Acorn TV's Dalgliesh: That 70s Mystery!
I cannot be certain, but I’m pretty sure I read ALL of the Dalgliesh novels written by P. D. James. My introduction to James was Shroud for a Nightingale (1971) which I studied as a teaching assistant in 1990, way back in graduate school. Then, decades later when I picked up Death in Holy Orders (2001) shortly after it was published, I was slightly disoriented because of substantial leaps in the time period. It was difficult to situate a detective who I remembered in a 1970 setting, which I read in 1990, re-appearing in a novel set in the new millennium.
Since reacquainting myself with P.D. James, I then proceeded to read all the novels that feature Adam Dalgliesh, which span from Cover Her Face (1962) to The Private Patient (2008). In these 14 novels over a 46-year period, Adam Dalgliesh has appeared always to be early middle-aged, in that trick of fictional series (non) aging I’ve written about elsewhere. We are told in 1963’s A Mind to Murder that he lost his wife in childbirth 13 years earlier. And then he gets married again at the end of the final novel The Private Patient in the series published in 2008.*
Despite (or probably because of?) my familiarity with P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh, Acorn’s new adaptation Dalgliesh remains simultaneously recognizable and foreign. This new adapted series started in 2021 with a first season of six episodes treating three novels, and then Series 2 came out in 2023, again with six episodes covering three novels. I’m still awaiting Series 3 to come out.
In a way, the TV series gives me another type of a time-period whiplash. I remember thinking how fitting it was that the first two episodes of the series would be on Shroud for a Nightingale, the same novel that served as my original introduction to the Dalgliesh novels. The TV series is set in the 1970s, and I thought the first episodes had a good “look” to it, with the ever so slightly sepia-toned aspect of the cinematography and the gesturing towards decades-old sensibility in terms of fashion and cars. And episodes 3 and 4—for The Black Tower published in 1975—successfully convinced me that the 70s were, indeed, back.
However, especially with adaptations of the last two novels (episodes 3-6 of Series 2), viewers already familiar with James’s novels might be getting a bit confused. I distinctly remember thinking that the setting of A Certain Justice and especially Murder Room didn't feel right—to me, that is. Surely those were from much later in Dalgliesh case files, right? When I checked, I saw that those two novels were published in 1997 and 2003.
Let me clarify that the series does a fine job of taking these more recent novels and time-warping them back to the 70s, so most people would not even notice. But if you have clear memories of novels and their particular periodicity, you might sense a slight dislocation—or at least transposition. For instance, I now wonder what contagious disease the series producers might substitute for the SARS virus outbreak of early 2000s utilized as a major plot device in 2005’s To the Lighthouse.
I suspect that the TV series will continue to make modifications to provide an authentic setting and feel, even if they are not exactly the same as those set out in the original novels. For example, while the character of originally white Kate Miskin—Dalgliesh’s partner in the last half of the series—has changed to a black-British bi-racial character in the TV series, that alteration continues the spirit (if not the letter) of the sense of alienation that the novels’ Miskin experienced as someone trying to escape the sting of her underprivileged youth in her class-obsessed society.
Bertie Carvel playing Adam Dalgliesh looks and sounds right in the role. Good-looking as the novels insist that the character be, but not distractingly so. Soothing voice that sounds appropriate as he reads poetry. Carlyss Peer conveys well a combination of vulnerability with her outsider status as a racialized minority woman in the 1970s British police force and her confidence in her more-than-competent policing skills.
And, given the changes the show has already made, one wonders whether, this time around, hers would not be an unrequited love…?
*This, according to (my memory and) the Wikipedia page on Adam Dalgliesh.