Killer (1983) User Reviews

Taggart before Taggart,rather good.

[ib011f9545i · 19 June 2018]

I picked up a pile of early Taggart episodes in a charity shop,this was with it but it is not really a Taggart episode. This was a mini series,Mark Mcmanus is Taggart in this but there is more too it than the average Taggart episode. I think there were a lot of average Taggart episodes. The plot in this is stronger than many Taggart stories and the Taggart character is shown to be more complicated than he often was in other episodes.

This drama reminds us that Glasgow has many fine green spaces but its depiction of Edinburgh is cliched. As an Edinburgh person can I remind writers that there are middle class people in Glasgow and poor people in Edinburgh. Of course readers of Ian Rankin know Edinburgh is not all middle class types like Taggart's sidekick in this.

Killer

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 24 January 2020]

The first appearance of Taggart in a three part series called Killer in 1983. The success of which launched the long running Taggart series.

Jim Taggart is as tough as nails cop. He worked his way up the hard way. Dour with some black humour. He has a disabled wife and a daughter who has little time for him.

When the body of a strangled woman is found by a jogger. Taggart finds himself being teamed up with a young Edinburgh University educated detective, Peter Livingstone who uses posh words.

Soon another woman is found dead and then a third body is found. It looks like a serial killer is on the loose in Glasgow.

There are several suspects in the frame here, several of them acting shiftily such as Michael Boyd (Gerard Kelly) or Alec McGowan who runs a corner shop with his sister and has a past history of rape. Of course Gerard Kelly seemed to have spent the entire 1980s playing mostly shifty characters.

Taggart thinks that a local video shop owner is the main suspect and uses his cunning by getting friendly with his wife. However this bogged down the pace of the story.

Made in 1983, it does look like another era. This is a very grimy Glasgow, not the one that has been transformed in recent years. Taggart has some old fashioned views which is pointed out by Livingstone. An example is where one possible suspect turns out to be gay.

This story is not as grisly as some of the later Taggart shows. It also has a plot device that I have seen in other films and television shows such as the first Jack Reacher movie. The killer was really only after the one person, the other victims was to throw the police off their scent to make it look like a serial killer was about and introduce an element of randomness.