Jason Lee, Alfre Woodard. TNT photos

Call it the case of the quirky cop.

Doesn’t it seem as if so many TV cops have to have a gimmick? Sort of like the strippers in the musical Gypsy.

Take Dwight Hendricks, the police detective winningly played by Jason Lee on the new TNT series Memphis Beat airing Tuesday nights.

Dwight is the typical doesn’t play by the rules cop who thrives on TV but wouldn’t last long on the job in real life. He often runs his own investigations. He’s not good at paperwork, or dealing with his supervisors. But he’s got a keen insight to human nature.  

Jason Lee channels Elvis

Dwight loves his mama, Memphis and Elvis. He drives a vintage GTO. To add to his eccentricities, he moonlights as an Elvis tribute singer, which probably will be the ending scene of each episode and will give Lee a chance to channel the King without the costumes of an Elvis impersonator. Don’t worry, we are sure to see plenty of the King’s impersonators. This is Memphis, after all.

  While it’s a given that Dwight will run up against Lt. Tanya Rice, his new supervisor played by always reliable Alfre Woodard. It’s also a given that not only will the lieutenant see his worth, but she’ll have to come to him for personal crisis.

 Quirks aside, Memphis Beat is an entertaining, well-plotted cop drama that has wit, atmosphere and a good storyline. It’s a cop series designed for the summer but with the substance to carry it through the winter. It’s not Hill Street Blues or Castle, but neither is it Cop Rock.

  Judging from the first couple of episodes I screened, the quality should last.

  Lee, sans moustache, taps down his comedic persona from My Name Is Earl to show he can handle a tough-guy role and the rigors of crime drama.

 Lee keeps the serious elements in tact, even when Dwight is joking around and acting goofy. In the first episode, he brings in a lamp with breasts that light up. In the real world, that stunt would get him sent straight to human relations department. But Dwight shrugs it off by saying “things work different around here.”

  An interesting group of supporting characters surround Lee and Woodard. All, of course, are quirky.

   And let’s remember why it’s called Memphis Beat. Memphis is a quirk in itself. And Memphis Beat does the city justice.

  Memphis is an urban city that is about as country as you can get. (Before you Memphisites jump on me, I am giving you a compliment.). Memphis is a big city but it has never lost track of its country roots. Country never feels out of place when it comes to Memphis.

   Jazz, rockabilly, blues and crunk are among the sounds that fill Memphis.  Graceland, the Peabody Hotel and some of the best ribs in the country are in Memphis. It’s a city that’s closest in spirit and eccentricities to New Orleans.

(For the record, it is an estimated population of 670,100, making it the largest city in Tennessee, the third largest in the Southeastern United States and the 19^th largest in the U.S. How’s that for facts?)

George Clooney and his longtime collaborator Grant Heslov are the executive producers, which should keep the scripts entertaining.  

Memphis Beat has the right vibe.

 Memphis Beat airs on Tuesdays nights on TNT at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times; 9 p.m. central time with numerous encorces.

Jim Thompson’s novels do not come easily to the screen.

This hard-boiled author, whose career began in 1942 and lasted through the early 1970s, had a noir vision that often bleak. Yet there was certain poetry in the way he could look into a person’s soul and see nothing but darkness.

Casey Affleck in The Killer Inside Me. IFC Films photo

 The most successful filmings of his novels have been by Europeans, as the New York Times recently pointed out. British director Stephen Frears gave us the excellent The Grifters in 1990 while Frenchman Bertrand Tavernier’s 1981 film Coup de Torchon was an adaptation of Thompson’s novel Pop. 1280. According to the same Times article, Coup de Torchon is considered the best adaptation of any Thompson movie. Even Donald Westlake who wrote the screenplay for The Grifters liked it best.

  The Getaway, both Steve McQueen’s 1972 version and the 1994 one with Alec Baldwin, is, admittedly a guilty pleasure, though not as faithful to the book. Both movies ended with Doc and Carol McCoy off to Mexico with a satchel of cash; in the novel, they find that money doesn’t buy them happiness, to say the least.

    The latest tackling of Thompson comes from British director Michael Winterbottom whose The Killer Inside Me is a fascinating and quite flawed version of Thompson’s 1952 novel. It is as faithful as it can be to Thompson’s work, and that is one of its high points as well as one of its problems. 
  
   Winterbottom delivers a darker than noir journey into hell via the psyche of a serial killer that is riveting. But the scenes of women being battered are cringingly graphic. Admittedly, these scenes aren’t extensive, but they are intense.

  In The Killer Inside Me, Casey Affleck portrays Lou Ford, a small town deputy sheriff whose cherry persona masks his cruelty, as he becomes a serial killer. At 29, Ford seems to have a good life. The son of the deceased beloved doctor of Center City, Texas, he is an up and comer in the sheriff’s department and he is engaged to one of the town’s “good girls,” Amy (Kate Hudson).

 Ford’s orders to run out of town Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), a prostitute who has set up shop on the outskirts of town. Instead, Joyce unleashes Ford’s sadistic side that he had tried to keep under wraps and the two begin an intense sadomasochistic affair. The two hatch a scheme to extort money from Chester Conway, the local construction mogul (the brilliant Ned Beatty), whose dim son is in love with Joyce. To say the plan goes wrong is an understatement.

 Affleck has proved his acting chops – and ability to immerse himself in his roles, beginning with one of his first roles as the high-school hit man who just wanted his CD’s in To Die For to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Gone Baby Gone.
  
   In The Killer Inside Me, Affleck is mesmerizing. He is charming and menacing, cocky and fearful, cold and calculating yet warm and affectionate. Affleck makes The Killer Inside Me rise above some of its unsavory aspects. Whenever he is onscreen, you cannot watch anyone else. When Affleck talks about how in a small town “everyone thinks they know who you are,” there’s no doubt what he means.

 Beatty embodies the vengeful businessman used to having his own way – and used to enjoying his revenge. Simon Baker (The Mentalist) does the most with the throwaway role of district attorney Howard Hendricks who sees through Ford’s charade. Elias Koteas, a character actor who’s often mistaken for Robert De Niro, is superb as a union leader and Bill Pullman shines as a self-taught bombastic lawyer.

Kate Hudson, Casey Affleck

However, it’s the women who are pivotal to The Killer Inside Me who are miscast. Without her blonde locks, Hudson seems more brassy and gutsy as a brunette and gives her most nuanced performance since Almost Famous. Still, Hudson falls short. Hudson’s Amy has to decide if her private humiliation is worth the price to keep Ford’s interest.

Alba is too pretty, too passive and too young looking to be a hard-bitten prostitute. When she suggests the extortion scheme, it sounds as if she wants to go shopping or take in a movie. While the 1976 version of The Killer Inside Me with Stacy Keach was a mess, Susan Tyrrell was a better Joyce. Alba lacks the dangerous sexuality that Joyce has. This role needs a Megan Fox, but a Megan Fox who can act.

But Ford’s brutal battering of Joyce and Amy are unwatchable and vile.  These intense violent scenes of the two women being brutalized are cringingly graphic. Never mind that these scenes are actually quite brief; the unflinching rawness is disturbing and sickening. Although these scenes are not as bloody or explicit as the violence in many films, the image of women passively accepting a ferocious beating is unwatchable. Sex scenes also are quite intense though very little nudity is shown, except in some old black and white photos.

The violence also was upsetting to Jessica Alba, who reportedly walked out of the screening at the Sundance Film Festival.

Flashbacks to Ford’s childhood and the relationship with his mother, who was battered by Ford’s dad, are confusing. 

Cinematography is powerful. You can almost taste the dust in the air and the dead-end future that Ford sees for himself 

Affleck and Winterbottom perfectly capture small-town 1950s ennui. But sometimes that’s not enough.

The Killer Inside Me is now in wide release and also is available On Demand. Rated R: The film contains graphic violence, gore, sexual situations, nudity, child abuse, strong language and heavy drinking. 109 minutes.

IFC Films

When the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted a couple of months ago, wreecking havoc on the country as well as European travel, I did three things to learn about it.

I read the newspaper and watched CNN; I asked my next door neighbors who hail from Iceland and I regularly read the blog Murder Is Everywhere for Icelanic author Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s posts.

 Fortunately, Eyjafjallajökull appears to be dormant now, according to scientists. (And no, I still don’t know how to pronounce it.)

But I still regularly check in with Murder Is Everywhere for its international focus, as I did before the volcano. Here, the contributors are Tim Hallinan (Bangkok), Leighton Gage (Brazil), Dan Waddell (England), Cara Black, at left, (Paris), Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Iceland) and Michael Stanley (Botswana).

The world has gotten so much smaller. When I was a kid, St. Louis seemed like another world from my small hometown of Charleston, Mo. Now, thanks to myriad technology, we know what is going on instantly throughout the world.

While newspapers and TV news keep us in touch, there is nothing like the human touch. And while many of us may not know someone who lives in exotic lands, international mysteries show us lands we may never visit.

I have read each of these novelists and have been fascinated with their take on their particular countries. Hallinan’s Bangkok brings this land close as does Stanley’s view of Botswana. Gage’s Brazil shows an unique perspective. Waddell’s take on England is different from the other British novelists whose work I admire.

One place I have visited – and desperately want to return to – is Paris. A day-trip two years ago on a cruise reconfirmed this; it also made my husband fall in love with the City of Lights.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep glued to Cara Black’s posts. Cara’s love of Paris is evident in each of her novels. Through 10 novels, Black has gracefully moved through the streets and neighborhoods, showing rare views of the City of Lights and, along the way, also exploring the life of private detective Aimée Leduc.

Black’s affection for the city has made me want to pack my bags many a time. I was delighted when I was forced to read Black’s Murder in the Palais Royal (Soho) when Mystery Scene assigned it to me for a review. Murder in the Palais Royal came out in March and her scenes in Paris still resonate with me.

So I was especially interested in Tom Nolan’s excellent profile of Cara Black in the latest issue of Mystery Scene (Spring Issue No. 114). Nolan captured this author who grew up in the Bay Area and credits her father with being an avid Francophile.

While it doesn’t seem as if Paris – or Iceland or England or Botswana – are in our immediate travel plans, I’ll be content to travel vicariously by reading these authors’ novels and their posts on Murder Is Everywhere.