Death in Paradise: Episode 13.1 (Red Planet Productions, BBC Television, PBS, 2024)

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

Last night (Friday, October 4) I watched the 100th episode of the BBC-TV series Death in Paradise, a murder mystery set on the fictitious Caribbean island of Saint-Honoré (“played” by the very real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe), in which local police commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) is being given a 50th anniversary party. (There’s a charming little prologue set 50 years before the main action, in which young Selwyn, played by Marson Francisco, shows up late for his first class at the police academy because he stopped his bike on the way to help an old woman stranded on the road, and while he had his bike parked a driver came along and ran over his front wheel.) Selwyn is a down-to-earth guy who’s getting impatient and utterly bored with the testimonials to him at the event, so he goes out to walk down a jetty and collect his thoughts while getting some fresh air. Suddenly a man walks up behind him and he gets shot and falls in the water. Fortunately he’s rescued by a party attendee who heard a shot and went to see what was the matter, so he’s merely injured but not dead – though he continues to run the investigation from his hospital bed and gets impatient with his investigators, Detective Inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little) – an import from London and the only white person on the Saint-Honoré police force – and his police partner, detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), over their slowness at apprehending his assailant. There’s another, seemingly unrelated case of a man who ran the local yacht club until he disappeared, ostensibly on a year-long around-the-world cruise. But of course Parker and Thomas discover that the cases are closely related after all: though witnesses saw a local Black guy named Alton Garvey (Mensah Bediako) shoot Selwyn, it turns out that the actual killer was [spoiler alert!] Marlon Collins (Sean Maguire), a local white ne’er-do-well and the only other white person in the cast besides Ralf Little as Parker.

Garvey approached Selwyn standing on the jetty and sneaked up behind him with the gun but drew back from actually firing it – until Collins sneaked up behind him and grabbed the gun, squeezing Alton’s hand so Alton actually pulled the trigger but it was Collins who intentionally fired the shot. Collins had calculated it so that Alton’s small-caliber gun wouldn’t be heard at the party, but because Alton drove an old, decrepit truck which always backfired when it started, the people at Selwyn’s party would hear it and assume that was the near-fatal shot at Selwyn. Midway through the episode Alton calls the police station from a pay phone (wow, a location in the world still remote enough it actually has pay phones!) and admits to shooting Selwyn but can’t explain why – something that baffled writers Tom Nash and James Hall, too. Fortunately, while Collins was squeezing Alton’s arm to get him to fire at Selwyn, one of his yacht club cufflinks fell off – and that enabled the police not only to tie him to the murder but even to explain his motive. It seems that he had previously killed the yacht-club president because the man was blackmailing him over his affair with Jacqueline St. Clair (Cathy Tyson), wife of Lincoln St. Clair (Leon Herbert), only because of the investigation surrounding the attempted murder of Selwyn, the police were trying to reach the yacht-club president Collins had actually killed, then scuttled his boat at sea, and left everyone to assume he was still on his round-the-world cruise. It was an O.K. episode and an excuse to show some of the drop-dead gorgeous scenery of Guadeloupe, and given that Sean Maguire was easily the most attractive man in the cast, it seems like the 13 producers – notably Robert Thorogood, who also is credited with “creating” the show – and director Steve Hughes were following Lifetime’s stereotype of making the sexiest guy on the show the villain. My husband Charles arrived home for the second half of the program and, like me, he was baffled by the listing of a “Rome Unit” in the closing credits. Did they actually shoot scenes in the Eternal City? Did they do some of the editing or sound mixing there? Or is there another “Rome” somewhere in the Caribbean?