Still trying to cope with the murder of his wife, Broadway director Larry "Cash" Carter resettles in Darien, Conn., which seems like a different planet after years in the urban jungle.
But he soon discovers that savagery isn't restricted to urban jungles. After years of importing good British mysteries -- including the "Lovejoy," "Cracker," "Dalziel & Pascoe" and "Inspector Frost" series -- the A&E cable network finally has decided to create its own. And it has turned to an unusual and offbeat source: comic actor Gene Wilder.Wilder and writer Gilbert Pearlman have created the character of Carter as a traditional amateur detective in the spirit of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple -- only with a gender switch and a full-time job.
Filmed in handsome, late-1930s period style, "Murder in a Small Town" (tonight at 6, 8 and 10) is light and often whimsical, devoid of blood and guts, but redolent with wit, colorful touches and clever paradoxes. Wilder plays Carter as a man in the process of rebuilding his life, shifting his career from high gear to the lower speed of community theater.
Cash -- the nickname comes from his string of financial successes on Broadway -- is sucked into a murder mystery when the would-be angel for his theater company, a despicable industrialist named Lassiter (Terry O'Quinn), is found dead.
Lassiter has enemies by the carload, including even Cash, who had put him in his place with a few deft verbal ripostes to Lassiter's anti-Semitic remarks.
Ultimately, Cash lends his help to Lt. Tony Rossini (Mike Starr), a theater fan who admires Cash for his immense knowledge of the stage and comes to admire him even more for his analytical mind.
The chemistry between the cool, clever, slight Wilder and the immense, genial Starr is palpable. Starr's Lt. Rossini isn't exactly Watson to Wilder's Holmes, but you won't be far wrong if you think of them as a sort of New England version of Christie's Poirot and Hastings. It works wonderfully well.
Wilder and his writing partner also have set up a larger family of characters in case Cash Carter clicks and is invited back. He has a college-age daughter, Sophie (Elisabeth Rosen), and a longtime girlfriend, Mimi (Cherry Jones), who's struggling to get him thinking along marriage lines again. There's also the unfinished business of his wife, who was killed in a routine robbery attempt -- or was it something more?
Though Wilder doesn't exactly play Cash Carter in sober-sided style, this isn't a goofy sendup, either, as some might expect from the star of "Silver Streak," "Young Frankenstein" and other broad comedies. Like Wilder himself, Cash is an intelligent man who relishes the use of his rapier wit but occasionally likes to get a little silly.
There are some magic comic moments, such as Cash singing Maurice Chevalier's old tune "Mimi" to his Mimi while wearing a pencil mustache, or doing an inspired tango with her.
Though "Murder in a Small Town" isn't a skull-thumping mystery like "Cracker" or "Silent Witness," it's somewhere in-between the traditional British mystery and the comparable American genus that included "The Thin Man" and similar fare of the non-hardboiled school of detectives.