Scotland Yard's Inspector Jericho deals with class and racial tension in 1950s London.

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 30, 2006

BY ANDY SMITH
Journal Television Writer

There's a new copper on the beat in the popular PBS series Mystery! He's Inspector Michael Jericho, a tough Scotland Yard detective in 1950s London, played by British actor Robert Lindsay.

The first installment of the Jericho episodes, which open a new season of Mystery, begins tonight at 9 p.m. on WGBH, Channel 2.

The two-hour story A Pair of Ragged Claws will finish next Sunday. The Jericho stories will continue on PBS with another two-part story, The Killing of Johnny Swan on May 14 and 21.

Lindsay, interviewed by phone while he was on vacation with his family in the south of England, said Jericho has a film noir sensibility inspired by the movies of Robert Mitchum, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, transplanted to London.

In A Pair of Ragged Claws, Jericho finds himself investigating a racially charged murder in the mixed neighborhood of Notting Hill.

On the same night, the wealthy Sir Nicholas Wellesley is kidnapped from his exclusive club and held for ransom. His wife, Lady Clare (Francesca Annis) insists that Jericho handle the case personally.

As he pokes around, Jericho discovers some links between Sir Nicholas and Notting Hill and begins to wonder if the two cases might be related.

He also learns that almost no one connected to either crime is who they initially seem to be. (Viewers need to pay attention in this one to figure things out.)

In the meantime, there are secrets lurking beneath Jericho's hard-bitten exterior.

"When I first saw the script, I felt intuitively he was a rather wooden, archetypical, '50s hero," Lindsay said. "But if the character could be fleshed out, given a past that he still has to deal with, that would create something interesting."

Jericho is a loner, an insomniac, and a workaholic whose life contrasts with his closest colleagues -- family man Clive Harvey (David Troughton) and soon-to-be-married John Caldicott (Ciaran McMenamin).

We learn that Jericho's fitful sleep is haunted by the night he saw his father, also a policeman, gunned down by a pair of thugs. (We also discover that the love of his life left him while Jericho was in the British army in World War II).

"Each of the Jericho stories involves not only the crime being solved, but also reveals a few more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of the character," Lindsay said.

IN FUTURE INSTALLMENTS, Lindsay said, we will discover that Jericho is Jewish, that he is still trying to solve the murder of his father -- and that his father might not have been the hero that Jericho looked up to as a boy.

Jericho is a co-production of WGBH and Granada television in England.

A total of four Jericho mysteries, each two hours long, were made. All four have aired in England; in the United States, Mystery is showing two this season and two next season.

Lindsay said the response to Jericho in England was largely favorable, particularly for the later stories.

Tonight's A Pair of Ragged Claws, he said, suffers a bit from having to simultaneously introduce characters, deal with a complex plot, and introduce the "back stories" about Jericho's past.

The biggest problem English audiences had with Jericho, Lindsay said, appeared to be all the cigarette smoking, commonplace in the '50s but frowned upon today.

LINDSAY SAID he signed on to do just four Jerichos, and he isn't sure whether the character will return to TV or not.

At 56, he is a well-known film, TV and theatrical actor in England. He's been in a number of popular British TV comedies and played Captain Pellew in the TV versions of the Horatio Hornblower novels that starred Ioan Gruffudd.

His experiences in Hollywood were not so pleasant. "I did a few movies in the '80s. I had a bit of an attitude problem . . . I was outspoken then and refused to bend towards the machine. I ended up high-tailing it back to London," he said.

Broadway proved more congenial for Lindsay, and he won a Tony in 1987 for Me and My Girl.

Now Lindsay will star in a new production of The Entertainer, in the role made famous by Laurence Olivier.

"Generally I prefer the theater," Lindsay said. "TV fills the coffers and keeps things ticking over, but I've done very little TV that I find satisfying . . . Jericho was more satisfying than most.