Father Brown: "The Hand of Lucia" (BBC Studios, BBC Worldwide, Albert+ Sustainable Productions, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 22) I watched a Father Brown episode from 2017 called “The Hand of Lucia” and then a Turner Classic Movies presentation of the 1956 film Julie. “The Hand of Lucia” is about author Lucia Morell (Hetty Baynes), who’s just published a best-seller called Lulu and Lucia about a Lesbian affair she had about 20 years before. This has allowed her to buy a big house in the central England county where the Father Brown mysteries take place, and to be the typical prima donna bitch towards her staff, her neighbors and everyone else. Lucia Morell has put out the word that her next novel will reveal the true identity of “Lulu,” though Father Brown has already deduced who it is. She’s Lady Ursula Langford (Carol Royle), who lives in the same neighborhood in a large house she inherited from her wealthy family and has used the fortune she was left to start a sort of halfway house for young women who were just released from prison. Lucia is nearly killed when some unseen person or persons push a giant crystal container off her roof and onto her below. This puts out one of her eyes, but she recovers long enough to wear a preposterous-looking eye patch and to attempt a seduction of Ursula’s overweight son James (Kristoffer Olson). Things go badly for James when, confronted by the sexually aggressive Lucia, James literally can’t rise to the occasion. Instead of being understanding the way older women are supposed to be in stories like this, she tears into him, tells him he’ll never be able to satisfy a woman, and he might as well just give up on the whole idea of sex. (By now I was thinking maybe he’d turn out to be Gay; like mother, like son, after all.)

Later Lucia is found dead in her bed, victim of an assailant with an axe, and her hand is severed and hidden inside a toilet tank, where Bunty (Emer Kenny), a halfway-house inmate whom Father Brown has befriended, finds it while having an attack of vomiting from a meal she ate. Still later, one of the residents of Ursula’s halfway house, Mildred Nook (Claire Brown), is also killed, this time with poison, and found in a bathtub. Father Brown gets involved in the case, much to the predictable discomfort of Sergeant Goodfellow (John Burton), the local representative of official law enforcement, who’s so fixated on the obvious suspects he makes Inspector Lestrade seem like Sherlock Holmes by comparison. Father Brown, Bunty and Father Brown’s housekeeper, Mrs. McCarthy (Sorcha Cusack), take turns reading chapters of Lucia’s novel hoping to find clues that will help them solve the crimes. Mrs. McCarthy’s disgust at the explicit (for the 1950’s) sexual content of the novel is hilarious, especially when it turns out that she’s already read it and owns several copies. There’s also a disgraced friar on the Langford property, Friar Novak (Sam Cox), who works as Ursula’s groundskeeper and still dresses in monk’s drag, and who looks like he stepped out of a Grant Wood painting. In the end the killer turns out to be yet another of Ursula’s charges, Scarlet Finch (Nicola Thorp), who served a 10-year sentence for a crime actually committed by Lucia Morell – for whom she supplied a false alibi that ended up making her the fall girl. Lucia incorporated Scarlet Finch into the book as the “Red Cardinal,” changing her gender and making him/her/them another one of her lovers, and in the end Scarlet tries to kill Ursula. She surprises her in her garden and is carrying the axe with which she dispatched Lucia – she also killed Mildred because Mildred had caught her in the act of hiding Lucia’s severed hand in the toilet tank – when Father Brown and Bunty arrive just in time to save Ursula.

Eventually we learn that Lucia was a Bisexual sadist who loved to pit her various sex partners against each other – we get a dramatized scene from her novel in which two brothers who got along with each other just fine until they both got involved with Lucia’s character literally fight a duel to the death for one night with her – and Ursula broke up with her because she got tired of the horrible sadistic things Lucia kept making her do to her other partners. We also learn that, contrary to what Ursula told her son James that his father was killed in World War II (remember that the Father Brown stories take place in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s), he was actually the product of a rebound relationship she had with Friar Novak, and the friar/groundskeeper was his biological father (and got thrown out of his monastic order for violating the vow of celibacy). James is so shocked by the revelations of his mother’s past and his true ancestry that he leaves the estate for good. From the title I had expected this Father Brown episode to be about opera and madness – I was, of course, thinking of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and in particular its mad scene, and I was expecting the story to revolve around a long-retired and picturesquely crazy soprano who’d been especially famous for her Lucia – but what I got was a charming story (as charming as a story about an axe murderer can be, anyway) expressing the odd mix of gentility and horror at the root of so many British mysteries.