Which makes them suspicious of the Vienna steel magnate and mayor’s right-hand man, Hans Brückmüller – as if he’s the only one in the city with access to such a device. He deduces the murder weapon is an antique gun, stuffed with fragments of human bone instead of shot, so it leaves no trace (I still don’t understand why the killer thought this necessary) – and Liebermann figures the door was locked from the outside using steel forceps. It doesn’t work but he is questioned, until rich and powerful people conspire to put pressure on the police, and get Rheinhardt taken off the case.Īs if that would work Rheinhardt is dogged and anyway, he says, “work is all I have”. The sleuths arrange another seance, presumably – though it’s not clear – to pretend to contact the dead medium, and flush out one of the other attendees, a wealthy banker, Heinrich Holderlein, whose wife makes him go to this sort of thing. But it’s not Braun – the killer is an adulterer with a reputation to lose, and anyway, Braun soon ends up dead. It is cheesy, but their relationship is developing so nicely I’ll let them off. “Welcome to the case, doctor,” says Rheinhardt back to Liebermann, when they catch him.
Is the killer Otto Braun, one of the men they track down who attended the seance? There is a good rooftop chase that makes him look guilty. “Find the father of this child, he’s your killer,” he tells the experienced older detective, who inexplicably fails to thank him sarcastically for the suggestion. Back to the morgue where his theory is confirmed.
Goodness, he’s cocky, under that cool demeanour. “Welcome to the case, Inspector,” says the doctor. Liebermann is implausibly good at this: he points out that the woman’s apartment is “like a stage set” (they realise she holds seances), and is puzzled by the absence of clothes in her wardrobe, until he makes the giant leap that she must have been pregnant, her clothes all taken to be altered by a seamstress. Matthew Beard and Jessica de Gouw in Vienna Blood.
For the first half an hour, it feels as if the makers are failing to repress their Sherlock complex – the jaunty camera angles, the hyperreal look, the jangly music – until it starts to relax into itself. But Liebermann’s character study of his reluctant new mentor is so Holmesian it feels like a spoof.
#Ny times review sherlock series
The three-part series will be compared, unavoidably, to Sherlock: its writer, Steve Thompson, adapting the Frank Tallis novels, was also a Sherlock scriptwriter. It is set in Vienna in 1906, where gruff detective Oskar Rheinhardt (Juergen Maurer) is told that a young doctor – Liebermann (Matthew Beard), a fan of Freud – will be shadowing him to learn about “the psychopathy of the criminal mind”. Still, the image of junior doctor Max Liebermann hanging from his fingertips over the city of Vienna after being hurled from the door, proved a thrilling, if completely avoidable – “hypnosis would be easier” – end to the first episode of Vienna Blood (BBC Two). F or someone who professes to be into the new-fangled science of what makes people tick, I’m not sure it was the cleverest move to get into a rickety carriage on a fairground ferris wheel with a psychopathic killer.
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