Death of an Expert Witness

1 9 8 3 (UK)
7 x 50 minute episodes

Roy Marsden starred as Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh in this Anglia Television adaptation of PD James’ best-selling novel, with John Vine as his young assistant, DS John Massingham

The seven episodes told a complicated story of murder and disappearance, set in a bleak Norfolk landscape.

Scotland Yard detective Dalgliesh – whose wife and baby recently died in childbirth –  is first called to the forbidding Fens when a fun-loving 19-year-old girl is found strangled and sprawled over the back seat of an abandoned car in a clay pit. He returns again when Dr Edwin Lorrimer (Geoffrey Palmer) is found murdered in the regional forensic laboratory, known as Hoggatt’s.

Roy Marsden returned to play Dalgliesh in a number of television miniseries, including Shroud For a Nightingale (1984), Cover Her Face (1985), The Black Tower (1985), A Taste For Death (1988), Devices and Desires (1991), Original Sin (1997) and A Certain Justice (1998). He also reprised the role in the made-for-television movie Unnatural Causes (1993).

Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh
Roy Marsden
Dr Maxim Howarth
Barry Foster
Dr Henry Kerrison
Ray Brooks
Inspector Blakelock
Ivor Roberts
DS John Massingham
John Vine
Clifford Bradley
Andrew Ray
Angela Foley
Brenda Blethyn
DI Tom Doyle
Malcolm Terris
Brenda Pridmore
Chloe Franks
Stella Mawson (‘Star’)
Fiona Walker
Paul Middlemass
Stephen Thorne
Claire Easterbrook
Valerie Testa
Domenica Howarth
Meg Davies
Chief Superintendent Mercer
John Bryans
Nell Kerrison
Annabelle Lanyon
Dr Edwin Lorrimer
Geoffrey Palmer
Miss Willard
Rhoda Lewis
Mrs Pridmore
Kate Lansbury
Anne Kerrison
Wendy Gifford
Sue Bradley
Sheridan Ball
Mrs Bidwell
Maryann Turner
Sergeant Reynolds
Richard Foxton