A Man of No Importance

A dead man turns up on the deck of a canal barge, and the general reaction is a shrug. Nobody knows him, nobody's looking for him, so everyone is ready to write him off as a nonentity and move on. Van der Valk disagrees. Before he can even ask what happened to the man, though, he has to find out who the man was, and that turns out to be the real puzzle.

There's something rather good about an episode that makes anonymity itself the crime scene. The usual order of a murder investigation runs backwards here: no name means no home, no habits, no enemies worth listing. Every door has to be knocked on without knowing whose door it is. And the episode takes seriously the idea the title carries, that a city full of people decided this one didn't matter long before he died. Finding his identity means noticing what everyone else agreed not to. Amsterdam is full of people passing through, and the episode makes that the point rather than the excuse.

The canalside setting does a lot of quiet work too, barges and lost property offices and people who live their lives a few steps from the water without being seen themselves. There is a fitting irony in a dead man arriving by water and the city barely registering the ripple.

Arden Winch wrote it with Nicolas Freeling, and Douglas Camfield directed. Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk, with Michael Latimer as Kroon and Susan Travers as Arlette. Sydney Tafler returns as Halsbeek, joined by Patricia Lawrence as Marijke Hoekstra, Kevin Stoney as Kemeling and Karin Fernald as Yvonne. John Gill plays the Lost Property Man, Donald Pelmear is Jan Vierman and Richardson Morgan plays the Bargee.

A man nobody thought important turns out to be worth somebody's trouble after all. That's a decent argument for paying attention, and the episode makes it without ever getting preachy about it.