Death in Paradise: "A Calypso Caramba" (Red Planet Pictures, Région de Gaudeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, BBC Television, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, May 3) my husband Charles and I joined up to watch an episode of the quirky BBC/PBS TV series Death in Paradise, about a white British cop, Neville Parker (Ralf Little), who somehow has got to be the only white police officer on the (fictional, I believe) Caribbean island of Sainte Marie (“played” by the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, whose tourism bureau sponsored and helped fund this show). Both his boss, Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), and his subordinates are all Black, and his associates tend not only to be Black but to be nubile young women with a penchant for neon-bright wardrobes, including yellow shirts and skin-tight blue pants. This episode, the last one for 2023, was called “A Calypso Caramba” and featured the mysterious murder of Clifford Brown (Tyrone Huggins), husband of former calypso music star Babette François (Jacqueline Boatswain) and co-owner with her of Babette’s Bar. Neville Parker is actually at the bar when the killing goes down, and he feels professionally embarrassed that somebody offed somebody else in his presence and he had no idea anything was amiss. Clifford (it was indeed jarring to have the character have the same name as the real-life jazz musician who died tragically young in 1956, not from drug use – he was famous for avoiding it – but in an auto accident) died from an overdose of opiates given to him in spiked rum.

Given that this is a 47-minute show and there isn’t much running time for red herrings or subplots, it doesn’t take us long to find out who the real killer is: Elijah St. John (Joe Dixon), who publishes a ‘zine about the local calypso scene and who was once the lover of Babette François and the composer of her most famous song. He was worried that the auction of her personal effects, including her demos, would reveal the truth about his relationship with Babette and the fact that he, not Clifford, was the biological father of Babette’s daughter, Catherine Bourdey (Elizabeth Bourgine). Babette is sponsoring Catherine’s debut as a calypso singer even though Babette herself stopped singing professionally 30 years before for reasons writers James Hall and Lisa McMullin don’t make especially clear. (I thought they had something to do with her marriage, her affair and Elijah’s involvement in writing her career-making song, but the chronologies don’t work out that way.) At the end Babette joins Catherine for her first performance at Babette’s Bar and we get to hear mother and daughter – or at least two fine actresses with nice voices (and I’m pretty sure they’re doing their own singing, especially Bourgine, most of whose imdb.com credits are for music) playing mother and daughter – taking out the last show. This was apparently the final episode that featured Ralf Little before he was written off the program (though the series has continued for at least two more seasons without him), and it’s a nice enough farewell in a series that, like a lot of British (or British Commonwealth) mysteries, has a certain quirky charm that makes up for its relative lack of action or dark atmospherics.