My Life Is Murder: "Lividity in Lycra" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, May 24) I watched the third episode of the Australian TV series My Life Is Murder, “Lividity in Lycra,” dealing with retired Australian police detective Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless, best known for playing Xena, the Warrior Princess, in a TV series made in New Zealand from 1995 to 1999) and her former police partner, deputy inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry), who keeps giving her cold cases the police have ruled as either suicide or accidents and asking her to re-investigate as possible murders. This time it’s a case from a month before in which Hugh Miller (Robert Shook), chief financial officer of a hospitality company owned by Roger Simms (Don Hany), falls down dead during a bike ride through the Australian hills along with Simms and six other one-percenters who regularly meet one morning a week to ride their bicycles through the countryside. Simms himself is a “regular” at a coffeehouse that’s part of his chain where Alexa is also a frequent visitor – enough so that the barista takes offense when she just grabs a cup of coffee off his counter and drinks the dregs, then protests that she wouldn’t have done that if he’d been behind the counter instead of in the back of the shop. I loved the episode title – it’s a pun on the Lycra material of which bicycle-riding clothes are made, which among other things so clearly outlines the manhoods of the males who wear it that Alexa gets turned on by guys dressed that way.

This My Life Is Murder show had the same problem as the two previous ones I’ve already watched – too few suspects really to work as whodunits. Almost from the outset Alexa zeroes in on Simms as the killer, and the only suspense is how she’s going to prove it and whether she’ll be in jeopardy herself, since she’s dating and romancing him while simultaneously trying to prove him guilty of a major crime. Alexa is momentarily fooled by a carefully prepared video ostensibly showing all eight riders tightly bunched together, which is supposed to prove that none of the other seven killed Hugh because none of them deviated from the path long enough to do so. Alexa figures it out by watching an old social-media post of Simms announcing the new location he’s purchased for the coffeehouse and pointing to the garden on the patio as the main thing that impressed him enough to make him want to buy the location. Only the garden isn’t there anymore – he had it ripped out – and Alexa later figures out why: it’s because the main plant in the garden was poisonous, and Simms used it as part of an elaborate plan to murder Hugh. Simms spiked Hugh’s water bottle with a chopped-up version of the plant and swapped his own, “clean” bottle for it, thereby ensuring that when Hugh drank the poisoned water he’d have a heart attack en route. Only when the poison from the plant incapacitated Hugh but didn’t quite kill him, Simms came upon him and finished the job by banging his head against a rock. We see this in a flashback, and in a relatively placid and action-free series like this one (the Down Under mystery shows like this one and the New Zealand-set The Brokenwood Mysteries seem to have captured the same reticence about out-and-out blood-and-gore as their British counterparts) the graphic violence of this scene packs a wallop.

His motive was a clause in his father’s will (dad founded the hospitality company and left it to him) saying that both he and Hugh had to approve any major capital expenditures in advance, and Simms was chafing against this restriction while Alexa heard about it and said, “Daddy didn’t trust you very much, did he?” In the end Alexa nails Simms and the cops show up to arrest him, and then Alexa takes another cyclist home with her for at least a one-night stand, the first indication we’ve had that her sexuality is directed at anyone other than Kieran (who was established as a married man in a stray bit of dialogue, so he’s at least theoretically unavailable to her). Like the other two My Life Is Murder episodes I’ve seen, it’s a charming show and particularly strong at presenting Alexa as a free and independent woman, in the bedroom as well as everywhere else, and though I didn’t really care for the jock writers Ainslie Clouston and Chris Hawkshaw paired her with at the end, it’s pretty clear they intend this as just a one-night stand anyway. About all I could wish for from this show is more viable suspects in each crime so we’d be a bit behind Alexa on her journey through each investigation instead of miles ahead of her! I was also grateful that the end credits from this episode included an acknowledgment to the city of Melbourne; until then I’d thought it was Melbourne but the scripts had been maddeningly unclear as to which Australian city in which this show took place.