Frankie Drake Mysteries: “A Brother in Arms” (Shaftesbury Films, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I turned the TV on at 8 p.m. and before The Black Church came on I watched an episode of the Frankie Drake Mysteries series, also on PBS, in which Frankie Drake (Lauren Lee Smith), co-proprietress of an all-woman detective agency in 1920’s Toronto (the show is a Canadian production, and for once Canada plays itself instead of being passed off as somewhere in the U.S.!) and her Black partner Trudy Clarke (Chantel Riley) see the lights in their office on when both women are sure they turned them off before they locked the door and went home. It turns out that their burglar is Jack Drake (Dillon Casey), who says he’s Frankie’s half-brother (same father, but his mom was one of the many women dad was having extramarital relations with and which ultimately led to the breakup of Frankie’s parents’ marriage). Frankie’s mother Nora (the memorable Canadian actress Wendy Crewson, star of a few quite good Lifetime movies a few years ago, including a semi-series in which she played a tough police detective and a one-off in which she was a Lesbian who seduces the film’s heroine away from her straight marriage, leading her daughter to ask mom, “Hey, you always told me Gays were born that way! Then how did you end up with dad and then become a Lesbian?”) naturally wants nothing to do with Jack – “He’s not my son,” she exclaims with just the right touch of bitterness – only it turns out Jack wants the detectives to take the case of Lu Zhang (Norman Yeung), a Chinese-Canadian immigrant who worked at the Fordham Mannequin factory until the plant’s owner decided to fire all the Chinese workers. Lu is accused of killing the factory’s owner out of revenge, but he claims he broke into the factory and stole a large sum of cash but left the owner alive – and he only took the money to help out his fellow workers, who had been let go without severance pay.

Since one of the plant’s security guards had been wounded with a .38 calibre pistol, and Lu was known to own such a gun – though the bullet that actually killed Fordham had not been recovered – the police and courts got a quick conviction and he’s scheduled to be executed the very next day. This gives Our Heroines just hours to find out the real killer – and they do that by actually finding the death bullet, which turns out to be from a sniper rifle. From this they conclude that the real killer was Fordham’s son, who had served as a sniper in World War I, and they set up a phony situation in which young Bruce Fordham (Jake Epstein) is supposed to meet Frankie to buy back a piece of incriminating evidence – the bullet they recovered, which supposedly contains his fingerprints – only Bruce lines up his sniper rifle to shoot her. But she sneaks up behind him and reveals that the “target” was simply one of the Fordham factory’s mannequins which she’d dressed up to look like her. There was a bit too much of Frankie Drake: The Soap Opera for my taste in the way writers Karen Hill and Ley Lukins milked the situation of the long-lost (half-)brother for more than it was worth, but for the most part this was a nice episode and a reasonably entertaining show without the preciousness of some of the episodes – and the anachronistic music that often besets attempts to do the 1920’s on film (though very few people today actually own as many 1920’s records as I do and therefore have my knowledge base of what 1920’s music actually sounded like).