by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I had finally caught up with one of the
Friday night British detective shows currently being run on KPBS, Vera, which I had thought was about a young and sexy
policewoman being appointed to run the force in an out-of-the-way British
location. Actually Vera Stanhope is a rather frumpy woman who’s either hit
senior citizenship or come awfully damned close to it, and my fantasy was that
her tales (the characters were created by Ann Cleeves and this particular screenplay,
“Young Gods,” was written by Gaby Chiappe) were concocted by a writer who asked
herself, “What if Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple had actually joined the
official police force as a young woman and eventually risen through the ranks?”
DCI Vera Stanhope runs the police of the small British town of Northumberland,
in the north of England on the Scottish border, and in this particular case she
and her young, hunky assistant John Warren (John Hutch, whom Charles thought
looked like Justin Timberlake — he does, too) are trying to solve the
unexplained death of 25-year-old investment banking hotshot and extreme sports
devotee Gideon Frane (Darragh Horgan), who was seen dashing through the North
England countryside on fire before he leaped off a cliff and ended up drowning.
One could readily imagine this tale of murder and mayhem among the 1 percent as
an episode of Law and Order or
its spinoffs, but reflecting the general differences between British and
American murder mysteries, this one is a good deal quieter and more genteel. At
first Vera and John Warren suspect Kit O’Dowd (Kevin Trainor), a Gay
hairdresser who took in, A Taste of Honey-style, a former girlfriend of Gideon’s who was being stalked and
threatened by him — and though as usual with movie Gays there’s no depiction of
Kit actually being romantically or sexually involved with a man, Kevin Trainor
is boyishly cute enough (and we do
get to see him shirtless, or almost so!) to make the concept work even though
“Gay hairdresser” is, if anything, an even hoarier stereotype than “Gay
Broadway choreographer.” Then they find out that Gideon and an old friend of
his from prep school, Jamie Levinson (Mark Quartley), were both dating a Black
woman who’d been admitted to the school by its current headmaster, Dr. Vivienne
Ripman (Maureen Beattie), who’s dressed so severely in a black suit of men’s
cut and hair even shorter than April Hill’s in The Perfect Boyfriend — though on her face she’s made one concession to
traditional femininity: she’s plucked her natural eyebrows and painted in new
ones, which seems jarring (and she’s also insisted that the students call her
“The Master” just like previous classes addressed her male predecessors, mainly
because the sexual connotations of “The Mistress” would render it ridiculous
and risible), who’s easily the most interesting character in the movie.
It
turns out that Gideon became a successful investment banker — though he had a
leg up in that his family had so much money they even endowed a “Frane Wing” at
the school — while Jason sank into drugs and overall squalor, and the woman
(Pippa Benedict-Warner) joined a convent headed by an old teacher of Vera
Stanhope’s, Sister Benedict (Rita Davies). She took the name “Sister Clare” and
to make herself a more effective servant of God in the here and now returned to
school to study psychology (and, once she completed that degree, to study
social work), and her new-found psychological knowledge helped her understand
what had happened to her back at the prep school where she was one of the first
women and people-of-color
students, a product of Ripman’s affirmative action program to give the place a
student body that looked like modern-day England. It all turns out to do with a
crime that happened years before when Frane, Jason and Clare were all students
at the school, in which Frane ran down a local man and killed him, leaving
behind his wife, his daughter, his disabled son (in a wheelchair due to spina
bifida, which is why as a form of penance Jason lives in squalor and donates all his family income to charities dealing with spina
bifida) — and the kids’ grandfather, who turns out actually to have killed
Frane by poisoning him with atropine, the active ingredient of deadly
nightshade, which is what made Frane run about so crazily after his killer
threw a gas lantern at him and thus set him ablaze. The ending isn’t much —
though there is a note of pathos
when the killer explains that he’s not only old, he’s been diagnosed with
terminal cancer, so he doesn’t fear the legal consequences of his actions
because he’ll be dead long before the case can come to trial anyway — but
overall Vera, made since 2011 by
the Independent Television network in Britain (their commercial channel), is a
quite engaging program and a good example of the quieter British sort of
mystery at its best.
