by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on KPBS for an
episode of the Inspector Lewis series from the BBC (I’m old enough to remember when PBS recycled so
many British shows it was jokingly referred to as “BBC West”), which was
created by the same person who did the Inspector Morse stories and appears to
take place in the same fictional universe — the police force of Oxford. The
central intrigue is the murder of Alistair Stoke (Jonny Phillips), a
neurosurgeon by day and also the owner of an estate he’s set up as a hunting
ground, which has attracted the ire of animal-rights activists. Dr. Stoke has
also attracted the ire of the Nooran family, whose son was put into a
persistent vegetative state when Stoke botched an operation on him while under
the influence of alcohol. Stoke is killed and the bullet that killed him is
ballistically matched to a gun belonging to Tom Marston (Aden Gillett), his
partner in the hunting estate, but later Marston is killed with a ballistically
matching bullet while the gun itself is safely locked in the police evidence
room. Our hero, Inspector Lewis (Kevin Whately) — a retired cop who comes out of
retirement to help his former partner, James Hathaway (the striking-looking
Laurence Fox), solve the crime — figures out that a sufficiently determined
murderer could fake the ballistics evidence by firing bullets into water,
recovering them and then reusing them as long as the gun in which they were
fired the second time was smooth-bored, like a shotgun. (I’m not sure I believe
that but Helen Jenkins’ script insists on it.) Stoke’s assistant is one of the
red-herring suspects — he had complained about Stoke doing surgery while drunk
to the medical board, but Marston had alibied him and he’d got away with it —
and the father of the boy Stoke put into a vegetative state is also a suspect
until he kills himself midway through, but the actual killer turns out to be
Stoke’s nurse, who was determined to get rid of him before he knocked off or
severely damaged any more patients. The episode title was “Entry Wounds,” but
though it’s listed as “part 1” on the imdb.com page for the series it seemed
self-contained enough to me! What struck me about this show was how dull it was
— though it takes place in modern times and there are enough of the
computer-related accoutrements of modern life (cell phones, the Web, tablets and laptops all figure in
the action), it’s plotted like an old-fashioned British mystery, with the cops
politely investigating an equally polite and relatively nonviolent crime (even
the bullet moved more slowly than usual, a consequence of its having been
already fired and reused), with characters as flat as cardboard and a
resolution that’s less a whodunit than a whocareswhodunit. When Raymond
Chandler praised Dashiell Hammett for having “given murder back to the people
who commit it for a reason, not merely to provide a corpse,” this was exactly
the sort of story Chandler was critiquing, a typical British mystery in which
even the appearance of several dead bodies isn’t enough to break the decorum!
