Father Brown: "The Forensic Nun" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, copyright 2023, released 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 28) I watched a couple of British mystery shows on KPBS, a Father Brown episode called “The Forensic Nun” and a Sister Boniface Mysteries episode called “House of Misfit Dolls.” Both of them were copyrighted 2023 but not shown on the BBC until early 2024. Father Brown was a TV adaptation of the classic Catholic priest/detective concocted by G. K. Chesterton in 1910. Chesterton kept writing Father Brown stories until 1936, and according to Wikipedia the character was inspired by real-life Right Reverend Monsignor John O’Connor (1870-1952), who was apparently instrumental in converting Chesterton from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism. “The Forensic Nun” included Sister Boniface as a character, played (as on her own show) by Lorna Watson, and she and Father Brown (Mark Williams, who’s played him on every episode of the Father Brown series since it debuted in 2013) teamed up to solve the murder of an egomaniacal artist named Marmaduke Snell (Edward Bennett), who was poisoned with cyanide-spiked wine from the vineyard of Sister Boniface’s convent. Naturally the local police identify Sister Boniface as the prime suspect for no better reason than she brought the wine. There was a nice little scene in which Sister Boniface is bringing the wine to a local arts fair organized by Gaynor Garfield (Ingrid Oliver) on her bicycle, which has a front basket to carry things in, and she almost loses control of the bike and comes close to crashing into Snell, who’s carrying two of his valuable paintings into the arts fair to show them off and make the other attendees drool with envy at the fact that they’re priced so high none of them can afford them. He also insists on entering the life drawing contest the festival organizers have set up, which everyone assumes he’ll automatically win because he’s a Famous Artist. Only the moment he’s served wine from That Bottle, he starts foaming at the mouth and soon expires.

The representatives of official law-enforcement, Chief Inspector Sullivan (Tom Chambers) and Sergeant Goodfellow (John Burton), needless to say jump to all the wrong conclusions and it’s up to Father Brown and Sister Boniface to straighten them out and find the real killer. Only that’s not going to be easy because the cops have decided Sister Boniface is the killer and locked her up in jail – though Father Brown has figured out a way around that. He has another local woman, with aspirations towards acting as a career, dress in a nun’s habit and take Sister Boniface’s place in the jail cell, with no one the wiser because the replacement “Sister” spends all her time facing the wall of her cell, praying and not turning her face to the cell-door window. Writer Neil Irvine and director Ian Barber drop a big clue towards the beginning when Gaynor’s assistant Meryl Plunkett (Lydia Larson) boasts that she’s gotten the arts fair a writeup in an important newsmagazine, only when Gaynor sees the article and notices it contains her photo, she freaks out. It turns out [spoiler alert!] that Gaynor is the killer; she was briefly married to Snell but broke up with him after just one day when he insisted that she give up her own artistic ambitions and just be a wife and mother. Irvine’s dialogue for him sounds like the sorts of things Republican candidates for public office are saying today (particularly Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who was caught on a clandestine recording saying that women over 50 don’t need to be concerned about abortion since they’re past child-bearing age anyway, and J. D. Vance’s comment that the only reason for post-menopausal women to exist is to take care of their grandchildren), so it’s understandable that Gaynor, whose real name also began with “M” (Father Brown discovers their wedding ring, with the initials “M to M” on it, which is one of the key clues), bailed on their relationship.

Only she never bothered to divorce him, and so not only are they still legally married, he has every intention of tracking her down and forcing her to live with him after all. He was able to find her via the photo in that magazine, and she decided to off him by using one of her insulin needles (she’s a diabetic, as was ostensibly revealed when she accidentally spilled some of the pills she takes to keep her disease under control) to siphon off some cyanide-containing cleaning fluid from one of the other artists at the fair, inject it through the cork of the wine bottle, and thereby kill her very much (and understandably) unwanted husband. This Father Brown episode is slightly unusual in that we’re sympathetic to the killer and her motive, though in the end Father Brown and Sister Boniface are able to persuade Gaynor to confess and turn herself in a) because not doing so would damn her immortal soul, and b) she wouldn’t want anyone else to suffer earthly punishments for her crime. I really liked this one and assumed it was especially written to introduce Sister Boniface to the world, though it wasn’t; it was a relatively recent episode from a year or two after her own show was launched in 2022.