The Mallorca Files : "To Kill a Stag" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Before they showed Live at the Belly Up last night KPBS aired another episode of a rather charming of sometimes annoying British mystery series, The Mallorca Files, in which British female detective Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys) and German male detective Max Winter (Julian Looman) are partners in the detective force on the island of Maiiorca, off the coast of Spain. Just why the Mallorcan authorities need to import their cops from other countries is never explained by series creator Dan Sefton, but the two have an interesting and rather curious chemistry. They are quite clearly drawn as having no romantic or sexual interest in each other – Nick and Nora Charles they definitely are not – but was they also don’t have the kind of mutual professional respect for each other Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni did for each other on the first 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit either. At one point Max is dumped by his latest flame, bartender and waitress Carmen Lorenzo (Tábata Cerezo), because he stood her up one night and didn’t even call, so she spent the evening worried that he’d been killed in the line of duty and never forgave him once he tried to make up with her. This particular episode of The Mallorca Files was called “To Kill a Stag” adh was directed by Rob Evans from a script by sarah-Louise Hawkins. It was an O.K. mystery, abit too campy for my taste but with a believable resolution of the myseroy. The murder victim is a man named Karl (Leo Woodruff) who is found dead in a swimmikng pool the nght before he was supposed to get married to Chloe Sumner (Natalie Simpson).

He was drowned in the pool while he had been rendered unconscious with a stun gun during a trick with prostitute who uses the absurd professionial name “Carina De La Noche” (Lauren Carse). Apparently she makes a specialty of picking married men whose wives are out of town for a few days and using he stun gun to rob them, but not killing them. She’s confident that her victims won’t report her to the police because then they’d have to admit they were spending time engaging in extra-relational activities with women other than their wives. The cops work out a pose by which Max will pose as a rich man at the local casino, thereby attracting Carina’s attentims, and they will arrest her while she’s with him. Only Carina insists that while she’s inicapacitated and robbed her tricks, she’s never killed one. It turns out the real killer is Torsten, who had a one-night stand with Claire and immediately fell in love with hier, while she saw it as just sex with no emotional involvement or commitment on her part. It turns out Torsten set up Karl’s trick with Carina in the first place, hoping that Claire would have a jealous hissy-fit, break off their engagement and turn to Torsten. When Claire didn’t react the way he wanted her to, he killed the unconscious Karl in the pool and drowned him. Then he confronted Claire and threatened to kill her, too, only the police arrived just in time, arrested Torsten and saved Claire from being nyrdered herself. It was an O.K. crime show, not as interesting as the Mallorca Files episode we’d previously watched, “The Oligarch’s Icon” (a quite good tale about art forgery and theft involving one of the corrupt Russian oligarchs that took over the country’s economy after the Soviet Union fell). but it had its points.