Season 24 - Dandelion Dead (1994-1995)
Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong was a man convicted and hanged for the murder of his wife in 1921 and the attempted murder of his business rival, Oswald Martin, later the same year. He would probably have gotten away with the murder of his wife if not for his attack on his rival, whose father-in-law was the local chemist from whom Armstrong bought the poison used in both cases supposedly to deal with the dandelions in his yard. The practically nonexistent dandelions. The father-in-law put two and two together and the rest, as they say, is history. The case inspired both Dorothy L. Sayers and Frances Iles, AKA Anthony Berkeley Cox. But it was Michael Kitchen and his genius who brought this man so fully to life. First off, let it be known, I am a Michael Kitchen stan. I fell in love with his understated method of crime solving in Foyle's War and worked my way through his back catalog. If you haven't seen him as Branwell Brontë in The Brontes of Haworth I question your dedication to the actor, your love of British miniseries, and your interest in the Brontës themselves. Yes, the absolute fro of hair and mutton chops for days may at first distract you, but once you hear that voice, well, you are in for another classic Kitchen performance. And it's that ability to reel you in, to side with him that this drama uses so deviously. For the first quarter of this miniseries you identify so strongly with Kitchen as Armstrong that you can see why he'd kill his wife. She's portrayed as a demanding harridan. She's unmanageable and untenable and by being given just this glimpse into this couple's life we see that Armstrong really only had one way out. But that's the point, we are given just this slice of life. His views, his opinions, his struggles. Then, after she is dispatched, we see a different side of him. Maybe his wife wasn't how he portrayed her to us. Little hints of who he really is starts to seep in. The womanizing, the venereal diseases. All this comes as a shock and makes you think, how could I have gotten the wrong end of the stick so thoroughly. That is all down to the genius of Kitchen. Once we know the truth and he sets his eyes on Oswald Martin, brilliantly played by David Thewlis the series shifts once more into a dark comedy with Armstrong's ham-handed attempts to get ride of his rival. First he attempts to bump off Martin with poisoned chocolates. But not being able to witness the ingestion leads to a bit of a mix-up. Therefore the second attempt is done under his watchful eye at his home. In other words, his desire to destroy his rival makes him show his hand. This leads to much palaver. Did Armstrong just try to kill him? Wait, were those chocolates him? And then the father-in-law putting it all together. Brilliant. The timing leads to it being humorous without being overplayed. The trio arriving to report their findings to the police is comic gold but also, just three desperate people trying to save themselves. Needless to say, Armstrong doesn't get away with it. But, for a moment, Kitchen made you wish he did.
If you're anything like me you have an old stack of catalogs in your bathroom. Signals and Acorn are perennial favorites even if they're over a decade old. Of course this leads to the problem that most of the DVD sets I'm coveting are now long out of print. One such DVD I desired was The Blackheath Poisonings. Oh, how I longed for it. It's in the British tradition of everyone in a large extended family living together who them start dropping like flies. Add in the fact that the family runs a successful toy company and live on the edge of a heath and the Gothic atmosphere is turned up to eleven. One day when I was checking my external hard drives I discovered that I had somewhere along the way acquired a copy. Which meant that all other shows were dropped because it was time for some poison! Three episodes later I wished I had taken the poison. Such potential wasted with too many tropes. Literally the only thing I liked was their house. It was a unique and highly tiled entryway that helped distract me from how completely stupid each and every character was in this series. I honestly don't know how it was possible for each and every character to be too dumb to live. Literally ALL OF THEM. The patriarch becomes severally ill and is recovering if his food is carefully prepped and monitored. But occasionally he relapses and eventually dies. Don't you think that, I don't know, someone would look for some food secreted about his room or a flask filled with liqueur that he might be sneaking against doctor's orders? When his son bothers to look after the death the flask is found in under a minute. But then again our earnest young crime solver is also in love with his "aunt" who was also his father's mistress and he spends all his time when he's not trying to connect the dots of criminality plighting his troth. To a women who could easily be his mother. Though of course the killer isn't done with one death, the elderly matriarch, Sister Monica Joan from Call the Midwife, she starts exhibiting the same symptoms and seriously, the family and the family doctor are like, what could it possibly be!?! She deserved to die. They all deserved to die. And I felt cheated with them using Patrick Malahide as a red herring. He's so wonderfully malevolent and scheming, but alas, this show is nothing more than a family bickering, having affairs, fighting for dominance, and wanting to sleep with Ian McNeice's wife. And that right there is why the first murder happened, because Ian McNeice is the killer. But it's SO much worse than that. Because he likes to dress in women's clothing and go to secret clubs and wander the heath dressed in widow's weeds. That's why his mother had to die, she saw him on the heath. Though there was no way that was Ian McNeice. There is no fat shaming on this blog, but it has to be pointed out that even in the early nineties Ian McNeice was an ample man. There was no way he fit convincingly into a corset to wander the heath. That's a body double. Which is why I didn't guess he was the killer, it wasn't that I didn't add up the pieces I just hoped that this was above hateful anti-trans tropes. But it wasn't. Though in my desperation to follow this up with something I would enjoy I rewatched all of Father Brown, so I have to thank The Blackheath Poisonings for being so bad, stupid, and hateful, for me to remember how much I love the denizens of Kembleford.
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
An English Murder by Cyril Hare
Secrets of the Nile by Tasha Alexander
The Grave's a Fine and Private Place by Alan Bradley
A Shakespearean ghost brought us the phrase "murder most foul." I'm sure, given that it was spoken in Hamlet, that Shakespeare knew the basic human drive to be enthralled and strive to solve an unnatural death. It's the crux of the play's forward momentum to that gory end. We, as humans, are drawn to puzzles and hunt for clues like they're candy. Murder mysteries can even be comforting. There's a whole subgenre just of cozy mysteries! There's nothing I like better than being transported away from reality by a book, and mysteries tend to transport me more than most because I'm not just enjoying the narrative, I'm trying to pick up all the clues, throw aside all the red herrings, and figure out whodunit before the author actually tells us. Yes, I like to be one step ahead at all times. Of course there are so many different types of whodunits that one could read nothing but mysteries and not even dent the genre. And yet, that doesn't stop us from trying. From devouring one murder after another like they were a big box of chocolates, which thankfully, in this instance, aren't out to poison us. So here's to the mystery genre, to all those murders most foul. Here's to kicking off the holiday season the right way, with a corpse or two.
When people think of authors from the 1920s I don't think many people think of Agatha Christie because she was prolific for such a long time, her final book being published posthumously in 1976 a few months after her death. Hercule Poirot might be inseparable from the the Art Deco trappings of the 1920s but Christie herself has become timeless. Yet her first book featuring the Belgian detective, 
Nightmares! The Sleepwater Tonic by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller
A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup
My Cousin Rachel
So you're probably wondering, why did she give this adaptation three stars (actually more then I gave the book) if it had all these issues? Aside from the fact that early BBC dramas hold a kind of special place in my heart for the bad sets, reused sound effects (yes, it's THAT ONE bird again), and great character actors, there is what I am now referring to as The Roday Factor. OK, so hopefully you all know who James Roday is. If you don't, shame on you! But I shall take mercy on you and do a brief explanation of the genius of James Roday. James Roday with Dule Hill starred on the much underappreciated USA show Psych, about a fake psychic who was a real detective, in a very unorthodox way. For eight seasons it was the perfect combination of mystery and comedy. Plus, for children of the eighties, it was a goldmine of Goonies references and random sing-a-longs. It was controlled chaos that would make me laugh more then any show out there and made me love James Roday.
Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie
