by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Love My Dog (see below) I
switched the channel to PBS for the next episode of Endeavour, the British series that takes the character of
Inspector Morse and flashes us back to 1966, when he was just Constable Morse
and just starting out as a British police detective — and annoying his
superiors with his insistence on linking seemingly separate crimes and
attributing them to the same person, or at least to the same interest. This episode was called “Nocturne,” a title inspired
by the Chopin nocturne (Op. 9, no. 1) that figures prominently in the plot, and
takes place at a girls’ school in the British countryside that a century
earlier was the home of a titled family which had returned to Britain following
a stint in India in which they’d made their fortune in tea — only three of the
family’s four daughters were brutally murdered and the fourth was declared
insane and shut up in a mental institution, where she died decades later
without having had any kids of her own. Writer Russell Lewis seemed to have
been taking the Ross Macdonald trope — the gimmick he introduced in his 1959
novel The Galton Case of having
the detective obliged to investigate and close a case from a quarter-century
earlier in order to get the clue he needs to solve the more recent crime he is
also investigating — and pushed it to the absurd extreme of requiring Morse to
solve the century-old murder in order to gain a clue as to who committed the
current crime, the murder of a septuagenarian antiquarian who was nosing around
the girls’ school doing research on the family that had once lived there until
they came to so brutal an end. Personally, I thought the killer was going to
turn out to be the writer who had published a book on the old crime some time
before, and who was attempting to reproduce the original crime by abducting and
knocking off students at the school so there’d be renewed attention to the
affair and he could get his book back in print, but instead it turned out to be
the direct descendant of the family gardener, who was in fact an illegitimate
descendant of the father of the original owners of the estate from an affair
he’d had with a woman in India, whom he had brought back to the U.K. but
entrusted to the care of the gardener, whom he told to pass off the boy as his kid — and thus matters rested for generations until
Parliament started debating a bill to remove the restrictions on illegitimate
children inheriting, thereby giving him a motive to knock off anyone
potentially between him and reclaiming the old estate. I quite liked the show,
especially the virtually Gothic direction of Giuseppe Capotondi, who was
particularly effective in the scenes in which the schemers are trying to make
it seem like the ghosts of the original murder victim are still haunting the
house. But as Charles pointed out, it’s also the sort of plot that really pushes the long arm of coincidence and the
resolution is so far-fetched it’s too unbelievable to be satisfying. But I was amused that the filmmakers had the entire story take place during a hard-fought World Cup match in which the British team make it to the finals — and the BBC and PBS chose to air it during a real World Cup!
