Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Sister Town" (Britbox, BBC-TV, PBS, 2022_

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 I got done with my writing in time to watch the latest episode of the engaging British TV series Sister Boniface Mysteries, “Sister Town,” dealing with World War II and its aftermath. The plot synopsis on imdb.com reads, “When a German mayor visits Great Slaughter to partake in a war memorial ceremony, tragedy strikes; Sister Boniface investigates whether it's a terrible accident or a malicious plan.” The action kicks off when a townsperson is killed at the so-called “twnning” ceremony when a plaque falls off the wall and strikes him. Sister Boniface deduces that the “twinning” ceremony – a sort of sister-city relationship between the British town of Great Slaughter and a similarly sized German community that the British government is pushing in an effort to let bygones be bygones and help rebuild a trade relationship between the two countries in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and the real target was Kurt Fischer (Andy Henderson), a German military officer and war veteran who’s there representing Germany in the ceremony. (It’s not clear just when this show takes place, though it appears to be about 1947 or so, with the war over but the wounds from it fresh in the minds of the people of both Britain and Germany.) After participating in the bonbing of Coventry, for which he was awarded an Iron Cross, Kurt was shot down by the Royal Air Force on a subsequent mission and spent the rest of the war n a prisoner of war camp near Great Slaughter.There he fell in love, or at least had an affair, with EIris Heartley (Ellie Piercy), who was denounced for it at the time and told she was “sleeping with the enemy” (a phrase I had thought was much later in its origins than World War II: I’d attributed it to late-1960’s Lesbian feminists who used ot to denouncing women who claimed to be feminists but still had sex with men).

Today, or at least in this story’s present tense, Kurt is married to a German woman, Elsa Fischer (Alix Dunsmore), who’s so much richer than he is he’s accused oif being a gold-digger and one of his big concerns is that Elsa will decide he just married her for her money and will dump him. Sister Boniface has a couple of friends on the local police force, series regular Sam Gillespie (Max Brown) and African-British junior officer Ferry Livingstone (Jerry Iwu), and unlike the official law-enforcement representatives on the Father Brown series (based on a character created by G. K. Chesterton) Gillespie and Livingstone actually welcome Sister Boniface’s assistance, especially since she’s developed a level of forensic science that didn’t become common in law enforcement until decades after this show is set. Among her deductions is that the killer was diabetic, which leads her to ask the local police to have all the suspects submit to urine tests to determine which of them has the elevated levels of sugar in their urine that would indicate diabetes. The actual killer disguises himself by taking hogh-dose vitamin C before he submits his sample, thereby lowering the sugar amount in his piss to a level that doesn’t indicate diabetes. There’s a fascinating scene in which a local resident pulls a gun on Kurt and the other German officer who’s on the scene, General Udo vin Stark (Chriustopher Sherwood) because his wife, their children and his parents were all in Coventry when it was raided by the Luftwaffe and he returned to find his home a ruin and all his immediate family killed.

He’s particularly furious with Kurt because Kurt was given a medal for it, though Kurt explains that he didn’t want the decoration and didn’t think there was anything honorable about slaughtering innocent civilians. The script by Oliver Frampton actually preaches a strong anti-war message, though it seems a bit anachronistic for a show set 75 years ago when the wounds of the war were still fresh. But then the message that war is evil can’t be taught often enough, even though I’m haunted by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s statement in the preface to Slaughterhouse-Five that, when he was working on the book and told somebody he was working on an anti-war book, the person’s reply was, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book?” The cruel irony was that Vonnegut’s acquaintance was saying that war is as eternal as glaciers, but now with glaciers disappearing as human-caused climate change reaches an irreversible level, war actually seems as if it’s going to be around longer than glaciers!