So while the books aren’t quite cosy, nor are they dark and grim. Alleyn himself is quite a cheerful detective, who enjoys his job and has a keen sense of justice. Nigel and Angela are Bright Young Things, and provide some levity which lightens the tone. Alleyn sends them off to infiltrate an anarchist meeting, and has fun with the portrayal of these bogeymen of the era, complete with stock bearded Russian Bolshevist. Anyway, I digress.Īlleyn also has another occasional sidekick in the person of a young journalist, Nigel Bathgate, and he and his fiancée, Angela, appear in this one. We were more deferential, for sure, back then, but even so.

Although I do often wonder what contemporary working class readers, who surely made up the bulk of the readership for all these authors, made of their mockery of the working classes. Alleyn’s Fox, Sayers’ portrayal of Wimsey’s sidekick, Bunter, and Allingham’s Lugg, sidekick for Campion, all make the books feel much more dated than Christie and in a way of which modern audiences are less tolerant, I feel. When thinking about it, I wonder if part of the reason that Christie has remained so popular is that Poirot’s sidekick is a man of the same or even higher class than Poirot himself, so that while Poirot may mock his intelligence from time to time there’s no feeling of snobbery. Alleyn is very fond of Fox but is horribly patronising towards him, as is Marsh herself. Alleyn is one of these aristocratic policeman (did they ever exist in real life, I wonder?) and his sidekick, Inspector Fox, is a “common man”. The one thing that makes me not wholeheartedly love Marsh as much as I do, for example, Christie, is the snobbishness in the books – a fault she of course shares with many of the Golden Age writers. So it all comes down to motive and method – who wanted him dead (lots of people!) and who could have given him the drug, and how. But Alleyn quickly realises that many other people had the opportunity to give him another injection or perhaps to have given him the drug in another form. So suspicion naturally falls on Sir John, since he gave the hyoscine injection. It soon transpires that Sir Derek had been poisoned with hyoscine, a drug that had been used as part of his preparation for surgery. It’s a nice mix of whodunit and howdunit, and the investigation is mostly carried out through a series of interviews Alleyn has with the various suspects. It’s a long time since I last read a Ngaio Marsh, but I was very fond of her books back in the day, and happily this was a pleasant revisit. So when he subsequently dies, it’s not altogether surprising that suspicions of murder arise! Enter Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn of the Yard… Hmm… surgery carried out by the doctor who’s furious at him, the nurse he seduced, an anaesthetist who previously accidentally killed a patient, and another nurse who is a Bolshevist in her spare time. He is rushed to Sir John’s clinic where he is diagnosed with peritonitis requiring immediate surgery. It all comes to a crisis when Sir Derek collapses while giving a speech in the House of Commons. It’s probable his wife won’t be too happy if she learns about that little episode either! His sister, meantime, thinks that all his woes and ills can be cured by one of the many patent medicines she acquires from her pharmacist friend. And the personal issues are piling up! As well as his health and threats against his life from those Bolshies, his doctor, Sir John Phillips, is furious at the way he has treated a nurse who works in Sir John’s clinic, having seduced and then dumped her. So although he is suffering from intermittent abdominal pains, he is ignoring them until he has more time to deal with personal issues. For all the latest Netflix news, drops and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook.The Home Secretary, Sir Derek O’Callaghan, is in the middle of steering an important bill through Parliament to counter the threat from anarchists and Bolshevists. Painkiller is available to watch on Netflix now. Ron Lea stars as Bill Havens in the Netflix Painkiller cast and he is best known for his roles in Street Legal, This is Wonderland and Doc. Jamaal has starred in an array of TV shows and movies including The Recruit, The Manny and Rabbit Hole.

Jamaal Grant stars in three episodes of Painkiller as Shawn Flowers. He has also appeared in You Wish, Who Are You People and Life of the Party. Ales is best known for his roles alongside Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor. John Ales stars as Dr Gregory Fitzgibbons in the Netflix Painkiller cast. Some of his more recent projects include A Million Little Things, Where the Crawdads Sing and Alt. Raymond Sackler is portrayed by Sam Anderson, who viewers may recognise from Forrest Gump, Memoirs of an Invisible Man and Water for Elephants.

Memois of an invisible man cast