My Book the TV Show

This originated from “My Book the Movie” guest post on Campaign for the American Reader.

THE MISPLACED PHYSICIAN is book #3 in my An Irregular Detective Mystery series, about a former Baker Street Irregular – one of Sherlock Holmes’ hired street urchins, his eyes and ears of London – who aged out of that group and decided to become a detective like the guv. Tim Badger is the one with enough chutzpah to believe he can do it, and when he met a black bloke from the East End named Ben WATSON, he deemed it Fate that they should work together, but it wasn’t until Mr. Holmes himself stepped in to sponsor them that they started to succeed. In this book, DOCTOR Watson has been kidnapped and Holmes is out of the country and can’t be reached. So it’s up to Badger and Watson to save the day! But if they can’t, that’s the end of the Badger & Watson Detecting Agency.

The post originated as “my book the movie”, but I’d rather have a television series, preferably a British production perhaps on Masterpiece Mystery or BritBox.

Because I write cinematically – that is, with dialogue that actors love to speak (my audiobook narrator says this is true!), and a sense of place and action, it flows nicely. The books are all easily translated to a script. They’re moody, accessible, and drawn in such a way that readers know exactly what they are “seeing” and experiencing. And because it is a Victorian cozy mystery, there is no bad language and no sex (but there is romancing). This is in keeping with the canon of the Doyle material. I treat it as if they are historical documents and I don’t deviate from them or their sensibilities. Hence, the “swearing” is “bloomin’” this and “ruddy” that. With some “By Joves!” and “Great Heavens!” thrown in as well. Not that the London Badger & Watson travel through isn’t a bit gritty at times. It can be, depending on what they investigate. But for the most part, they stay strictly Victorian and could be seen as an extension of the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes adventures.

Tim Badger is a man of action and guts, but despite his tough childhood, he always has a smile on his face. That’s why I might choose an actor like Callum Woodhouse (Tristan Farnon from All Creatures Great and Small) for him. He has that playful, carefree, and sometimes irresponsible sensibility for Tim Badger. As long as he can go full Cockney.

As for Ben Watson, he’s a little tougher to cast as I am unfamiliar with as many black British actors. Ben is a husky fellow with a beard, more cerebral than an action hero, but he does help solve their cases with intellect, with his scientific mind, and willingness to go along with Badger’s wilder inclinations.

I’m looking at Daniel Kaluuya for that role, a British award-winning actor (including an Academy Award) who has had scores of roles that would fit him rather nicely as a Victorian detective-for-hire.

Briefly, they had a nemesis in the beautiful shape of a female reporter, Ellsie Moira Littleton, based on real female reporters of the era. She begins by mistrusting Badger and Watson’s motives, knowing that Tim Badger has a police record and assumes he’s up to no good. But as soon as she gets to know them better, she’s all in, becoming their Boswell and writing up their adventures in the Daily Chronicle (just like Dr. John H. Watson writes up Holmes’ adventures for The Strand Magazine), boosting Badger and Watson’s profile and getting them clients. And then she and Badger see more in each other than first expected, and this woman who was the daughter of a baronet, the lesser nobility, finds herself falling for this Cockney bloke. Chastely, of course. I can see Brit actress Gemma Arterton, a woman who has had over 65 television and film roles to her credit, as the lovely and fierce Miss Littleton.

It’s a young cast, and that is no accident. Though the demographics for mystery BOOKS tend to be older, demographics for mystery TV SHOWS tend to skew younger. The characters are younger in the books anyway. The setting is an England in flux, on the cusp of a new century and new ideas. Though Ellsie, the New Woman, is not yet accepted as such (and the Suffrage movement is in its dawning stages), it’s ripe for women viewers who crave seeing feisty women who can still have a lot to learn, especially with a budding romance.

I’d watch it. The closest I can get right now is listening to the audiobooks performed by Man of a Thousand Voices, Noah James Butler, a voice so versatile that you believe in the characters even when they are women, and whom I would certainly tap for a role in the television series.