Sister Boniface Mysteries: "My Brother's Keeper" (Britbox, BBC-TV, PBS, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I watched the latest Sister Boniface Mysteries episode on KPBS, “My Brother’s Keeper,” in which Alfie Lynch (Jay Simpson), scapegrace brother of Sister Reginald (Virginia Fiol), shows up at the convent after having just been released from prison for burglary. An internationally famous artist named Gerry Ardwell (Gerald Kyd) has just shown up in this backwater English town and announces his intention literally to put himself on exhibit in the local gallery. Ardwell announces he will live in the gallery for a month, including ppeing and pooping in full view of the people in the gallery, and at night when the gallery is closed he will sleep. Gerry has arranged this with gallery owner Madeleine Righely (Briony Hannah), an old girlfriend of his until they broke up and he married Lilly (Naoko Mori). Only Gerry Ardwell is found murdered on the gallery floor after just one day on exhibit, and a valuable painting of the Virgin Mary is stolen off the gallery wall. The suspects include Alfie Lynch – whom the police are instantly certain was the culprit – along with Lilly Ardwell, Gerry’s hunky young assistant Francis Scritton (Dylan Wood) who’s been having an affair with Lilly behind Gerry’s back, and Dickie Whitfield (Julian Firth), a bitchy art critic who has been waging a one-person campaign against Gerry Ardwell because 20 years earlier Ardwell published an article savagely attacking another artist Whitfiend was promoting. The artist, whose name was something like Edgington, committed suicide a week after Ardwell’a article attacking him appeared, leaving behind a wife and baby son. Alfie Lynch briefly rents a room in town from Mrs. Clam (Belinda Lang), a stereotypical obnoxious and domineering landlady who tells Alfie he’s required to be back by 9 p.m. or the doors to the building will be locked and he won’t be able to get back in until the morning. It doesn’t tale king for Alfie to break Mrs. Clam’s rules and get himself thrown out of her building, and later on the cops search the room Alfie had briefly rented and found the Virgin Mary painting there.

The cops insist that Alfie had an accomplice in the gallery that turned off the alarm system for him, but Alfie insists he’s innocent and of course he’s right. Where I assumed this was going was that Francis Scritton and Lilly Ardwell and conspired to murder Gerry and get together à la Double Indemnity, but in the end Scritton turns out to be the sole killer. It turns out that he is the long-lost son of the artist who committed suicide a week after Gerry Ardwell attacked him in print, and he’s spent the rest of his life plotting his revenge, which included getting the job as Gerry’s assistant (and creating most of his paintings for him) and screening the opportunity to kill him when it arose. There’s a welcome surprise appearance by Father Brown (Mark Williams), the G. K. Chesterton-created character who inspired this series, who turns up towards the end of the episode and announces that he had been ready to involve himself in solving the crime, only Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson, whose delightfully spunky performance is one of the best aspects of this show) solved it herself before he could arrive. It’s nice to know that, even though Sister Boniface Mysteries is technically a TV original, it’s supposed to be part of the same fictional world as Father Brown and it has a similarly anachronistic setting – though Sister Boniface Mysteries takes place in the 1960’s and the Father Brown episodes I’ve seen were set earlier, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Still, it’s easy enough to imagine Father Brown’s career as a parish priest and part-time detective overlapping from the late 1940’s to the mid-1960’s. And one of the most delightful aspects of “My Brolther’s Keeper” is the sight of Alfie Lynch, once he’s thrown out of Mrs. Clam’s rooming house, literally hiding out in the convent dressed in nun’s drag, which he proclaims to be surprisingly comfortable.