Hammer and Nails

A Chinese club owner is murdered and the killing turns out to be part of a fight for control of something the police do not fully understand. The second episode of the series puts Ho in the middle of a gangland struggle and, at the same time, into the bad books of his superior.

Vincent Wong plays Mr Hong, the club owner whose death starts the story and whose importance carries into the following week, which makes him the run's first substantial Chinese guest character with a position of his own rather than a function in someone else's plot. Helen Keating plays Sandra Beatty, Brian Croucher plays Jack Mangan and Matthew Scurfield plays Detective Inspector Gratton, with John Judd as Roy Kinnock and James Marcus as Charlie. All five return in the next episode, which is the first sign that the first series is not a set of unconnected weeks.

The episode's method is the series' usual one: a killing inside a community the police are not trusted in, an officer who can move between the two sides, and a superior officer who regards the whole arrangement as an embarrassment. Derek Martin's Berwick is the source of that pressure, and this is the first episode in which his disapproval becomes the story's second obstacle rather than background noise.

Terry Green directed, and it is the only episode of the run credited to him with confidence. IMDb also gives him the third episode, which Wikipedia credits to Ian Toynton, and that disagreement is recorded rather than settled. Terence Williams produced all fourteen episodes, with Harry South's theme and Peter Chapman's photography, and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote this one as he wrote every episode of the first series.

Brian Croucher's Jack Mangan is an English gangster inside a dispute within a Chinese community, which is the shape the series returns to repeatedly: overlapping interests rather than a single group's crime. Croucher also appears on this site in Rockliffe's Babies as Chief Superintendent Barry Wyatt, a small but real connection between two of the shows in this batch.

Yip's Ho is shown being pushed from two directions at once. The Chinese community treats him as a policeman first; the police treat him as Chinese first; and the episode's case is one he can only work because he is both. That position was the series' whole argument, and it never resolved it, which is the honest reading of a programme that ran for two years and stopped.

The published account of the episode ends with the premise. What Ho establishes about the killing, who takes control of the club and how the case closes are not recorded in any source, and they are not reconstructed here. What survives is the arrangement: a murder inside a closed community, a detective who is half in and half out of it, and a superior officer who would rather he were somewhere else.

For a viewer coming to the run in order, this is where the series shows what its format was for. The first episode introduced the position; this one puts a case inside it.