The Mallorca Files: "Friend Henry" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, PBS, 2019)

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

Before the Live at the Belly Up episode I watched an episode of the intriguing PBS/BBC co-production The Mallorca Files, featuring Elen Rhys and Julian Looman as Miranda Blake and Max Winter, British and German (respectively) police detectives who for some reason work together on the police force ini Mallorca (also sometimes spelled Majorca), an island off the coast of Spain ruled over by the Spanish government. The episode was called “Friend Harry” and dealt with a celeb rated violinist and D. J. named Kurt Sommer (Maximillian Derr) who comes to Mallorca to play at the island’s most prestigious nightclub, only in the middle of his set he collapses onstage while playing the main theme from Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. (The writing committee on this show – Alex McBride, Dan Muirden and Dan Seftom – present his piece as a profound meditation on human mortality. I first heard it in the nate 1960’s in a Columbia 78 rpm set by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter, a close friend of Mahler, and it left me cold then and still does.) Kurt is declared to have died of a drug overdose – which surprises Detective Winter in particular because Kurt had the reputation of being a very “straight-edge” person who not only avoided drugs and alcohol himself but forbade their sale at any venue he played. Nonbetheless,the medical evidence is irrefutable.

Blake and Winter trace the drugs that killed Kurt to a Black woman named Maria (Jane Chirwa) and try to get her to turn state’s evidence and work undercover to bust the island’s controller of the illegal drug trade, Gardera (Francisco Denis). Only she’s scared for her life because previous informants who have gone up against Gardera have simply disappeared without a trace. Maria’s cover is blown by an associate of Gardera’s named Heinrich (Lucas Gregorowicz), and she tries to persuade Gardera to let her live by feeding the cops false information about his gang and its operations. Gardera orders Heinrich to kill her instantly, but Heinrich delays and Gardera looks like he’s about to do it himself when [spoiler alert!] Blake and Winter arrive with a squad of police officers who proceed to take Gardera into custody. The whole thing was a setup by the late D. J. Kurt and Heinrich, who had known each other as children in Germany (there’s a photo of the two of them together as kids in a student band) and had concocted an elaborate plot to bring Gardera to justice because years earlier Heinrich’s sister Rita had been a member of Gardera’s organization until he’d got suspicious of her loyalties and killed her. Kurt had contracted terminal cancer and was in constant pain, so in order to help his friend Heinrich avenge Rita, Kurt agreed to buy the drugs from Gardera to euthanize himself and give the cops the information they would need to bust him. The Mallorca Files isn’t a show I deliberately set out to watch, but it’s clever and entertaining. This episode seemed the best of the three I’ve seen so far even though my feelings about Mahler’s music are quite different from those of the writers of this show!