A Mind to Murder ** (1995, Roy Marsden, Frank Finlay, Jerome Flynn, Robert Pugh, George Costigan, Robert East, David Hemmings) – Classic Movie Review 10,449

Roy Marsden’s portrayal of Adam Dalgliesh in Anglia Television’s P D James detective series spans 15 years from Death of an Expert Witness (1983) to A Certain Justice (1998). The series began as adaptations in serials of five or six one-hour episodes each, recorded on outside broadcast videotape.

But the format of the adaptations changed after original producer John Rosenberg died in early 1991, with Anglia TV making the next two adaptations into two-hour filmed TV films: Unnatural Causes (1993) and A Mind to Murder (1995), ie bona fide TV movies.

In A Mind to Murder, Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh investigates the brutal murder of the administrative director of the Steen Psychiatric Clinic, which specialises in upper-class psychiatric cases.

Though script-writer Russell Lewis provides a very loose adaptation of the book, and it is a shame that he has changed the plot and characters so much, frustrating the many fans of the novel, nevertheless A Mind to Murder works well on its own terms, especially with Marsden so excellent and a fine vintage cast on form.

It is atmospherically filmed on location at Bawdsey Manor, Suffolk (where Robert Watson-Watt invented and developed radar just before World War Two) and across the River Deben from Bawdsey, at Felixstowe Ferry. The climax is filmed on the foreshore and in a specially created pit. The London dock scene at the beginning is the Saint Peter’s dock in Ipswich, with Tower Bridge added digitally.

Also in the cast are Frank Finlay, Jerome Flynn, Robert Pugh, George Costigan, Robert East, David Hemmings, Mairead Carty, and Sean Scanlan.

After A Certain Justice (1998), the Dalgliesh role was taken over by Martin Shaw when the BBC took over the rights to James’s novels and produced its own series. Shaw took the role of the poetic bespectacled forensic detective Adam Dalgliesh in P D James’s Death in Holy Orders in 2003 and The Murder Room in 2005.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,449

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