The Mallorca Files: "Honour Among Thieves" and "King of the Mountains" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, Britbox, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 30) I watched the first two episodes of the British TV series The Mallorca Files, set on the Spanish island of Mallorca and dealing with two police detectives who get stuck in Mallorca and have to learn to work together. The detectives are British cop Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys) and her accidental partner – only professionally, not romantically – German detective Max Winter (Julian Looman). Both these shows were from the series’ opening run in late 2019, and the first, “Honour Amongst Thieves,” was a sort of origin story for the series. In the opening, Miranda Blake is shown escorting a London gangster, Niall Taylor (Aidan McArdle), who’s ostensibly turned state’s evidence and is prepared to testify against his old gang and help the British authorities recover the loot his gang stole over years. Miranda has Niall handcuffed to herself and gets anxious when she notices a goon squad of hired killers stalking them through the Mallorca airport. One of them, dressed in the uniform of the Mallorcan police, shoots Niall and apparently kills him. Then the other members of Niall’s gang start getting mysteriously killed themselves, and Blake is told by the bitchy Black woman cop who’s her supervisor in London to stay in Mallorca until the murders are solved. Blake also scores a surveillance video showing a mysterious figure who apparently forces a young woman to go into a car with him, and Blake is convinced she’s been kidnapped and is being held against her will.

Ultimately it turns out that [spoiler alert!] Niall is still alive; he faked his own assassination at the airport using one of his confederates disguised as a cop, and he bribed a genuine (male) London cop to go along with his plot for the money. Only Niall shoots the bad cop just as Blake and Max Winter, a German detective who took a job with the Mallorcan police force for his health, have come to a beachfront home where they’ve traced the alleged kidnap victim – who wasn’t kidnapped at all. She’s actually Niall’s daughter and co-conspirator, and their motive was to grab the loot for themselves and keep it all instead of having to split it with the other crooks. They end up with a fortune of 30 million euros in ill-gotten gains and, in a thoroughly irritating ending, escape with it all. (Raymond Chandler once said that a mystery story had to end with the criminal being published in some way, whether or not through the operation of the law courts. “It’s not a question of morality,” Chandler explained; he said having the crook get away with it at the end “leaves a sense of irritation” with the reader. And it’s indicative of how much of his childhood Raymond Chandler spent in England that he used the phrase “law courts” to describe the justice system.) Superintendent Abbey Palmer (Tanya Moodie), the African-British bitch from London for whom Miranda works, orders her to stay in Mallorca indefinitely on assignment to the local police force, headed by an equally nasty and insistent female official named Inéz Villegas (María Fernández Ache), and she and Max end up as uncertain and mutually wary police partners.

My husband Charles joined me for the second episode of The Mallorca Files, “King of the Mountains,” which was a good deal better and quite frankly the writer, Dan Muirden, could have given his colleagues on the Australian-set show My Life Is Murder lessons on how to maintain suspense and create genuine uncertainty about whodunit in a 45-minute crime show (one hour less commercial interruptions, which these shows were built around even though there were none on the PBS screenings). This one builds around the disappearance of Mallorca’s star bicycle rider, Esteban Domènech (Rafael Cebrián) – though I’m a bit curious about the spelling of the character’s last name because, at least according to Charles, Spanish doesn’t use the accent aigù, though both French and Portuguese do. Esteban used to ride for British coach Terry Davies (Sean Campion), whose martinet tendencies make the real-life drill sergeant in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket seem warm and fuzzy by comparison. Once Esteban left Davies’ team two years earlier, his performance on the bike-racing circuit improved so dramatically Davies was convinced he must have done it with drugs – but Esteban’s drug tests keep coming back clean. Esteban disappears on the eve of the big race and one of Terry’s team vans later turns up, burned out to destroy all internal evidence, making Terry the prime suspect. Later Esteban turns up and claims he escaped from his kidnappers while their van was stopped in traffic.

Supposedly Esteban grew up in Argentina before emigrating to Spain, and his parents and brother were all killed in an auto accident in Argentina – only it turns out [spoiler alert!] that the parents were both killed but Esteban’s brother, Davide (also Rafael Cebrián), survived. What’s more, the Domènech kids are not only brothers but identical twins, and out of shame for having caused the deaths of their parents by driving them while drunk, Davide agrees to Esteban’s plan that Davide will take the cycling industry’s drug tests for him. That will make it look like Esteban is racing “clean” when in fact he’s juiced up to the proverbial gills; when he’s finally caught and the real Esteban is tested, his drug levels are so high the doctors administering the tests say they’ve never seen anything like it before. Obviously this show was conceived in the wake of the scandals surrounding Lance Armstrong and the other top-tier contenders in the world’s most famous open-road bike race, the Tour de France, which led some people to wonder if the whole sport was a fraud and at least one writer to argue that the riders should be allowed to use as many performance-enhancing drugs as they want. There’s a scene in which the owner of the bar at which Max’s girlfriend, Carmen Lorenzo (Tábata Cerezo), is a bartender rips Esteban’s autographed photo off his wall, breaks its glass frame and tears the photo to shreds. The Domènech brothers’ plot fell apart, it seems, when Davide fell in love with Esteban’s supermodel wife, Clara Cicada (Lucía Guerrero), and the two hatched a plot to blow Esteban’s cover and expose him as a druggie so he’d be publicly disgraced and humiliated, which would somehow pave the way for Davide and Clara to become an above-ground couple. After the mystery is solved, the show ends with one of its characteristic tag scenes: a private bicycle race between Miranda and Max which Miranda wins easily because she’s been training for it intensively, riding a stationary bike at a local gym until she can achieve a speed of 30 kilometers per hour, while he hasn’t trained at all.