Carland Cross (TV series)

Background

A 1930s British private eye, Carland Cross, tackles cases steeped in the strange and supernatural. His work leads him to ancient ruins, forbidden zones, inexplicable murders, Satanic curses, abandoned cities, and monstrous creatures. The stories unfold in a fog-drowned London, a crime-ridden city of danger and dread.

Characters

Carland Cross is a calculated and methodical British private investigator from Baker Street in London who works alongside police officials. He shares his investigations with his pupil Andy White, the aristocrat Medwenna Simpson, and is often helped by Superintendent Marmaduke Wingfield. Andy White, born in Whitechapel in 1916, is Cross's hotheaded teenage pupil who writes his master's memoirs and provides unexpected action through his clumsiness.

Mrs. Stone, approximately sixty years old, is a sympathetic governess and admired cook who feeds Cross and White and disapproves of their occupation. Medwenna Simpson, a good-looking aristocrat with green eyes and red hair, is a novelist who decided to write Cross's biography after encountering him at The Derby, becoming a close collaborator. Marmaduke Wingfield is a gruff, grumpy, and nervous London Superintendent who embodies authority and has complex relations with Cross, sometimes complicit and sometimes competitive.

Murdock, the main antagonist, is a Prussian international adventurer, mercenary, smuggler, and spy wounded in the left hand by Cross in 1914. He has long silver hair, wears a monocle, and is a ruthless, stateless sociopath thirsting for power and revenge. Snoops, Murdock's brutish henchman, is a big, thick-skulled man with long black hair who is somewhat intelligent, naïve, and cowardly.

Conception and history

Carland Cross's crime comics, created in 1990, were inspired by works of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Hope Hodgson, and Jean Ray. In 1994, Olivier Grenson conceived a computer animation of Carland Cross, working with a friend who owned the studio ASAP to edit images into a short sequence with effects and soundtrack. After contacting the Belgian animation studio ODEC-Kid Cartoons, they produced a pilot based on Michel Oleffe's scenario from The Mystery of Loch Ness, presented at the Azores animation congress in 1995. The interest generated led to a financial arrangement with Odec-Kid Cartoons and French and Canadian partners. The series of 26 episodes was completed in 1997.