Gareth Edwards: On the Box

Above Suspicion: The Red Dahlia (ITV, 9pm, last night)

THERE was a time when the latest crime thriller from Lynda La Plante would be hailed by critics and audiences alike, command the ratings and generally be seen as a bit of an event.

Such is not the case nowadays, it seems, with her latest tale of shocking murders and troubled cops hacked up like one of her victims and discarded over three weeknights to fend for itself.

This is probably a shame in some ways - La Plante after all has quite a pedigree and you might expect her work to be given more publicity, while Ciaran Hinds is always good value, even if he is putting an inexplicable accent to play DCI James Langton, a man whose investigative technique amounts to shouting at people until they cry.

Even the one-time Emperor of Rome cannot save this rather muddled and curiously quaint-feeling show however, as it plays out like an old-fashioned country house mystery.

In the immortal words of Taggart, there's been a murder, a particularly nasty one which resembles the infamous Black Dahlia killing in America.

Crack investigator Anna Travis (Kelly Reilly) has to try and find the copycat killer while fighting her feelings for Langton, and trying to get a team of incompetent officers to pull their weight.

It's all very familiar stuff, and fails to live up to the publicity description of "terrifying" or "challenging".

La Plante was recently complaining about the BBC commissioning policy which, she claimed, would favour a first-time work by a writer from an ethnic minority to anything created by her, but on the evidence of this it seems a fair bet that a young writer would create something a lot more relevant to modern viewers.

It is as if landmark shows of the past decade, from CSI and the Wire to one-off dramas such as Low Winter Sun, never happened, or at least failed to make any impact on La Plante, and as a result her murder mystery seems very out of date.

The killer will be revealed in tonight's "shocking" conclusion, but the real mystery is whether this is just a minor blip for one of TV's great crime writers, or the final nail in her coffin.