Turner Classic Movies is featuring mystery films this month, on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, with an emphasis on various detective series. All showings will be entirely without commercial interruptions, as is TCM’s custom. Those who have had their fill of sensationalistic, ultraviolent, ugly, modern theatrical crime thrillers would do well to take a look at these films, which are mostly lower in production values but much stronger on logic, common sense, insights into human behavior, and what makes for good character. Tomorrow night the series begins with two of the best films featuring hardboiled detectives. The 1941 film The Maltese Falcon (8 p.m. EST) was written and directed by John Huston and features Humphrey Bogart in the definitive private eye movie performance as Sam Spade. TCM follows that at 10 p.m. with an even better film, Howard Hawks’s superb adaptation of The Big Sleep (1946), by Raymond Chandler. Those two are must-sees. At midnight, iron-fisted Mike Hammer comes on the scene in Robert Aldrich’s excellent 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, followed by a poles-apart detective, Hercule Poirot, played by Albert Finney in a star-studded 1974 production featuring Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, and Lauren Bacall. After that, at 4:15 a.m., the

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