The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Leather and Lace" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2015)

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

In between British Rock: The First Wave and The Beatles’ 1965 appearance on Blackpool Night Out, my husband Charles and I watched the first 2015 episode of the quirky New Zealand-based policier, The Brokenwood Mysteries. This one was called “Leather and Lace” and it begins with a young blonde woman in a red dress being chased by a man in a car – though we don’t know yet who he was or why he’s doing this. Then the show cuts to the discovery of the body of Arnie (Phil Vaughan), coach of the local rugby team, The Cheetahs, which has lost 50 games in a row. Arnie is dead, tied up to one of the rugby field’s goalposts, and his body is discovered by the team members doing a warmup run. Police detective Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea) disqualifies his young, sexy red-haired officer Sam Breen (Nic Sampson) from serving on the investigation because he’s a member of the rugby team himself. Arnie was strangled with a pair of black lace women’s panties stuffed down his throat, embroidered with the initials “G. G.” Writers Timothy Balme and Nick Ward are able to fill the show’s 90-minute running time with a lot of red herrings, including Arnie’s widow (they’ve been separated for four years but have never divorced); Steve (Ben Barrington), the hot-headed young man who just got suspended from The Cheetahs for starting a fight with an opposing player during a recent game; and three other players who gathered outside Arnie’s window on the night he was later killed and called out to him to come out and “face the music.” Steve and the wife were having an affair, and that may have given Steve the motive to kill Arnie, but as it turns out the real culprit is Liam (at least that’s the name I thought I heard on the soundtrack; he’s identified on imdb.com as “Len” and is played by Jason Fitch). Ten years earlier Liam’s brother, a member of The Cheetahs, beat another player to death on the field during the game, and Arnie never got over it. Liam’s brother, Brooke, committed suicide a few weeks later somewhere on the rugby field, and Liam (or Len) never forgave Arnie and blamed him for his brother’s suicide. As part of a long-term revenge plot Liam/Len joined the team, not on the field but on the sidelines playing a drum during the games, and waited and bided his time. His time finally came when he was able to lure Arnie to the field after dark with a phone text ostensibly from a woman with the initials “G. G.”

The only local woman with the initials “G. G.,” whom the police have been searching for because of the initials on the murder panties, is local librarian Gloria Ginsberg (Jodie Rimmer), whom Arnie was attracted to but who begged off of a relationship with him because she’d been married twice before, and both her husbands had died in bizarre accidents that had left her suspected of murdering them. It also turns out that Arnie was a secret cross-dresser; like Ed Wood, he liked to wear women’s clothing and the red dress the three rugby players who gathered outside his window saw through it and assumed he had a girlfriend (or trick) over was actually one he was wearing. Even while he was out in public dressed in male clothes, he generally wore women’s underthings under them, and when Liam/Len ambushed Arnie on the rugby field he was genuinely shocked at Arnie’s embroidered black panties and decided to use them to kill him. Mike Shepherd and his main police partner, Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), are able to deduce this because the local library’s three books on embroidery are missing. Rather than risk public embarrassment checking them out in the normal fashion, Arnie simply pilfered them from the shelves, took them home and used the information in them to hand-embroider the “G. G.” initials on his panties. Also Arnie was a big fan of classical music in general and Richard Wagner in particular (the cops find a DVD of Daniel Barenboim’s Bayreuth recording of Tristan und Isolde among Arnie’s effects), and this becomes part of the solution to the mystery because Mike Shepherd is told by Gloria Ginsberg that Wagner, too, wore women’s underwear. (Actually he didn’t; Wagner had a rare skin condition called erysipelas that made it agony for him to have any fabric rougher than silk in direct contact with his body. So the chronically broke and in-debt Wagner spent a lot of money he didn’t really have to make sure all his clothes were made of silk.) I quite like The Brokenwood Mysteries and it’s been fun watching them (though last week I missed this show and watched the film Fitzwilly, an old favorite of mine, on TCM instead) even though Charles says he doesn’t like it as much as the program it replaced on the local KPBS schedule, Midsomer Murders (maybe because the principal cop in Midsomer Murders has been married only once while the one in The Brokenwood Mysteries has been married three or four times; in fact his marriages have been so perfunctory even he can’t remember for sure how many times he’s been hitched!) and neither show impresses him as much as his memories of the more conventional hour-long PBS mystery shows he remembers from his younger years.