I’ve got a whole section of my book collection demarcated “Theater mysteries.” Several dozen of them, and nearly a dozen of those are by Simon Brett and star the itinerant and alcoholic actor Charles Paris.

Brett, sadly, gave up writing Charles Paris yarns years ago and turned to other characters, such as Mrs. Pargeter. So the best we could hope for was that the old books could be adapted into other media. Which the BBC has recently done, clogging the airwaves with them this past week. The latest adventure has been running in weekly installments on BBC4 while older ones have been getting broadcast daily on the web-0nly BBC7.

Roam around the radio pages of www.bbc.co.uk and you’ll find various ways to access episodes which have run within the past week. It’s a fitting medium for Charles Paris, not only because one of the murders, Dead Side of the Mic, is set in BBC Broadcasting House, but because Simon Brett worked for years as a radio producer himself.

In the BBC series, which take three episodes to complete one novel, Charles Paris is played by Bill Nighy. Not at all the actor I’d always imagined might play this actor. I’d always thought of Charles Paris as boxy, plain, vaguely handsome, like Ann-Margret’s husband Roger Smith or perhaps James Mason. There are always too many of guys like that, and it would explain why Charles works steadily though not often enough. A reedy, distinctive character actor like Nighy, however—well, he stands out in a crowd.

But of course that’s the wonder of radio. You don’t have to think of what Bill Nighy looks like. And he sounds like a drunken hammy actor, just as he behaved like a drunken hammy pop star in the Christmas film classic (just ask last week’s Entertainment Weekly) Love, Actually.