The British crime drama series Whitechapel resumes tonight at 10 EDT on BBC America with the first episode of a six-part season three. It’s worth watching—especially for those looking for a modern murder mystery that respects the classics of the form.

Or, at least it seems to do so at present.

The first series of Whitechapel had a high-concept storyline: a copycat killer is recreating the Jack the Ripper murders in today’s Whitechapel, with the bodies being found with the same wounds and left in the same locations as the murders of more than a century ago. The series highlighted the strained relationship between newly arrived Detective Inspector Joseph Chandler (Rupert Penry-Jones)  and his cynical, working class crime team led by Det. Ray Miles (Philip Davis). It also showed a serious interest in using historical events to comment on today’s society.

The second season was not nearly as compelling for me, as it dealt with murders resembling those by the infamous Kray twins in the 1960s. The coincidence of another set of murders resembling old crimes seemed a bit much.

In plotting out the third series, however, the producers found a good way to solve the implausibility problem and make the concept more believable. Instead of investigating a series of crimes that explicitly emulated notorious murders of the past, the team would solve unconnected modern-day crimes by understanding two centuries of the history of crime in Great Britain. Chandler hires a professional historian, Ed Buchan (Steve Pemberton) to look through the enormous archives of criminal history of the past two hundred years and glean insights from them. The historian is in fact a “ripperologist” who was introduced as a prominent character in the first season, and Pemberton characterizes him very interestingly.

The current case—a mass murder in a tailor shop in which four men have been bludgeoned to death—does bear a strong resemblance to the Ratcliff Highway murders of 1811.

Buchan’s work, however, proves more difficult than ever, and his first effort at drawing a conclusion and expressing it to the team is a disaster, as he attempts to solve the entire mystery and explain it all before much investigating has been done. The investigative team ridicules him, Chandler tells him to concentrate on what he’s supposed to be doing, and Buchan goes off to lick his wounds and redouble his research. It seems likely, however, that he will ultimately be vindicated and his work prove essential in solving the case, if only because screenwriters and producers are much more likely to sympathize with a historian than with a bunch of working-class coppers.

Like the first series, season three is more than just a common police procedural. In fact, the atmosphere and mystery are more like a fabulously complex John Dickson Carr mystery novel than a simple cop show. For one thing, the first murder is a locked-room mystery, surprisingly—and pleasingly—enough (more of a locked-house mystery, but essentially the same concept). The four men who were killed were bludgeoned by an adversary who has to have escaped without opening any of the doors or windows, a classic mystery puzzle concept, and without leaving any forensic evidence of his presence (an interesting modern variation on the theme).

And just as Carr was seldom content to present only one impossibility, Whitechapel 3 provides another in just the first episode: a prisoner, suspected of the murders, escapes from a locked jail cell, disappearing as if “into thin air,” as one of the detectives puts it. That’s another  problem common to impossible-crime fiction. This prisoner is a particularly bizarre and sinister fellow who would fit quite nicely in a Carr classic.

Also like much of Carr’s fiction, Whitechapel 3 includes plenty of weird, gothic imagery. The house in which the men are massacred is described as being “like a fortress,” and the locals are rapidly spreading rumors that the killer “isn’t human” but instead some sort of supernatural evil. One witness says, “I saw the devil walking in Whitechapel!”

All in all, the atmosphere is quite similar to that of a John Dickson Carr novel, which I consider a very good thing indeed. One way in which the show differs from Carr’s works is that it  lacks the latter’s penchant for humor and young romance. I miss the humor, to be frank, but the romance in Carr’s novels is often something of an intrusion, so not all of the differences need be considered deficiencies.

In short, season three of Whitechapel starts off very promisingly, with a respect for history that’s reflected not only in the story line but also in the storytelling. If the rest of the season lives up to the promise of the first episode, it will be quite a corker, as Carr’s detective Sir Henry Merrivale might say.