Murder in Any Language

Murder in Any Language

I hear Italian in the den.

I don’t speak or understand Italian, and yet a gentleman is in there speaking it, along with a dozen other people. The night before, it was the French. The Swedes had a turn. And the British? They swarm the place.

I’m referring, of course, to TV shows. When we ran out of American programs, we stumbled onto MHz, a streaming service that specializes in shows from around the world. The first one we watched was Italian — Inspector Montalbano, about a detective who solves mysteries in a little Sicilian town we visited the year before the pandemic.

Yvonne, inspired by our trips to Italy and her Sicilian heritage, has been studying Italian via Zoom, so she actually understands some of the stuff. I just read the subtitles.

The Italians, along with the rest of Europe, seem to love mysteries. Luckily, so do we.

On MHz and more recently PBS, we’ve discovered Murder by the Lake (Austria-Switzerland), Detective Ellen Lucas (Germany), Bannon (Gaelic!), and Murder In, each episode of which is set in a scenic region of France, from Provence to Avignon. For good measure, we’ve watched Shetland and Grace Harte, which are English but might as well be in a foreign language. We use subtitles for those.

Check it out. In the meantime, I’m off to the den, where Yvonne is sitting with a bunch of Europeans. I think one of them may be dead.

Opera

Blog: Music