Sister Boniface Mysteries: “It’s Just Not Cricket” (BBC-TV, Britbox, PBS, 2024)

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

Alas, the Sister Boniface Mysteries episode I saw immediately after “The Quill of Osric,” “It’s Just Not Cricket,” wasn’t anywhere nearly as good. The writer or writers (who aren’t credited on imdb.com; the only writing credit is to Jude Tinsdall, who created the show’s premise) decided to abuse one of the classic tropes of mystery fiction: creating a character who gives himself or herself so many reasons to be hated there are plenty of people with motives to kill them. In this case the central asshole who marks himself for doom is Humphrey Lash (the quite handsome James Cartwright), who’s just been hired for major money to play cricket for the Great Slaughter team in central England by the club’s owner, C. C. Lowsley (Robert Daws). Lowsley is being threatened with foreclosure by an African-British woman; he’s two months behind on his rent and she’s going to take the cricket pitch away from him and use it for a big new development. (It sounds like Donald Trump somehow died and got reincarnated as a Black woman, but then again these days just about any story about greed-driven real-estate developers is going to remind me of Trump, former and almost certainly future U.S. President.) It seems that Lash’s princely salary isn’t enough for him; he’s been stealing and forging checks to himself on the club’s bank account, which is why the club is broke. He’s also been cruising a teenage girl, Elsie Calder-Marshall (Holly Earl), much to the disgust of her father, Lindsay Calder-Marshall (James Gaddas). Eventually Lash is found dead and Sister Boniface deduces that Lindsay Calder-Marshall is his actual killer.

Apparently “Lindsay Calder-Marshall” wasn’t his real name; he was a World War II private named Scott Ellis, a total lower-class nobody, and when the real Lindsay Calder-Marshall, an air hero in World War II, was shot down and died, Ellis assumed his identity. What caught him out was a slip of paper reading “YELL-” which Sister Boniface found next to Lash’s body. It turned out it was short for “YELLOW,” which Ellis’s late wife had put on his clothes because Ellis was color-blind and that was how he could tell what color he was about to put on. Only the Royal Air Force wouldn’t have taken him if he’d been color-blind, so Sister Boniface figures out that Ellis must have been posing as an aviation hero and killed Lash when Lash threatened to “out” him if he didn’t let Lash keep seeing Elsie. It was an O.K. episode and ended the way you’d think it would, with Great Slaughter winning the cricket match and thereby earning enough prize money for the team to pay off its debts – for now, since the Black woman also owned the team they were playing against and she’s determined to win back the title the next year. One thing about this episode that perplexed me is its depiction of cricket; I’d always assumed it was pretty much like baseball, with a pitcher (a “bowler,” in cricket parlance) throwing a ball to a batter, who’s supposed to hit it, but there are other ways of scoring in cricket besides just making it around the bases without the defense tagging you out with the ball. There’s another way of scoring in cricket, and that is the “wicket,” which seems to mean throwing the ball at an assemblage of pegs and knocking the top pegs over. I’ve heard the expression “sticky wicket” before in many British movies and until last night’s show had no idea what it really meant!