Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Love and Other Puzzles" (Britbox, BBC, PBS, copyrighted 2021, released 2022)

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

Last night at 8 my husband Charles and I watched a really oddball mystery TV series episode on KPBS, Sister Boniface Mysteries, about a mid-country English nun, Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson), described ont he show’s imdb.com page as “nun, moped rider (actually it looked more like a motorcycle and sidecar to me), wine maker and part-time forensic scientist.” The show is set in the 1960’s and features Sister Boniface – whose last name is pronounced “bony face” (I’d always assumed it was “bahn-ih-fass”) interacting surprisingly well with the local police, particularly inspectors Sam Gillespie (Max Brown) and African-British immigrant Felix Livingstone (Jerry Iwo). The episode we were watching was called “Love and Other Puzzles,” directed by Ian barber and written by Jude Tindall and Kitty Percy. In the opening, middle-aged widow Hilary Simpson-Smythe (played by pleasingly plump actress Sarah Flind) is found dead with a nearly completed jigsaw puzzle in front of her and a face slathered with cold cream. The police and Sister Boniface trace her to the personal column of the local newspaper, in which she advertised for a male companion, and as in the marvelous 1947 movie Lured (of which I once wrote it featured “great dramatic performances by George Sanders and Lucille Ball – yes, you read that right”) the killer is meeting his victims through answering their personal ads. (I’ve long wished someone would remake Lured for the Internet age, the way Nora Ephron redid The Shop Around the Corner as You’ve Got Mail!) The cops and the Sister cycle through various suspects, including three of the men who used the personals to meet women for dinner and hopefully sex. At one point, convinced that the culprit is a retired Army major, Roger Travis (Nick Sampson) still plagued by wounds he got in combat in World War II, they recruit Cleo Clam (Barbara Lang) to answer the Major’s ad.

Cleo is a member of the local amateur theatre troupe – they’re doing a production of a play based on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and during one rehearsal an actress slips up and starts reciting dialogue from last year’s show, The Merry Widow – and they doll her up to make her look sexier and send her off on her date with the Major. They wire her for sound and tell her that “macaroni'' is her safe word, so when she says it the cops will burst in and arrest the Major. Only they soon realize that the killer isn’t the Major; it’s Colin Sweet (Sam Crane), makeup man at the theatre company, who suffered a disastrous childhood. It seems that when he was three his father left his mother and left her alone to raise him as a single parent. Noting that he had an unusual gift for assembling jigsaw puzzles, she entered him in jigsaw-puzzle solving contests, where the prize money he won helped keep the family supported financially. The show includes a flashback sequence in which after one such contest he comes home with a second-place pendant, and she throws it away, saying, “Second place is for losers!” Colin’s mom eventually dies – it’s not chear whether he killed her or she died of natural causes – and he feels compelled to reproduce her death with other older women, lathering their faces with cold cream and then poisoning them with a drug that simulates a heart attack. It’s a gimmick Dick Wolf and his writers have used on Law and Order and the other shows in the franchise more than once, though as witl a lot of British mysteries what’s most impressive about th is one is the lightness of touch and the gentility with wh ich the characters act. Even the murderers seem like nice enough people when they aren’t actually killing! I’m not sure if I’ll want to watch Sister Boniface Mysteries again, but there is definitely a certain quirky charm about this show even though it’s also hard to avoid the impression that the people who created it thought, “O.K., G. K. Chesterton did a series about a priest who helps the police solve crimes; let's try to do that with a nun!”