David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and we're going to close the show today checking in with the New Yorker's own Jill Lepore. Jill's a staff writer for the magazine, a professor at Harvard, and the author of best selling works of history. Jill, good to hear from you.

Jill Lepore: [chuckles] And an inveterate watcher of television.

David Remnick: Well, we're going to find out who watches more, right soon.

Jill Lepore: I dare you. I can call you. I have a lot of knitting to do, and I can really only knit while watching TV.

David Remnick: Your intellectual life, your working life, is about as engrossed as possible with the uniqueness of American history, but it's when you step aside from work, you're looking across the ocean for entertainment. Why is that?

Jill Lepore: [chuckles] Maybe I just love the British police procedurals because they're just a step aside from the US. Also, there's not a lot of gun action, so there's not the same kind of swagger.

David Remnick: Did you grow up on police shows when you were a kid? Kojak?

Jill Lepore: Yes.

David Remnick: Law & Order?

Jill Lepore: Yes, but like you, you're basic like Adam-12 and The Rockford Files.

David Remnick: [laughs]

Jill Lepore: The Rockford Files are so good.

David Remnick: I liked Adam-12, too-

Jill Lepore: Columbo, yes, that, like '70s stuff.

David Remnick: -for older listeners. Yes.

Jill Lepore: I now have a series of rules about things I will and will not watch.

David Remnick: What's the rules?

Jill Lepore: Well, one thing that actually really constrains my police procedural viewing is-

David Remnick: [laughs]

Jill Lepore: -which is a real handicap, a child imperiled in episode one. I can't do it.

David Remnick: Oh, really?

Jill Lepore: I think since having kids. Also, I think it's cheap shortcut for emotional engagement, right? Like, it just amps everything up. There's a missing child. I cannot do it.

David Remnick: Okay. All right, so let's narrow it down. Jill. We want to come up with three of these British police procedurals that our listeners are just going to love diving into if they haven't already.

Jill Lepore: Okay, so Annika is totally my favorite because I love Nicola Walker, who stars as the head of a new marine homicide unit.

David Remnick: In Scotland, right?

Jill Lepore: Boats. It was set in Norway originally.

David Remnick: Right.

Jill Lepore: When they adapted it, they had her move to Scotland from Norway, but then she still offers all these asides involving-

David Remnick: The Norse sagas.

Jill Lepore: -Icelandic sagas and the Norse sagas. Yes, so it is a little gritty, but it's a very dark comedy and it has a little bit of screwball elements.

David Remnick: Two things about Annika that are [unintelligible 00:02:33] to me other than the actors. One is that the crimes are always fishing someone out of water.

Jill Lepore: [laughs]

David Remnick: [chuckles] They got a harpoon through their head or whatever, and everything's set on the water. It's the nicest office in the history of the world.

Jill Lepore: Yes. It's beautiful glass.

David Remnick: Exactly.

Jill Lepore: Floor-to-ceiling glass, looking out at the water.

David Remnick: The other thing is they do this thing where she faces the camera and breaks the fourth wall all the time.

Annika: A bridge is just this beautiful idea, isn't it? And they're often beautiful in themselves, but they're so hard to build. You need loads of experts getting the keystone in the middle right is a delicate and difficult moment. But the main problem with them is that quite a lot of the time, when you say you're building a bridge, you're actually burning it to the ground.

Jill Lepore: Yes and usually, there is a meta plot that involves her close reading of a piece of literature. It's often Shakespeare. The pilot episode, it's Melville's Moby Dick, which is appropriate, and this person's being harpooned to death.

David Remnick: [laughs]

Jill Lepore: They are quite lovely readings. She has a John Donne poem that helps us think about this death.

David Remnick: As one does.

Jill Lepore: It does a really good job, so there is what I think of as the Jane Tennyson problem. Do you remember Prime Suspect when Helen Mirren was Jane Tennyson?

David Remnick: Why do you insult me as if I would not remember Prime Suspect?

Jill Lepore: Okay, so I think of it as kind of the Jane Tennyson problem in that it was a real breakthrough when Helen Mirren-- just a dazzling performance- as this kind of hard bitten women taking over a homicide unit, confronting the old boys, et cetera. There's a kind of they never really know what to do with motherhood, and they want to use it. Storytellers for these, when they have women who run detective units, want to make somehow the screwed-up family life serves as character development for the character.

David Remnick: Our hero in the aforesaid Annika, has this teenage daughter who's kind of Riley a half a mess. Right?

Jill Lepore: Yes. She's a pretty important character as the series develops.

David Remnick: Okay, so that's Annika. What's the second?

Jill Lepore: Okay, so I love this show, Karen Pirie, that I think only has had one season. I'm not sure it's going to be renewed.

David Remnick: Karen Pirie, which is also set in Scotland, and she's sort of what a young Jane Tennyson story might have been. She's very young. She looks like she's in her 20s, so there's a lot of romance and sex and interest, and she's adorable. Like, she wears these little sweater vests. I know I'm not supposed to somehow just objectify this female character, and she has a kind of ferocity, but not at the expense of other elements of her character.

Karen Pirie: Sir, I need a word with you.

Chief Superintendent James Lawson: You all right, Sergeant?

Karen Pirie: Chief Superintendent James Lawson, I'm arresting you under section one of the Criminal Justice Scotland Act 2016-

Chief Superintendent James Lawson:  What are you doing, Pirie?

Karen Pirie: -for the murder of Rosie Duff.

Chief Superintendent James Lawson: This is ridiculous.

Karen Pirie: You are not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say will be noted and may be used in evidence.

Chief Superintendent James Lawson: You're embarrassing yourself, Sergeant.

Karen Pirie: Do you understand?

Jill Lepore: If Jane Tennyson were living in the now, she'd be Karen Pirie. My third was Magpie Murders, which doesn't really qualify as a police procedural. Our hero is Susan Ryland. She is an editor at, unsurprisingly, a failing publishing house that relies for staying in the black on a single author, a mystery author who has this character named Atticus Punt, who is sort of like Poirot if Poirot had survived a concentration camp. The Punt stories, which are set in the '50s, are stories within the stories of the Magpie Murders, and this editor, Susan Ryland, goes on this romp to try to solve the mysterious death of the writer of the Punt books because it's going to crumble the publishing house.

Detective Superintendent Locke: Miss Ryland.

Susan Ryland: Detective Superintendent Locke, you can call me Susan.

Detective Superintendent Locke: Can I ask what you're doing here?

Susan Ryland: Can I ask if I need to tell you?

Detective Superintendent Locke: I've asked you a simple question, Susan, and I've asked it nicely. Now, if I feel you're obstructing an officer in the performance of his duty, we can do this down at the station.

Susan Ryland: So you're investigating Alan's death?

Detective Superintendent Locke: I didn't say that.

Jill Lepore: She's not a police officer. She's a fish out of water thrown into this event. Anthony Horowitz, who's this very crazy prolific television writer. He's really having fun here with thinking about genre and the publishing industry and the relationship between writers and editors and writers and their subjects, writers and their characters, so I find those questions interesting.

David Remnick: I think, for me, the perils of the publishing industry might be a little too much on the nose, but you get your entertainment [chuckles] where you can. Now, this is a tangent for police shows, but not so far. A while back, you wrote a profile for us on Mick Heron, who's a British spy novel. I had never heard of Slow Horses. I'd never heard of Mick Heron until this exploded onto the screen. Apple obviously does Slow Horses, and it's amazing. You can practically smell that raincoat through the screen. Tell me about Mick Heron as a writer.

Jill Lepore: McCarran is this really interesting guy. He wanted to become a mystery writer, and he wrote a bunch of stuff that he threw away. I think he wrote five novels. He couldn't find a publisher, but he didn't really feel like he cracked the detective genre. He was working essentially as a petty bureaucrat, dealing with job dismissal cases of people who were being terminated with cause.

David Remnick: He was an HR guy?

Jill Lepore: Yes. Like, essentially, he had to write all these reports about people that needed to be let go. Redundant, I guess, is the UK term, right? Then he thought, "Well, what if I did a spy series about the failed spies. The spies that had really screwed up and had to be let go, what would you do with a failed spy? You can make an employee redundant. You can lay them off and, maybe there was an NDA or whatever. They go on their merry way, but what do you do with a failed spy? It's tough to cut them off. They know too much.

David Remnick: Yes.

Jill Lepore: Slow Horses was a kind of genius formulation of pushing at the theme of failure, and it's a really beautiful series. I first encountered them as audiobooks, and I listened to them all. There's quite a number of them. It's incredible narration, but the TV series is, if anything, even better.

David Remnick: Oh, it's heaven.

Jill Lepore: I just was getting a text today from my youngest kid who's like, "Mom, Slow Horses season four is coming out."

David Remnick: The only thing that annoys me is that unlike the way Netflix lays it all down, and you can just say to your mate, "You know, I think I have the flu today," and you pretend to have the flu. They close the door and you watch the entire series in a given day. You have to wait a week for each episode. I'm not happy about that.

Jill Lepore: I like that Slow Horses; it's going to take us through Thanksgiving. That's a good, you just got to get to Tuesday. You just got to get to Wednesday.

David Remnick: It'll get us past the election.

Jill Lepore: You can have a little break. Right? You have other people to worry about than your students.

David Remnick: Jill, have you ever thought about writing a detective novel?

Jill Lepore: Oh, God, I would give it all up in a heartbeat to do that. Wouldn't that be the best life? Doesn't that seem like the best life? If you'd start all over, and you could do that, would you do it?

David Remnick: I plan on starting all over.

Jill Lepore: [laughs]

David Remnick: Pomegranate juice and the gym, I'm going to live forever. Jill. I don't know about you. [laughs] Jill, it's always great talking to you. Thank you so much.

Jill Lepore: Great talking to you.

David Remnick: Jill Lepore is Camper professor of American History at Harvard and a staff writer at the New Yorker. If you missed any of her favorite British cop shows, we'll list them @newyorkerradio.org.

 

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.