by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ended up watching KPBS, including a surprisingly recent
(first aired January 11, 2017) Father Brown
episode called “The Lepidopterist’s Companion.” The imdb.com synopsis reads,
“When Mrs McCarthy takes over the running of the mobile library, Father Brown
discovers a shocking secret.” The show actually starts with the killing of
Lewis Ward (the genuinely attractive Thomas Pickens, whom it’s a pity to lose
so early), an amateur photographer who works for camera-shop owner (a marvelous
period advertisement for Kodak is seen as a stand-up display on his counter)
Graham Cartwright (Andrew Greenough), who hears an intruder about in the “live”
parts of his live-work space and gets out of bed with his wife Margaret
(Elizabeth Berrington), grabs an old cricket bat and wallops the kid, only
learning later that it was his assistant and he didn’t need to break into the
space — he had a key. Police Inspector Mallory (Jack Deam) is convinced that
Lewis was stealing from his
employers and that Graham caught him at it and killed him in legitimate
self-defense, but like your standard-issue amateur sleuth in a British mystery,
Father Brown (Mark Williams, who blessedly pronounces the “t” in “often”!)
doubts this. His doubts are confirmed when it turns out that Lewis Ward was
actually fatally ill before
Graham clobbered him with the cricket bat, courtesy of some strychnine poison
someone else fed him earlier. In the process of mounting his own investigation
Father Brown discovers some photographic negatives that were in Lewis’s
possession; he sets up a darkroom in his home — much to the consternation of
his housekeeper — and prints them. They turn out to be pornographic images of
naked women, and the police immediately suspect the town ne’er-do-well, Blind
’Arry (Alan Williams), of running a porn ring with Lewis as his accomplice and
the actual photographer. Father Brown and his friend Mrs. McCarthy (Sorcha
Cusack), who’s just taken over running the mobile library from Margaret
Cartwright, go through the pictures and realize they recognize at least one of
the models, Ada Rawlins (Holly Bodmeade), who had been dating Lewis Ward until
she suddenly broke up with him — someone overheard them arguing, so it was
known she initiated the breakup,
but why remained a mystery. It turns out the real culprit was Margaret
Cartwright, who, pissed off at her husband because they were chronically poor
due to his gambling addiction, hit upon making and selling porn as a way to
make herself some money. The episode title “The Lepidoperist’s Companion”
refers to the way she figured out to distribute her dirty pictures: she hid
them in a book about butterflies, and anyone wanting to buy her pics checked
out that book, deposited the price in the library’s box for overdue fines, then
returned it a day later sans
porn.
Only her scheme got blown one night when Lewis Ward came into the
Cartwrights’ basement unexpectedly and caught Margaret in the act of
photographing his then-girlfriend Ada in the nude, and, anxious to eliminate
him before he blows the whistle on her whole sordid racket, later that night,
as Lewis was in the Cartwrights’ basement darkroom developing his own pictures,
Margaret offered him a cup of hot cocoa laced with strychnine, intending to
make it look like Lewis had killed himself. Only her husband blew that one by
hearing him stumbling around their house and hitting him with the cricket bat,
and once the authorities discovered poison in his body and realized Graham
Cartwright hadn’t killed him, in
self-defense or otherwise, Margaret determined to frame Ada for the crime. The
ending was a surprisingly exciting action sequence for a British mystery:
Margaret has kidnapped Father Brown and Ada and put them in the back of the
bookmobile, where she intends to kill them by bailing out of the van just
before it heads off a cliff, then telling the authorities that its brakes
failed — only Father Brown figures out how to break out by crashing one of the
bookshelves inside the van against its back door so he and Ada can leap out as
the van is moving but before Margaret has a chance to kill them. Of course
Margaret, once she realizes her captives have escaped, turns the van around,
intending to run them over, and Father Brown dead-pans with perfect calm to
Ada, “It might be a good idea to get out of the road” — only just then the
bookmobile’s worn and much-abused engine comes to a grinding halt and Margaret
has to flee on foot, not that she gets very far before the police capture her.
In the end Mrs. McCarthy begs off running the bookmobile and the city fathers
decide to give Ada the job, essentially buying her argument that she didn’t want to pose for nude photos but Margaret blackmailed her
into it. Father Brown is one of
the most charming of the plethora of British and Commonwealth detective shows
that clutter up the PBS schedule, and this one was unusually good because of
the overall kinkiness of the plot premise (even though porn as a secret racket
had already been done to a turn in The Big Sleep!) and because writer Kit Lambert and director Paul
Gibson actually managed to get some action into it without compromising the overall laid-back “feel” fans of
British mysteries expect from them.
