Latest news with #TheEmpressMurders
West Australian
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Screen Queen TV Reviews: Travels With Agatha Christie, Bay of Fires, The Surfer, America's Sweethearts, DWTS
I've spent the past weekend steaming through the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Empress of Australia, a passenger liner at the centre of WA author and actor Toby Schmitz's grizzly-but-great debut novel, The Empress Murders. His book, which I inhaled over the course of a weekend, is set in 1925, and is a fantastically dark rumination on the end of the British Empire, the legacy of World War I and a close-up look at colonialism and the murky confusion the world found itself in at the start of last century — it's also a ripping murder mystery. Having spent so much time in that world, I decided to stay in similar terrain and dive into this fabulous travel series, which sees Sir David Suchet, the man who inhabited Agatha Christie's best-known creation, Inspector Hercule Poirot, for 25 years on TV — as he follows her footsteps, retracing early trips the crime novelist took with her then-husband Archie before she became famous (and famously reclusive) in later life. In 1922, Christie, along with her husband, found herself crossing the world on a passenger ship much like the one that's central to Schmitz's book, tasked with visiting various countries to help promote an upcoming British Empire exhibition. Suchet's first stop is South Africa; in 1924, Christie published a detective novel set there, and in episode one Suchet, armed with his old Leica camera, is off to Cape Town. Later episodes see him travel to Australia, New Zealand and Canada — even Hawaii. It's a delight to traverse the globe in his gentle presence. And — praise be! — there are no murderers along for the ride, though there is plenty of discussion of the devastating violence wrought in the name of king and country. Seek this series out, and give Schmitz's book a read, too. Though be warned: his is a much choppier crossing. There's much to like about this Tasmanian crime series, which sees the always-watchable Marta Dusseldorp starring as Stella, a mum-on-the-run in witness protection — it's so delightfully odd! Season two sees her still stranded in off-kilter Mystery Bay with her kids, making the best of things by running the town's criminal enterprises. Mystery Bay's wacky inhabitants have got used to the spoils of their ill-gotten gains, but their harmonious anonymity is about to be tested as Stella finds herself in the sights of an 'unhinged apiarist drug lord' and 'maniacal doomsday cult'. It can't end well. Worth a second look, and a satisfying continuation of the story. Remember when Nicolas Cage spent a few weeks living down south, shopping at the Asian grocery store in Busselton? He was there shooting this psychedelic surf thriller for Stan. Worth a look for the curious. Rebecca Gibney, Susie O'Neill, Felicity Ward, Osher Gunsberg and Shaun Micallef are just some of the stars making their dance floor debut this Sunday. You KNOW I'll be tuning in to see how they fare. Sorry, not sorry, but I loved the first season of this doco. This one follows the 2024-25 cheerleading squad from auditions right through to the season, and it won't be smooth sailing. Cannot wait to feel woefully inadequate as I check back in with these impossibly glamorous gals.
Perth Now
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
New SBS series follows Agatha Christie's footsteps
I've spent the past weekend steaming through the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Empress of Australia, a passenger liner at the centre of WA author and actor Toby Schmitz's grizzly-but-great debut novel, The Empress Murders. His book, which I inhaled over the course of a weekend, is set in 1925, and is a fantastically dark rumination on the end of the British Empire, the legacy of World War I and a close-up look at colonialism and the murky confusion the world found itself in at the start of last century — it's also a ripping murder mystery. Having spent so much time in that world, I decided to stay in similar terrain and dive into this fabulous travel series, which sees Sir David Suchet, the man who inhabited Agatha Christie's best-known creation, Inspector Hercule Poirot, for 25 years on TV — as he follows her footsteps, retracing early trips the crime novelist took with her then-husband Archie before she became famous (and famously reclusive) in later life. In 1922, Christie, along with her husband, found herself crossing the world on a passenger ship much like the one that's central to Schmitz's book, tasked with visiting various countries to help promote an upcoming British Empire exhibition. The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz. Credit: Supplied Suchet's first stop is South Africa; in 1924, Christie published a detective novel set there, and in episode one Suchet, armed with his old Leica camera, is off to Cape Town. Later episodes see him travel to Australia, New Zealand and Canada — even Hawaii. It's a delight to traverse the globe in his gentle presence. And — praise be! — there are no murderers along for the ride, though there is plenty of discussion of the devastating violence wrought in the name of king and country. Seek this series out, and give Schmitz's book a read, too. Though be warned: his is a much choppier crossing. Marta Dusseldorp is back for a second season of the delightfully oddball crime drama, Bay Of Fires. Credit: Supplied There's much to like about this Tasmanian crime series, which sees the always-watchable Marta Dusseldorp starring as Stella, a mum-on-the-run in witness protection — it's so delightfully odd! Season two sees her still stranded in off-kilter Mystery Bay with her kids, making the best of things by running the town's criminal enterprises. Mystery Bay's wacky inhabitants have got used to the spoils of their ill-gotten gains, but their harmonious anonymity is about to be tested as Stella finds herself in the sights of an 'unhinged apiarist drug lord' and 'maniacal doomsday cult'. It can't end well. Worth a second look, and a satisfying continuation of the story. Nicolas Cage in The Surfer. Credit: Supplied / RegionalHUB Remember when Nicolas Cage spent a few weeks living down south, shopping at the Asian grocery store in Busselton? He was there shooting this psychedelic surf thriller for Stan. Worth a look for the curious. This year's competitors on Dancing With The Stars. Credit: Nicholas Wilson Rebecca Gibney, Susie O'Neill, Felicity Ward, Osher Gunsberg and Shaun Micallef are just some of the stars making their dance floor debut this Sunday. You KNOW I'll be tuning in to see how they fare. America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is back for a second series. Credit: Supplied Sorry, not sorry, but I loved the first season of this doco. This one follows the 2024-25 cheerleading squad from auditions right through to the season, and it won't be smooth sailing. Cannot wait to feel woefully inadequate as I check back in with these impossibly glamorous gals.
The Australian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Australian
The Empress Murders is a new novel by a talented young actor and writer, Toby Schmitz
More than a decade ago, actor and playwright Toby Schmitz wrote a play called Empire: Terror on the High Seas about a murder spree on board an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. It was set in 1924, the year of the British Empire Exhibition in London, where one of the most popular features was an exhibit called Races in Residence designed to show off the conquered peoples of the empire. One theatre reviewer noted that the 'fall of the victims mirrors the tumbling of the British Empire in the mid 20th century' while speculating that the dense and incident-packed play might work better as a novel. Schmitz appears to have taken the suggestion on board, turning his play into a novel and renaming it The Empress Murders (after the ocean liner, Empress of Australia). The new title is a nod in the direction of Agatha Christie but readers expecting to snuggle up with a bit of Miss Marple-style cosy crime will be in for a shock. The Empress Murders is a violent book: nobody here is dispatched with a nip of arsenic in their camomile tea. Victims are flayed, mutilated, eviscerated and impaled. The bumbling ship's detective, Inspector Archie Daniels, is up to his copper's ears in gore. Daniels suspects the killer might be the so-called London Bleeder, who has been committing gruesome murders all over Greater London, 26 bodies at last count. 'Sometimes a clean kill, strangled, slit, poisoned, sometimes an abhorrent mutilation or perversion. Sometimes a mocking message left, sometimes nothing but maggots already at play'. Coded telegrams from his boss at Scotland Yard advise 'no Bleeder activity in London since embarkation', confirming the inspector's hypothesis that the Bleeder is on board the Empress. But is he a passenger or a member of the crew? Most of the action takes place in first class, and the author holds little back in depicting the malignant racism, boorish manners and entitled indolence of the toffs as they drink and screw their way across the Atlantic. Schmitz has certainly done his homework in the fashion mags of the day: 'Nicole Hertz-Hollingsworth … skips over in patent Mary Janes, periwinkle argyle socks, purple heritage tartan knickerbockers, a champagne silk blouse with black satin bow (top button popped).' Tony, her repellent – and cuckolded - husband of three weeks, is in 'sapphire velvet sports coat with plum silk pocket square and matching tie (top button popped), white trousers knife-pleated, two-tone wing-tips'. Does the story need this intricate sartorial detail? Probably not, but Schmitz's careful cataloguing of upper-class white privilege steers us towards the novel's central themes of racism and class warfare. His inventories of wardrobes and jewellery boxes mimic the mental inventories drawn up by members of the ship's crew as they plot to separate the toffs from their valuables. As an actor, Schmitz has appeared in Tom Stoppard's ultra-clever play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and there is more than a whiff of Stoppard's ingenious word-games in The Empress Murders, and of his verbosity: Some readers might find themselves skipping over such passages, overstuffed as they are with background detail, and by the author's own admission they won't miss much by doing so. The novel itself sometimes feels overstuffed, with superfluous characters as well as words, but once the murders start happening it doesn't take Schmitz long to whittle down his cast to a more manageable size. If the lurid violence of the murders functions, at one level, as an analogy of the violence of empire, it also mirrors the violence of the First World War, from which nearly all the book's characters emerge damaged, either by having taken part in it or, in some cases, by having missed it. The war scenes contain some of the novel's most graphic and visceral prose, the overwriting validated by the atrocity of the subject: Somehow Schmitz manages to hold the novel's disparate elements together, skewering a world debauched by wealth and war and empire while keeping the reader guessing about the outcome of his nautical murder mystery. Even a few short chapters narrated in the voice of the ocean liner make a crazy kind of sense as the first-class passengers guzzle gin and squabble about Dada in the ship's cocktail lounge. (Tom Stoppard's parody of Dadaism, Travesties, is another of Schmitz's acting credits.) The penultimate chapters are suitably cataclysmic, like a Jacobean tragedy in which the stage ends up covered with corpses. By the end the novel had won me over, Schmitz's clever but sometimes show-offy prose giving way to something quieter as two Irish lighthousekeepers ponder the final telegram messages sent by the Empress of Australia. It's a book that will leave you thinking. Tom Gilling is an author and critic. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Toby Schmitz is a writer, director and actor. He was most recently seen on television in Boy Swallows Universe and on stage in Gaslight. He has received nominations for his performances in The Seagull, Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure. His television credits include The Twelve and Black Sails. He is also a celebrated playwright. His plays include Degenerate Art, I Want to Sleep With Tom Stoppard and Capture the Flag. He was awarded the Patrick White Award for his play Lucky. Arts News from the book world from literary editor Caroline Overington. Review Famed pieces from Monet, Renoir and Degas are going to become frequent fliers by making their second global crossing from Boston to Melbourne for this NGV exhibition.
The Age
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Prepare to be discombobulated by this bonkers crime caper
CRIME The Empress Murders Toby Schmitz Allen and Unwin, $32.99 Brilliant, bonkers and bloody - The Empress Murders is what you get when you let a mischievous thespian schooled in Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and Agatha Christie loose on the crime genre. This is a tragicomic, ambitiously wordy, and wild excursion into the territory of the traditional locked-room mystery, set on a ship with a serial killer on the loose. It begins with a Shakespearian prologue, although it's not called that, spoken by the ship herself who affectionately recalls her origins as a leaf in a puddle, through her many subsequent incarnations as a sea-faring vessel, and culminating in her current manifestation as The Empress of Australia, a luxury ocean liner and 'a cast-iron idea'. She's now 'churning the Atlantic run' in 1925 on the way to New York with a full manifest of passengers and one corpse. The scene is set. It comes as no surprise to learn that this outlandish excursion into the crime genre started out as a play 20 years ago and has been a long time in gestation. There are numerous quasi-theatrical moments as we encounter the diverse passengers and crew, although there are also interior reflections and backstories that could only exist in this kind of capacious, meandering crime novel. It begins on C Deck with the handsome, somewhat threadbare, Mr Frey from Australia. He's survived the Second World War after his mother signed him up the day he finished school, spent time in Weimar Berlin and now fancies himself as a Dadaist poet, slipping words around 'like mahjong tiles'. And he's just been invited into the first-class lounge for dinner, so up we go. While Agatha Christie usually assembled her suspects in the library for the big reveal at the end, Schmitz summons his ensemble at the start, under the watchful eye of Chief Steward Rowling who is not feeling well and will undoubtably feel worse. An announcement is about to be made by the ship's dismal detective, Inspector Daniels, that a young Bengali deckhand has been murdered in the night, his body mutilated. Be prepared - like all the best Jacobean tragedies, there's going to be a lot of gore. Indeed, there are moments when the elaborate crime-drama edifice morphs into slasher horror. Like all the best shockers, these moments are laugh-out-loud, discombobulating in their bloody excess. But don't worry, the Empress reassures the reader, while we might be in for a rough crossing, 'I've got you'. And so she has, along with all the onboard intrigues that range from a memorable mobster in full white tie and tails, 'his lubricious curls tamed as best he can', who travelled to London with one suitcase and is headed back to the US with 'considerably more freight'. Chief Steward Rowling has his number.
Sydney Morning Herald
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Prepare to be discombobulated by this bonkers crime caper
CRIME The Empress Murders Toby Schmitz Allen and Unwin, $32.99 Brilliant, bonkers and bloody - The Empress Murders is what you get when you let a mischievous thespian schooled in Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and Agatha Christie loose on the crime genre. This is a tragicomic, ambitiously wordy, and wild excursion into the territory of the traditional locked-room mystery, set on a ship with a serial killer on the loose. It begins with a Shakespearian prologue, although it's not called that, spoken by the ship herself who affectionately recalls her origins as a leaf in a puddle, through her many subsequent incarnations as a sea-faring vessel, and culminating in her current manifestation as The Empress of Australia, a luxury ocean liner and 'a cast-iron idea'. She's now 'churning the Atlantic run' in 1925 on the way to New York with a full manifest of passengers and one corpse. The scene is set. It comes as no surprise to learn that this outlandish excursion into the crime genre started out as a play 20 years ago and has been a long time in gestation. There are numerous quasi-theatrical moments as we encounter the diverse passengers and crew, although there are also interior reflections and backstories that could only exist in this kind of capacious, meandering crime novel. It begins on C Deck with the handsome, somewhat threadbare, Mr Frey from Australia. He's survived the Second World War after his mother signed him up the day he finished school, spent time in Weimar Berlin and now fancies himself as a Dadaist poet, slipping words around 'like mahjong tiles'. And he's just been invited into the first-class lounge for dinner, so up we go. While Agatha Christie usually assembled her suspects in the library for the big reveal at the end, Schmitz summons his ensemble at the start, under the watchful eye of Chief Steward Rowling who is not feeling well and will undoubtably feel worse. An announcement is about to be made by the ship's dismal detective, Inspector Daniels, that a young Bengali deckhand has been murdered in the night, his body mutilated. Be prepared - like all the best Jacobean tragedies, there's going to be a lot of gore. Indeed, there are moments when the elaborate crime-drama edifice morphs into slasher horror. Like all the best shockers, these moments are laugh-out-loud, discombobulating in their bloody excess. But don't worry, the Empress reassures the reader, while we might be in for a rough crossing, 'I've got you'. And so she has, along with all the onboard intrigues that range from a memorable mobster in full white tie and tails, 'his lubricious curls tamed as best he can', who travelled to London with one suitcase and is headed back to the US with 'considerably more freight'. Chief Steward Rowling has his number.
