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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 6, No. 17 |
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'Mystery!' season begins
with remake of a classic
of TheColumnists.com
PBS' "Mystery!" premieres its new, extended season Sunday with a remake of a classic "Mystery!" show, "Malice Aforethought," based on one of the most significant mystery novels in the history of the genre.
First published in England in 1931, Francis Iles' "Malice Aforethought," along with C.S. Forester's 1930 "Payment on Demand," launched the era of the "inverted" mystery--the sort of story in which the reader knows from the start who did the crime. The suspense comes not from "whodunnit," but from our wondering if the criminal is going to get away with it or not.
This new mystery style opened the door for the psychologically-driven mysteries and thrillers of today and had a profound effect on the way mysteries are done on screen. For example, every episode of TV's "Columbo" series is an inverted mystery because Lt. Columbo doesn't know what we know as he slowly gathers his clues.
Author Iles wasted no time letting us in on the secret in "Malice Aforethought." Here's the very first sentence of the novel: "It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter..."
In the story, Bickleigh is a small town physician whose wife, Julia, is from a higher plateau of English society and privately holds most of the couple's wealth. She enjoys having the upper hand over her seemingly docile husband and lords it over him rather freely. But while he grovels, Bickleigh is having his revenge by carrying on behind his wife's back with Ivy, a village woman who's smitten with him.
Bickleigh is one of those men who knows which side his bread is buttered on, so he doesn't rock the marriage boat too severely until the beautiful, well-bred Miss Madeleine Cranmere comes to the village of Wyvern Cross, buys the vacant manor house known as The Hall and begins to lure Dr. Bickleigh into her web. She makes it clear she could never marry a divorced man, so Bickleigh sees no other way out of his fix but to murder his wife.
The doctor is also in an excellent position to commit a murder and get away with it. This is in the era before much really sophisticated forensic medical examination was being done and, as a physician, Bickleigh could poison someone and do it slowly enough to appear a death by natural causes. Or he could infect someone with some local bug that he cultures in his lab and make the death look like just another tragic result of a runaway contagion. Smugly, he goes about committing what he's sure will be the perfect, undetectable crime.
In the original 1981 four-part version of "Malice Aforethought," which was the second attraction of the second season of "Mystery!", Dr. Bickleigh was played by Hywel Bennett, Julia by Judy Parfitt and Madeleine by comely Cheryl Campbell. The new two-part version stars Ben Miller as Bickleigh, sexy Megan Dodds as Madeleine and Lucy Brown as Ivy. The only well-known player in the cast is Barbara Flynn, who plays the doomed wife, Julia. Flynn played Robbie Coltrane's wife in "Cracker" and was one half of the "Chandler & Co." female detective team in that "Mystery!" series.
Though the new "Malice" is a handsomely produced show, done in lavish 1930s period, I was bothered by the light, almost playful approach to the material in the opening installment. Have we grown so inured to murder that we can chuckle over Dr. Bickleigh's little ups and downs as he makes the cold, calculated decision to murder his wife? I certainly hope not.
Yet there are times when Bickleigh is made to look ridiculous rather than menacing and I think this diminishes the suspense.
Fortunately, the second half of "Malice" develops a much more serious tone and comes close to redeeming the whole program. Certainly the rundown to the finish line is credible and suspenseful as Scotland Yard starts raking over the traces of evidence left behind after Julia's death and Bickleigh begins to pay a price for his adulterous and homocidal capers.
My favorite moment of the whole program, though, is the very opening scene: A pack of lambs comes running down the road into Wyvern Cross. Photographed at a low angle, the baa-ing lambs fill the screen symbolically as if representing all the various human lambs Dr. Bickleigh will contemplate leading to slaughter.
Overall, this production of "Malice" is pretty steamy. Bickleigh's original village girl friend, Ivy, is a hot-blooded lady who can't seem to keep her hands off him. They find all kinds of interesting places to comport themselves away from the prying eyes of Mrs. Bickleigh and the nosy villagers. Madeleine is also quite a piece of work, stripping to her red scanties in order to pose for Bickleigh, who fancies himself something of an artist. He virtually drools on himself as this elegant and shapely young woman comes close to showing her all to him.
Bickleigh has lots of potential lovers to choose among, including a rather man-hungry full-figured local girl named Felicity (Hannah McCabe), who finally gets it on with the doctor in a somewhat primitive style as her mother wanders about in the underbrush, calling for her to come home.
The portrait "Malice" gives us of English village life in the 1930s seems to suggest that any reasonably decent-looking chap who carries a medical bag could probably have all the action he could handle from the bored housewives and neglected virgins wandering about the village. Since Bickleigh isn't exactly the matinee idol type, one must assume that either village moral standards were extremely low or else Bickleigh was plying all his female patients with Spanish fly and giving their boy friends salt peter, all under the guise of headache remedies.
Those who don't know the story should not take the final outcome for granted. It comes with a profoundly ironic ending. It was a good ending in 1931 and it holds up pretty well today.
By the way, author Frances Iles was a make believe person. He was the literary alter-ego of mystery writer Anthony Berkeley, co-founder of the famous Detection Club of London. Berkeley himself was a false character, too. Behind both pen names was Anthony Berkeley Cox, a well-known journalist of his time.
Though I don't believe this new "Malice Aforethought" strikes the right tone in the premiere segment, it does get better as it goes along. It's a solid production that just might have been much better. Frankly, though, I think "Mystery!" would have been better served by launching its season with the new Miss Marple episodes, which begin the Sunday right after "Malice" concludes.
©2005 by Ron Miller.
The illustration is courtesy of WGBH Boston and ITV. This column
first posted March 28, 2005.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine
and teaches classes in mystery for the Academy of Lifelong Learning
at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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