Continues Saturdays, January 9 and 16 at 4:30. Miniseries ticket: $10. Detective-fiction writer Philip (P. E.) Marlow (Michael Gambon), laid up in the hospital with a crippling skin disease, isn't writing much these days. Immobilized and humiliated, Marlow works and reworks his novel The Singing Detective in his fevered mind, weaving in memories of a wartime childhood and elements of his current shattered state to create a sinister fiction based on unhappy fact. Marlow's gumshoe (also named Marlow), who moonlights as a nightclub crooner, has been drawn into a case of espionage involving a pasty art collector, a couple of call girls with connections in high places, and two hired guns in existential crisis à la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In all, six characters in search of an author. P. E. Marlow, in no mood to be generous, has fashioned the characters out of the figures of his youth ("A rat always knows where his tail is"): his pub-crooning father, his victimized/victimizing mother, her illicit lover. As their story unfolds, so does the mystery of Marlow's troubled psyche. The Singing Detective triumphs over the limitations of the genre by being about the mind of the detective-and about a detective of the mind. It is at once extraordinarily literary, with dialogue that ranges from the poetic to the hardboiled ("the air was like an Eskimo's mother-in-law: bitter and icy"); and cinematic, with haunting musical sequences, hallucinatory dissolves, overlapping dialogue and time frames, and an ever-deepening reflexivity. Michael Gambon won every British acting award there is for his unflinching portrayal of Marlow, writer and detective, and the rest of the casting is equally superb, with the deliciously sinister Patrick Malahide as the villain(s), Alison Steadman (from Mike Leigh's ensemble) as Marlow's mother, and a youngster with a most remarkable command of dialect named Lyndon Davies as young Philip.