or is he projecting his daughter’s unsettled life onto Tina?), etc. In other words, the book is nuanced in every way the TV production is gratuitous.

 

As noted, I tried some other episodes as Playing with Fire is among my favorite of Robinson’s novels. My gut tells me that the TV series couldn’t (ahem!) hold a candle to the novels.

 

Rob Weir