My wife got into a show called Murdoch Mysteries, a cozy Canadian mystery show that takes place in 1900. Then she got our kids into it (we have strange kids). So I often have to hear the dinner talk with the detective and coroner’s relationship, the lieutenant’s quest for a promotion, the gruff police chief’s drinking habits, etc. It’s a pretty good show if you like Castle or Monk or The Mentalist and so on. But it started as a book series, so I thought I’d check that out.

The book is quite different. Like you’ve probably gathered from other reviews, it’s grim and gritty, not shirking from the terrible dirty parts of living at the turn of the century–disease, child abuse, orphans, classism, lack of women’s rights, etc. Themes circle issues you can’t deal with on nice Canadian TV. For example, in the TV series, they’ve, through necessity of the cases (and the necessity of the writers probably) accidentally created things like the polygraph and night vision goggles and luminol. In the book, he’s struggling to stop from masturbating he’s an adult male Catholic.

I’m not sure people who like the series will like this, especially if they have delicate sensibilities (for example, this one has a lot of abortion and “promiscuous women” and child death). They are two different things–much like Song of Ice and Fire vs. Game of Thrones. Or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories vs. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock. I liked it, but that’s because I can separate Book Murdoch from Television Murdoch.

However, I don’t think I’d read any other books in the series. It lacks what makes the TV show charming (Murdoch’s boyish curiosity, the strong female presence, the anachronistic plots like the “Wrestlemania” one). If I need grim and gritty detective novels, there are plenty of others I can go to. Frankly, I’m surprised whoever created this show found a kernel of what it became. But shrug.