My Life Is Murder: "Can't Stand the Heat" (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 31) I watched the fourth and next in sequence of the Australian (Melbourne-set) crime series My Life Is Murder, “Can’t Stand the Heat,” which I thought was quite the best of the four episodes in this series I’ve seen so far. It begins with the leads, retired Melbourne Police Department detective Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless, top-billed) and current Melbourne Police Department detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry), inside a spherical glass elevator in a Melbourne amusement park. Hussey is recruiting Alexa to re-investigate a cold murder case in which the victim was young cooking student Ivan Zang (Yuchen Wang), who was found dead on the floor of the school kitchen next to a puddle of melted salmon and caviar aspic. (That sounds like a totally dreadful dish to me and one you’d have to pay me to try.) This time the writer, Chris Hawkshaw (imdb.com also credits Rick Maier as “creator” and Claire Tonkin as “co-creator”), actually gave us a genuine whodunit with a believable resolution instead of zeroing in on the most obvious suspect and making them the guilty party. Ivan Zang turns out to have been something of a jack-of-all-trades, including Australian football (it’s not clear just what variant of the sport that is – I remember an article from the early 1970’s about “Aussie Rules” football, which is like rugby only even wilder – but the shots we get of Ivan’s former teammates practicing look like pretty generic soccer), but after briefly going to law school he decided that his most deep-seated ambition was to cook for a living.

The initial prime suspect was a fellow student, a woman named Yi Ling (Chloe Ng) who had a deep-seated rage towards Ivan and especially the way in which he’d suddenly become teacher’s pet. The teacher is a no-nonsense martinet named Brenda Levine (Lisa Hensley), who’s working to open a prestigious new restaurant of her own and is going to select her kitchen staff from the best students at her school. Alexa arranges with her assistant, Aboriginal woman Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans) – at least I think she’s supposed to be Aborigine, though in a U.S. context she’d be “read” as Black – to join the cooking school as a transfer student in mid-term even though Alexa has very little knowledge of how to cook. She used to enjoy gourmet meals but that all changed with the death of her husband Gary, since he was the cook in the family. Alexa has learned to use a bread-making machine (which as a side effect has drawn the ire of her neighbors; she lives in a condo building and the head of the homeowners’ association has already called her out for the noise the damned thing makes) but is pretty hopeless in the rest of the culinary arts. There’s even an amusing scene in which she goes into her storage unit to retrieve Gary’s old knives, since she has none of her own and she can’t show up for her first day of class at a cooking school without knives. And there’s another gag scene in which she cuts herself big-time on her first day of class and has to beg Brenda to borrow some Band-Aids; Brenda, who makes a concentration-camp commandant look like an Esalen leader by comparison, tells her next time she’d better bring her own.

Ultimately Alexa gets from Ivan’s mother (Fiona Choi) a scrapbook she kept about him, which reveals that 10 years earlier he worked at a short-lived restaurant that closed abruptly when a customer died of food poisoning. The clipping includes a grainy, badly reproduced halftone photo of the woman who owned the restaurant, but Alexa gives Madison a copy of it and Madison is able to use photo-recognition software to determine that the woman was Brenda. Ultimately it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Ivan had worked as an associate of Brenda’s and had recognized her from a decade earlier. Now he was blackmailing her into giving him her primo set of Japanese knives, inflating his grades and generally favoring him for fear that he’d reveal her past and end her potential comeback as a restaurateur. When he demanded an equal partnership in her restaurant to be, she drew the line and clubbed him to death with a frozen chicken (apparently Chris Hawkshaw had seen, or at least heard about, “Lamb to the Slaughter,” an Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV episode directed by Hitchcock himself and written by Roald Dahl, in which the killer is a housewife, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, who clubs her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb and then thaws it out, cooks it and serves it to the police investigating the crime).

Then, to give herself an alibi, Brenda turned on the ovens in her kitchen and let them run all night so the autopsy would place the time of death at 4 a.m. – when Brenda was in bed with a boyfriend – instead of midnight, when it actually happened. The police finally arrest Brenda on the night of her big restaurant opening, and she pleads with them, “Can’t you let me have just one night?” – which, of course, they don’t. Previous My Life Is Murder episodes have been all too predictable, but this one was genuinely surprising even though my husband Charles, who came home from work half an hour into the show’s 45-minute running time, questioned whether the records of the power company showing unusually high energy consumption in Brenda’s kitchen on the night of the murder would really be that precise for that particular day. This is by far the most satisfying My Life Is Murder episode I’ve seen yet in terms of offering a credible resolution to a mystery story instead of just giving us the most likely suspect as the killer.