Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries: "Dead Beat" (Every Cloud Productions, Seven Productions, Screen Australia, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 13) I watched an intriguing mystery show called Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries on KPBS, set in the 1960’s. The episode was called “Dead Beat” and dealt with the murder of rising Australian rock star Duane Gordon (Stephen Madsen) and his performing partner Gidget Mitchell (Zima Anderson) in the middle of the program. He was supposed to be riding a surfboard during the big scene and she was supposed to be standing alongside him, but someone ran a partially severed electrical cable into the wading pool that contained the surfboard. The killer also spiked the water with salt so it would be more conductive. The “sleuth” character is a young woman named Peregrine Fisher (Geraldine Hakewill) whose ex-boyfriend, Eric Wild (James Mason – no relation to the late, legendary star of that name), is the prime suspect in the murder. The show features some O.K. pastiches of the pop music of the period, and Fisher works for a private detective agency hired by the owner of the TV station that aired the show. She’s a widow who can’t stand pop music but keeps the show on the air because it brings in a lot of money for the station, and she’s determined to have her detectives solve the case before the cops do to minimize the embarrassment to the station. She inherited the station and all his other properties from her late husband. Lurking on the fringes of the story is Carlo Liotti (Mark Casamento), a young Mafioso from Italy who was trying to sign Gidget Mitchell to a management contract. He’s involved with an underground nightclub and gambling den called Gattino Nero (“Black Kitten”) and with an alleged record company called Spin City, and eventually it turns out that the late club owner, Duane Gordon and show runner Billy Carson (Dominic Allburn) were all paying 500 pounds monthly to “Spin City” as blackmail because Billy and the late club owner were caught making out with each other at the club and Duane was also apparently Gay.

The killer turns out to be the show’s makeup woman, Julie Thomas (Georgia Chara), whose real name is Gina and is the fraternal twin sister of Duane Gordon, who was really Gino but changed his name to sound less Italian. Her motive was that Duane, t/n Gino, had promised her that as his career continued to rise, and especially when he moved to the United Kingdom to pursue the bigger opportunities in the British music scene, he’d take her with him, but he’d already arranged to emigrate to the U.K. … alone. Peregrine solves the mystery with the aid of Violetta Fellini (Louisa Mignone), an operative in her office who has a first-rate singing voice. Violetta signs up for the open audition the show is holding to find a replacement for Duane Gordon, and she preps a song in Italian but is told by Billy Carson to sing in English at the audition. She bombs, but “higher-ups” (i.e., Carlo Liotti, who was formerly Violetta’s fiancé until she dumped him for getting involved with his family’s business) order her onto the show. On the show she sings the song in Italian and is a hit, but Julie traps her in the show’s makeup room and nearly kills her until Peregrine arrives to save the day. There’s also a hint of forthcoming romantic interest between Peregrine and the lead official police detective on the case, James Steed (Joel Jackson). This was a nicely insouciant show with the light touch typical of British (or British Commonwealth) mysteries, and I especially liked the non-condemnatory treatment of the Gay (or Bi) characters.