The Singing detective. Vol. 2

The second and final volume of a compelling mini-series written by Dennis Potter which merges fantasy, reality and history through a noir-like, musical and surreal narrative entwined around its central character, Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon). He is an ‘out of print’ detective fiction writer who is incapacitated both physically and emotionally by a rare skin disease, waiting for a seemingly impossible healing process to begin in an overworked National Health Hospital while he constructs the plot and imagery of a detective story in his mind, unable to use a pen. ‘The Singing Detective’ seams together three narratives, Marlow’s hospital experiences, the detective novel set in post World War II London that he is half-composing and half-hallucinating, and memories of his wartime boyhood that cross into both his reality and his fiction. Marlow pictures himself as a crooning 1940s detective, wrapped up in an intricate murder case, an image that gradually interplays with his own progress of self-discovery and healing in the real world of his hospitalised condition and his intermittent memories of childhood. In this final part of the mini-series, the clues of his past and the plot twists of his novel begin to piece together, completing the puzzle of Marlow’s own griefs and fears and the detection of the multi-layered and not so fictional mystery he has been composing.