Father Brown: "The Quill of Osric" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, copyright 2023, released 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 26) I watched a couple of British mystery shows on KPBS and then the movie I Walk Alone on Turner Classic Movies. I did it that way instead of watching the Lifetime movie, Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story, even though I was interested in it (and I can always catch it tonight when it’s rerun at 6 p.m.), mainly because Charles was scheduled to come home sometime between 8:45 and 9 p.m. and I wanted him to be able to watch something complete. The British mystery shows were a Father Brown episode called “The Quill of Osric” and an episode of the spinoff, Sister Boniface Mysteries, titled “It’s Just Not Cricket.” I suspect “The Quill of Osric” would be interesting, and it was. It’s about a famous mystery writer named Osric Wolf (just why his parents named him after one of the most preposterous characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a mystery writer Lol Fletcher never bothers to explain) who dies an apparent suicide in a prologue set a year before the main action. The Quill of Osric is an award given for the best mystery writer in the Cotswolds in central England, and this year the main contestants are Jack Wilmot (Jake Simmance) and Walter Mitford (Samuel Jordan). Jack and Walter were both students at Oxford and Jack won a literary prize there Walter felt he deserved due to the influence of Jack’s domineering father, Kingsley Wilmot (Michael Simkins). Kingsley Wilmot is a major politician who’s just been appointed Minister of Education (and is put out that it wasn’t Minister of Defence) and is seemingly on his way up to the Prime Ministership.

Jack Wilmot is favored to win on the basis of a novel he’s published called The Eye of Lycos, only when he reads from it at the garden party “Murder and Tea” – a typically preposterous Father Brown event in which the guests are challenged to solve fake mysteries being enacted around them by professional actors and all of a sudden are confronted with the real one – he has a bad case of stage fright and bolts from the reading in the middle of the proceedings. The fête’s organizer, Lady Violet (Amanda Mealing) – who’s made Walter her protegé – is put out because she recognizes one of the characters in The Eye of Lycos, “The Baroness,” as a thinly veiled portrayal of her and her scandalous past (particularly the patch of “manizing” she went through after her husband died suddenly). Jack Wilmot is found badly wounded in the head on a parapet of the castle-like home of Lady Violet, where the event takes place, and Walter is suspected because the only item of Jack’s that is missing is the cheap pocket watch that was the prize for that literary contest Jack beat Walter in at Oxford lo those many years before. Later it turns out that Jack Wilmot worked as a protegé of the real Osric Wolf, only Osric literally started losing his mind in his last days, though he somehow managed to finish a last novel whose pages fluttered away in the wind as he died. Osric’s actual “death” was more or less caused by Jack; he fell off the roof as he and Jack were struggling over the pages of his final manuscript.

Somehow Jack managed to retrieve the pages and put them back in order (not an easy feat in the days before computers, when if a manuscript was lost, it was gone forever). He had The Eye of Lycos published under his own name, which attracted the ire of Miss Lipton (Gemma Lawrence). Miss Lipton had shown up at the event posing as a literary agent who wanted to sign Jack Wilmot, but she was really Osric Wolf’s daughter, out for revenge. Miss Lipton’s body was discovered by one of the guests searching for clues to one of the fake mysteries, though she was just wounded, not dead. At first everyone in the show (and we in the audience as well) assumed she was a victim of the same assailant who’d attacked Jack, but eventually we learn that she was Jack’s attacker, and after she did that she fled and tripped while carrying the “Quill of Osric” award. Eventually both Miss Lipton and Jack are arrested, and in a great worm-turning scene Jack tells his power-mad dad he’s actually looking forward to being in prison because “at least I’ll be away from you.” (I wonder if Donald Trump’s sons Donald, Jr. and Eric went through anything like this.) The episode ends with the two in custody and Father Brown officiating at a church funeral for Osric Wolf, who now that his death has officially been ruled not to be a suicide is entitled to one. It’s one of the few times in this quirky show we’ve seen Father Brown (Mark Williams) actually functioning as a priest!