Once upon a time, running out of my wooden Victorian house in Oakland, California, I stopped at the sidewalk to yank open the door of the barrel-vaulted tin mailbox on a wood post (countryside on upper College Avenue). And second bests don't get much better.To introduce this excerpt, the very first pages of my book Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson, I will start with the first words following the end of the book, the acknowledgments, which I call “Gratitudes”. Perhaps it's not quite as likable and human as The Killing, and Laure Berthaud not quite as beguiling as Sarah Lund. Yes, as well as being graphic, it's also effortlessly glamorous.

Oh, and hot lawyers in sharp suits and sexy dresses. And then spiralled in with what happened to him there is violent activism, organised crime, police corruption, illegal immigration, xenophobia, you name it. So much blood! When you add up the blood at the scene of the explosion, and in the car, and in the woods where he drags himself before finally giving up the ghost, he must have lost about 20 pints. He's missing most of his front, face, hands it's a big bloody mess. This poor chap in the car has been blown open. Series four starts typically (unnecessarily?) brutally. It can't really avoid getting compared with its Danish counterpart because it's gloomy and it's gritty, its characters are complicated and intriguing, it's full of twists and turns and dead-ends (cul-de-sacs), and at its heart is a beautiful, flawed female detective with a complicated home life who goes alone into dark scary buildings with a torch. Actually they call it Engrenages, meaning cogs or gears we call it Spiral. Well you'd be wrong: they call it Spiral (BBC4, Saturday). You know what they call The Killing in Paris? They call it Le Killing, you're thinking, because you learned your French from Pulp Fiction. They're called Mashco-Piro, a nomadic Amazonian people, and they are unconnected. Nice Charlie doesn't see them, just the evidence – a few broken twigs that they've been through. There is something even more excellent, and even more reassuring, than the otters and hagwars, in the Lake Salvador area. I met the chauffeur of a British ambassador who proudly drove a Hagwar.īut that's by-the-by. Hagwar, that's how they say jaguar in these parts. And then an actual jaguar, looking out from the river bank, cool as you like. It's not just about the giant otters and their ancient scaly nemesis there's all sorts of excellent stuff going on – piranhas, scarlet macaws, an ocelot caught on a camera trap, jaguar footprints in the sand. There's also something very reassuring that places like it, that take days and days to reach and are the same as they've always been, still exist. Lake Salvador is beautiful, and yes, surreal. Maybe Charlie can come back in another 13 years to find him. But two of the otter cubs are missing as well.

Who's won, though? Clearly not the caiman, who is now an ex-caiman. Suddenly, the calm water is boiling with thrashing tails and scales, whiskers and fur, snapping jaws and death rolls.

The dramatic highlight of the film comes when Diablo and his family take one on: a big daddy caiman. BOOM! Caimans they're called – South American crocodiles – and Lake Salvador is heaving with them it's basically a big bowl of caiman soup. Then the eyes disappear the danger is underwater now, ready to come at you – or Dali – out of the deep, from below. It hunts at night, slithers in from the banks, invisible except for its evil eyes. maybe Charlie should call the other cubs Rogan, Josh, Papadum and Tikka. Hang on, what is it with otter names? Tarka, Dali. Especially one of Diablo's brood, the smallest and cutest, who nice Charlie calls Dali because this place is called Lake Salvador. Ridiculously, baby otters don't like water.

Amazon spiral art