Frankie Drake Mysteries: “Life on the Line” (Shaftesbury Films, Canada Media Fund (CMF), Independent Production Fund, PBS, 2020)

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

Before the fascinating Johnny Cash concert PBS ran an episode of the Frankie Drake Mysteries from Canadian television, a series that’s been running since 2017. It’s set in Toronto in the 1920’s and centers around an all-female private detective agency which takes on oddball cases, usually – as here – involving an innocent party accused of murder and almost certainly slated for punishments they don’t deserve until Frankie and her partners intervene on her behalf. Lead investigator Frankie Drake (Lauren Lee Smith) and her African-Canadian assistant Trudy Clarke (Chantel Riley) take the case of toy-store owner Ernie Penny (Matt Watts), one of those characters in mystery fiction who seems to spend his entire life creating reasons for other people to hate him and want him out of the way. Penny, whose toy store is almost inevitably called “Penny and Pound,” has faced a series of harassments, including being done out of a deal to buy a toy company that would have salvaged his business by giving him a guaranteed supply of inventory. He’ s also been the victim of arbitrarily canceled orders and other signs that someone is mounting a concerted campaign to drive him out of business and utterly ruin him financially. At first he suspects his ex-wife, but she makes it clear she was relieved that their marriage ended and certainly has no interest in taking any further role in his life, for good or ill.

The women trace the harassing calls to the switchboard of a local telephone company and hire on as operators to see what information they can glean from overhearing the calls that go over their lines. They eventually realize that the harassment isn’t coming from an outside caller but from one of the women who work there, and ultimately they learn that Lillian (Katy Breier) decided to make herself rich by gaining stock tips from the callers and investing accordingly. She made enough money doing this to buy the toy company Penny was after just to screw him over and make sure he didn’t get it, but eventually Penny gets to be a partner in it. Frankie Drake Mysteries is a minor but charming series that is well worth watching and fun, even though there are some weird glitches in the writing – notably the positing that Toronto contains an illegal speakeasy in which most of the characters do their drinking. Memo to writer Kery Ferrencz: unlike the U.S., Canada wasn’t stupid enough to try to prohibit alcohoi in the 1920’s and therefore they didn’t need speakeasies: people wishing to consume or dispense alcoholic beverages in Toronto in the 1920’s could do so openly the way they can now.