Crimes Of Passion

The Swedes are laying it on thick again with the latest murder mystery
Ben-Felsenberg-176What’s this? When did Don Draper take up being a ’tec? More observant viewers will quickly realise our policeman in a jauntily angled period hat working on a murder case requires subtitles. Starring a Jon Hamm lookalike and glittering with fabulous 1950s wardrobe, unreconstructed sexism and wicked smoking and hard drinking, Crimes Of Passion (BBC Four, Saturday, 9pm), might at first be mistaken for Sweden’s answer to Mad Men, with the extra twist of dead bodies.

The show is based on the work of crime writer Dagmar Lange, whose stories are celebrated in her native Scandinavia as somewhere equidistant between the whodunnitry of Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith’s brooding psycho-dramas. Each episode is a complete tale, featuring a murder mystery that’s a little frostier – in every sense – than you’ll find in, say, Midsomer.

In the first one, a giddy group of artists and academics are partying on an island estate, but it’s not long before a corpse in the forest undergrowth means one less place at dinner. And so our trio are called into action: fearless Puck, her admirer Einar, and his good friend Christer Wijk, who just happens to be a Stockholm detective. He’s played by Ola Rapace, who must share a considerable amount of DNA with Mr Hamm and was himself married to Noomi Rapace, who starred in the film trilogy based on Stieg Larsson’s bloody thrillers. These Swedes do lay it on thick when it comes to killing in their entertainment. Could it be they need to offset the many decades of peace-loving neutrality?

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