Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley's People & A Perfect Spy (BBC)

There's a mole in The Circus, and only retired cuckold George Smiley can set things right.

Thanks to downbeat folk like Callan and Harry Palmer, the unglamorous spy motif was old hat by the time Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy appeared. However, it revels in its believable espionage set-up.

Despite its prestigious origins and lavish reputation, Tinker is a disappointment. Poorly composed shots, mismatched lighting (not helped by poor care of the original print), a plodding narrative and lots of talking heads make the series seem better suited to theatre or the radio.

The budget seems to have been spent on the wage packets of the central actors - including Alec Guiness, Patrick Stewart, Michael Jayston and Hywel Bennett. The superlative cast make a gourmet meal of the piece, and we care enough about them to forgive a lot of Tinker's shortcomings.

Carre's sequel adaptation (Smiley’s People) is not reliant on its actors. It enjoys a stronger story with more intelligent visuals - by 1983 TV had moved on, grown up a little, competing with the movies and sating an increasingly sophisticated audience.

More time and thought has gone into shots - there are low angles, lighting effects, complementing character relationships rather than detracting from them. The director even manages to make Hampton Heath look sexy.

Smiley's People is more rooted in the contemporary grit of the ‘80s - Tinker used a public school, old boys' clubs and restaurants as its arena. The follow-up uses the music, fashion and TV production style of the decade. The whole arena makes George's lost world of cold war politics as effectively distant and frightening as anything dreamed up by Michael Crichton.

Like its antecedent, the serial suffers from a slack second act but rallies for a stirring finale. A Perfect Spy has no such difficulty, packing a man's life into a few glossy hours. More technically adept, this yarn shows more humanity than the first two put together. While Alec Guiness' relationship with his wife and friends provided a welcome relief from heaps of chilly espionage, here relationships provide the hero's raison d'etre and downfall.

Peter Egan puts in a strong performance as the eponymous golden boy, but his reputation seems to precede him - we can see the intelligence and breeding in the character's eyes; his spying is mostly left to shadow and rumor. That's the point of the story, yet it makes the drama less effective.

These three releases provide a great introduction to Carre's people, expressing his themes with increasing depth and technical proficiency. Perhaps his next adaptation, tailored to the audience of a fast-paced new millennium, will reach even greater heights.

The Kitty Killer Cult seems to be getting all over the place, with plenty of online mentions and possible book events in Charleston, Camden, Greenville and Barnwell (Barnwell?), all in SC. Here's a few of its recent internet appearances:

The book and its predecessor get a page to themselves on the Meg Richards site. Meg is a web site developer and head of Ta Da Productions.

Look under the subheading "Nick Smith" for mentions of both novels on Multnomah County Library's Fiction for Cat Lovers - and of course, there are a lot of other great cat-related books on that page, too.

CampusI can find you a good price on The Kitty Killer Cult with cost comparisons.

Lest we forget, the official KKC website includes all the news and information about my work that you could possibly want to find. Pay the lonely little thing a visit sometime!

Ten years ago I was approached by a lady named Tinsley Lockhart in Edinburgh to produce "Web TV" content, but the project came to nowt. The technology just wasn't there to support it. The pictures were too jerky and video took too long to download on most people's computers (that's a general comment on the technology available back then, not my filmmaking, natch).

Now things are different. MSN's streaming video is fluid enough to be watchable, and as of this week, you can even watch a couple of minutes of my work online thanks to Filmbaby, CDBaby's offshoot devoted to video productions.

Dolly the Dog continues to grow in popularity, with book signings (or rather, pawings) thoughout Charleston and a second batch of her Take Time DVD available for distribution. I just hope her ego doesn't get too large - small dogs with big heads look weird. Urgh.

A last word or two about the book group I visited. It was called Women of Ms.tery, and the book of the month was Stephanie Barron's Jane and the Man of the Cloth, part of a mystery series starring Jane Austen. Some of the group liked it; other members didn't, in an assemblage that included one lady who like blood 'n' guts and another who "didn't like British authors." I didn't take it personally.

With their exclusive focus on women protagonists and female writers, the group never fails to find material for discussion. Next they're reading More Bitter Than Death by Dana Cameron, set in a snow-bound inn. The old isolate-your-characters-and-notch-up-the-tension kind of book.

Personally, I'm reading Sam Delany's On Writing for review in the local Post and Courier - you can read my wife Ros' latest review here. Delany, who's best known for his scifi writing, may sound like an insufferable windbag at times, but he knows it and he doesn't care. He uses a lot of big words and I hope some of his intelligent insight rubs off one my own work.

Last Friday marked my third murder mystery with the Actors' Theatre of South Carolina, playing a new character ("Tom Terse," an an innocent victim of circumstances). Along with six other actors, I laid out some clues for guests at the glamorous Citadel Beach House on the Isle of Palms, SC.

Our audience from The Citadel Military Academy in Charleston had fun trying to guess what was going on, with minimal help from us. Some of them didn't appreciate their cool coastal surroundings, but there's no accounting for taste.

We had a fine balance of characters - a nutcase, an extrovert ladies' man, a stiff-upper-lip career military man and others. I got to act guilty, instead of trying to look innocent as I do when I'm playing the murderer.

Things went prett smoothly until the end of the night, when one of our guns didn't go off and we had to drag the murderer away, kicking and screaming, instead. Whodunnit this time? I'll have to keep that a secret, in case we perform the same mystery in another location, for other guests...

By my reckoning, we have about 25 scenes left to shoot for our ambitous Revolutionary War film, Liberty. At our part-time, whenever-we-can-get-actors-together rate, that means another 10 weeks of shooting!

There are still a couple of big set-piece scenes to shoot, but most of what's left is small-scale, nitty gritty stuff. My own character, Charles Burke, is in a few more scenes, and I'll have to make sure I'm wide awake for them. I shot a scene last week where Burke was supposed to be tender and kind; instead, I was exhausted and looked scary.

The last scene that we shot was a tense exchange between our hero, Captain Felder, and William Henry Drayton, played by Craig Hadley of the Living History Group. In order to get an over-the-shoulder angle on Drayton I had to climb into the pluff mud of the River Ashley, slowly feeling myself sinking as we filmed. Fortunately, the tide was out at the time or I would have been washed up - mind you, some people have been telling me that for years...

My event this week at The Happy Bookseller was worthwhile - one of the few times I've visited Columbia, SC, and I didn't get too badly lost. I was accompanied by Sam, who brought a Halloween toy or two to keep himself busy. When I wasn't signing books I was drawing mummies, vampires and ghosts for the haunted house he's making.

I sat in on a meeting of the store's mystery book group, consisting of ladies of all ages who only examine mysteries by female authors with female protagonists. They weren't sure what to do with me, seeing as how the heroes of my books are cats.

This was my first brush with such a gathering, although I've attended writer's groups in the past and worked on a quirky TV show called The Book Group a few years back.

The Happy Bookseller will be taking their cut when I do my next Columbia event in the Bostick Auditorium at the Main Richland County Library. That will take place on April 4 at 10 a.m., and I'll be chatting for half an hour or so. For all I know, most of that time may be taken up with me apologizing for not being a female author with lady detectives in my literature.

Undercover Kitten

Let's hear it for the unsung heroes of crime busting. The secret squirrels who listen in on neighborhood conversations, aiding homeland security; the alligators who double as door-to-door salesman, sniffing out safe houses to get at edible bad guys; the dogs who send SOS messages via their Midnight Barks.

And, yes, let's not forget Fred, a Brooklyn dodger who facilitated a sting on a college student masquerading as a vet.

The last one's for real and you can read his story here. Thanks to Nitin Arora for the tip - he thinks Fred's the kind of character that could be ripped straight from the pages of one of my potboilers...