by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched one of KPBS’s reruns of a Doctor
Blake Mysteries episode from 2014. They’ve
been showing this quite interesting Australian detective series featuring
Doctor Lucien Blake (Craig McLachlan), the coroner and medical examiner in the
small town of Ballarat in the Australian outback in the late 1950’s (the show
is a co-production of December Media, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
and the British commercial network Independent Television, or ITV), who spars
with his live-in partner Jane Beazley (Nadine Garner) and his boss with the
local police, Chief Superintendent Matthew Lawson (Joel Tobeck). This episode
was called “The Ties of the Past” and featured a look into Blake’s ancestry: in
previous episodes we weren’t given more of his backstory than the basics — he
was born and raised in Ballarat but left to serve as an Army medic during World
War II and, even though the show is set over a decade after the war’s end, he’s
still suffering from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder.
(He also drinks a lot, which suggests that the writers may be setting him up
for an Inspector Morse-like
character arc in which he nearly drinks himself out of his job, then recovers,
becomes sober and continues, older, sadder and wiser.)
In this one we’re
introduced to Blake’s mother, Elaine Greenslade (Kestie Morassi), a
Ballarat-based artist who’s considered a minor talent but one of sufficient
local repute that a numter of her works were acquired by the Ballarat museum —
only all but one have been taken off the walls and put into storage. The
remaining one is a Modigliani-like portrait of Elaine’s friend Agnes Clasby
(Helen Morse), and though Elaine is long since dead when this episode begins
(though we see quite a lot of her in flashbacks, including some in which a
tow-headed kid who’s obviously supposed to be Blake as a child follows her
around the house), Agnes is still alive and recognizable as an older version of
the woman in the painting. The intrigue kicks off when a life drawing class
begins with the “unveiling” of the model from which the artists are supposed to
draw — only the model is dead for real, with considerable blood on her body and
evidence that she was strangled by a very fine wire used by potters to take
their works off the wheel after they’ve been formed. She’s also been posed in
the same position as the Ballarat museum’s most famous painting, Beneath
the Arena, which depicts a young Christian
girl being taken into the underground rooms under the Colosseum after she’s
been sacrificed to the lions.
Later a museum security guard is bribed to steal
a painting from it, only it turns out he took the wrong picture and the real one he was hired to steal was the one by Blake’s
mother. It turns out that before she married Blake’s dad she dated an artist
named David Davies (I of course couldn’t help but notice that Dave Davies was
also the name of Ray Davies’ brother and lead guitarist for the Kinks until the
Davies brothers had a spectacular falling-out and the band broke up, much like
Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis), and the Ballarat museum by coincidence is
about to host a traveling exhibition of Davies’ paintings. There’s a red
herring in the form of the victim’s hot-tempered boyfriend Geoffrey Ledwith
(the darkly handsome Dominic Allburn), who as the Ballarat art school’s pottery
teacher would have known how to use the wire that strangled the girl, but in
the end the killer turns out to be a local collector who wanted the painting by
Dr. Blake’s mom because it was actually painted over a David Davies — Davies
had given Elaine the painting when they were still dating, only when they broke
up and she married someone else, her new husband was fiercely jealous and
arranged to sell the Davies to a local rich guy — only mom was determined not to let the Davies go, so she painted her own picture
over it and then said it had “disappeared.” The victim stumbled on the Davies
work when she accidentally chipped off a bit of Elaine’s painting and saw that
another artwork lay underneath it, and she was killed so she couldn’t reveal
this to the museum management or the authorities. This was a chilling little
program and a nice bit of British (or at least British Commonwealth) mystery
writing, and the revelation of Blake’s family history gave the work power and
scope.
