My Life Is Murder: "The Locked Room" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, May 17) I watched a PBS showing of the second episode of the intriguing Australian TV series My Life Is Murder, about a young but recently retired Australian police detective, Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless) – supposedly she got an inheritance and never had to work again, but that hasn’t been stressed in the first two episodes – who keeps getting called in to consult on various cold cases by her sort-of boyfriend Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). This time she gets offered a locked-room mystery – literally: “The Locked Room” is the episode title – in which a middle-aged accountant named Alan Gillespie (Clayton Bitaks) was found dead six months previously, shot in the back in a locked room with a chain on the door. The show was directed by Mat Green from a script by Peter Gawler, who made the same mistake his colleague Matt Ford did on “The Boyfriend Experience,” the only My Life Is Murder episode before this one. There are too few suspects and therefore too little suspense as to whodunit, especially since Gawler begins the show with a prologue set five years before the main action in which, while still on the official police force, Alexa busted a big-time drug dealer named Nicole Buttera (Danielle Cormack) and caught her with a large quantity of drugs, more than she would have needed just for her own use. Unfortunately, Nicole got free on a technicality and since then has been leading an apparently above-board life as a nightclub owner under the name Nikki Malone. She’s trying to promote the singing career of her daughter, Cassie Malone (Markella Kavenagh, who judging from what we hear of her is a quite good vocalist in real life). Unfortunately, Nicole also invested in a company called Seraphim that made airbags for Japanese cars, where she met Alan Gillespie because he was the company’s accountant.

Though the scene was set up in a motel room to make it look like Alan had been having an extra-relational affair, down to lipstick on a champagne glass to make it look like the two had been sharing the sparkling wine before he got killed (and the bed in the motel room was still perfectly made, so it hadn’t actually been used during the night), Alexa deduces that Nicole was the killer. She wanted to silence Alan because, as an honest man, he wanted to report to the police that the Seraphim airbags didn’t work and posed a danger to drivers and passengers in a car equipped with them. Nicole stood to lose a great deal of money she had invested in Seraphim stock, so she took the motel room next door and drilled a hole in the wall between them through which she could fire and kill Alan. One wonders (I wonder, anyway) just what the mechanics of this were and in particular how well she was able to aim. The show concludes with Cassie Malone making her performing debut of the club owned by her mother, the murderess –and I wonder what that’s going to do to the rest of her life, especially since real-life American country singer Shelby Lynne never got over watching her dad kill her mom when she was just a child. In fact, she recorded an entire album about that trauma. I liked “The Locked Room” better than “The Boyfriend Experience,” partly because Nicole was a more interesting villainess than the hustler Dylan Giroux (Lindsay Farris) and partly because the music world was a much more interesting background to me than the world of high-end sex workers in which “The Boyfriend Experience” took place. I’ll probably keep watching this one even though it’s a bit disappointing that the writers of My Life Is Murder can’t come up with more interesting and engaging suspects in 45 minutes of running time!