Sleuth

When news of a planned new Sleuth hit Hollywood a year or so ago, it sounded promising: Kenneth Branagh directing a Harold Pinter-revamped version of the Anthony Shaffer play, a play made into a satisfying film back in the early 1970s starring Michael Caine and Sir Laurence Olivier. In this new version, Caine would return to play the Olivier part - a nasty-tempered mystery scribe exacting revenge on the young bloke who has stolen away his wife. And Jude Law would play that part, a ne'er-do-well lover-boy.

You may remember Sleuth. Written in 1969 by Anthony Shaffer, the British thriller won critical praise for its clever structure, ran for eight years in London and three years on Broadway (where it won a best-play Tony Award), was performed around this country, and became a successful 1972 movie starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier. OK, those who might see the revival of the play at Hedgerow Theatre can now stop trying to remember anything else about Sleuth, especially the plot.

Sherlock Holmes would be an antique if he were living today, says Dan Morrow, an avid follower of the legendary fictional detective. The famous English sleuth would not fit well in today's society, said Morrow, who stores his collection of Sherlockian memorabilia in a bedroom- turned-museum inside his Gloucester Township house. "I don't know if he'd be as effective as he was within his own time frame of the late 1800s," Morrow said. "I think telephones, cars and everything else in today's society would hamper him from making the brilliant observations he did so many times.

By Adrian Hyland   Soho. 304 pp. $24   Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky   Adrian Hyland says he is drawn to Osip Mandelstam's view of the writer as " 'a stealer of air' who works in the way that lace makers work to make a design that is 'air, perforation and truancy,' or the baker of doughnuts who puts as much care into the hole as he does to the dough. "   "What the hell does all that mean for a crime writer?" Hyland asks. "It means that there is no part of our world that should be 'immunized.

It's impossible to tell you almost anything about Sleuth and not feel like I've given everything away, which is why an usher at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival in Center Valley, where the play is being revived, holds up a sign of admonition when people leave the theater: Please don't give away the secret, it says. It may as well say "secrets" because the play has many little ones and a couple big ones. Sleuth opened on Broadway in 1970 and ran for three years, during which time Sir Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine starred in the popular movie version.

TATTLE HAS written enough about Jude Law over the past few years that it was nice to meet him finally in September at the Park Hyatt Hotel during the Toronto International Film Festival. In Toronto for "Sleuth" (Gary Thompson's review is on Page 50), Law showed up for his interview in sneakers, torn jeans and a gray thermal undershirt. His hair had not seen a comb - and on the "Sleuth" red carpet he had cleaned up so good. He also seemed to be the only celebrity we'd talked with who had a large man stand in the back of the room - just in case a journalist pounced on him. That said, the tabloid fave, who has been keeping a lower profile since the end of the Sienna Miller nonsense, came across as a thoughtful actor and producer, committed to his work and career.

While working at the Philadelphia architectural firm of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, James Bradberry had a "standing lunch engagement with a group of friends. " He kept these meetings a secret from his colleagues. Bradberry wasn't selling trade secrets or doing anything even remotely sinister. "Every lunch hour, I would log into one of the computers and work on a mystery novel," Bradberry said in recent interview. "Each day I would catch up with the lives of my characters, because I didn't know what was going to happen in the book.

Savvy, sassy, sexy Stephanie Plum, the bodacious bounty hunter from Trenton, returns in Janet Evanovich's High Five (St. Martin's, $23.95) for her fifth adventure. Or rather misadventure, since nothing ever goes right for Stephanie. This time out the trouble (and fun) starts when Steph's mom informs her that Uncle Fred is missing. Missing? Actually, nobody could really miss the disagreeable old coot, but he is family. And either the Plums stick together, Stephanie is told, or they get picked off separately.

"Alfie" apparently failed to cure Jude Law of his need to be unfavorably compared to Michael Caine. He resurrects a totemic Caine role again in the remake "Sleuth" and ups the stakes by appearing opposite Caine himself, who takes the role once occupied by Laurence Olivier. Much has changed from 1972 original, but its structural essence is intact - a two-character piece built around the battle of wits between an apparently shallow young man and a sophisticated older gent. Law is Milo, an out-of-work actor visiting the modernist country estate of a wealthy writer (Caine)

Tonight, Diana Rigg takes over as the host of PBS's Mystery! (Channel 12, 9 p.m.) and instantly injects an air of liveliness and wit that her predecessor, Vincent Price, had long ago abandoned in favor of winking campiness. Rigg - slinking around the new Edward Gorey-designed set in a sleek black dress - gets this series back on track, helped immensely in her efforts by the debut of a new detective, Margery Allingham's Albert Campion. Tonight's first Campion installment, "The Case of the Late Pig," does a good job of introducing Campion to viewers who may not be familiar with the fictional sleuth.

Like many children her age, Kym Willis, 14, is a big fan of television shows that revolve around crime-solving. Willis particularly likes Bones , about a forensic anthropologist, and Rizzoli and Isles , which follows a detective and a medical examiner on the job. In fact, Willis said, she might like to work as a medical examiner one day. "I want to do the autopsies," she said. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey hopes more students like Willis will translate their interest in crime shows into careers in forensic science when they enter college.

By Benjamin Black Henry Holt & Co. 310 pp. $25 Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky John Banville distinguishes between the artistic pleasure he derives from the literary novels he writes under his own name and the craftsman's pleasure he gets from the crime fiction he writes as Benjamin Black. This makes it fair to ask a craftsman's questions about the Black books: How well do the parts fit together? How smoothly does Black execute them? Are they beautiful? Do they work?

When a group of teenagers approached Cobbs Creek this week to test its water quality, they could see something was wrong even before collecting samples: hundreds of dead fish were floating in the slow-moving West Philadelphia waterway. After a short hike upstream and some quick chemical tests, they fingered an apparent culprit Wednesday morning: chlorinated water draining from a municipal swimming pool. The matter was still under investigation Thursday by the state Department of Environmental Protection, whose officials said they did not know for sure who bore responsibility for the mishap.

He was known by many as America's Sherlock Holmes. Before criminal profiling, before CSI and Miranda warnings, Ellis Parker garnered an international reputation for his uncanny sleuthing abilities. The Mount Holly man - Burlington County's first chief of detectives - solved hundreds of murder cases and obtained signed confessions in more than half of them. He was so well-known that law enforcement officials from England, France, and other countries sought his help.

LISTENING TO some conservative pundits and pols this week, you could almost be forgiven for mistakenly thinking that Osama bin Laden wasn't taken down by a crack team of Navy SEALs but rather by Jack Bauer, the fictional terrorist-slapping star of TV's "24. " Indeed, the great debate over what advocates call "enhanced interrogation" - and the rest of the civilized world calls "torture" - roared back into the national conversation with bin Laden's...

The two doors opened off the south end of the City Hall courtyard, each at the base of a tower. Fancifully sculpted, with carved snakes as handles, the doors held a distinction as dark as their original bronze: For most of the 20th century, prisoners on their way to court passed through them in manacles to climb to holding cells on the seventh floor. But as architects and conservators prepared in early 2009 to restore the matching seven-foot doors - part of a project to return the landmark 1901 building to its Second Empire glory - they noticed something.

When a great master dies, two things often follow - the artist's work skyrockets in value, and forgers emerge from the shadows, eager to make a buck. It happened to the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. Now, it's happening to Andrew Wyeth. But faking Wyeth's work is proving difficult, even for skilled forgers. His wife's ferocious attention to detail decades ago is providing rare evidence to help art detectives curb this growing crime, said art historian Jonathan Lopez, author of The Man Who Made Vermeers . The latest Wyeth forgery - at least the seventh since his death last year - was the most skilled yet. Offered at auction by Christie's in New York earlier this year, the painting was expected to fetch $300,000 to $500,000.

Today's lead question was crafted so nicely that I decided to forgo the usual introduction to the column and let reader Melanie Mackin do it for me: "I've been watching too many CSI television shows, because here's the problem:" The crime: Sopping wet carpet. The scene of the crime: Family room, underneath three floor-to-ceiling windows. The wet spot is rectangular, about eight feet long by six inches wide, which mirrors the length of the three windows. The middle window is actually a door that goes to the outside patio.

When you work undercover, it's always a good idea to greet an out-of-town target at the airport. A guy just getting off a plane is less likely to be carrying a weapon. On a frigid day in 1998, I met Civil War artifact collector Charlie Wilhite a few minutes after his flight from Kansas City landed at Philadelphia International Airport. We ducked into a shuttle bus headed to the nearby Embassy Suites. Wilhite was a middle-aged, gangly man with a pale face and a bad blond comb-over.

Did someone say The Booty Hunter ? In an early scene in The Bounty Hunter , the desperately unfunny action-romance starring Jennifer Aniston's glutes and Gerard Butler's triceps, the camera trails Aniston's backside as in an extended doggy greeting. Foreplay and foul play make strange bedfellows in this yawn about flirty ex-spouses ciphering the twin puzzles of their failed marriage and an unsolved murder. (Or was it suicide?) While following a hot lead, Nicole (Aniston)