by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a quite interesting PBS showing of a 2014 episode
of the Doctor Blake Mysteries, produced
by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and dealing with a small-town
coroner, autopsy surgeon and (of course!) amateur detective named Dr. Lucien
Blake (Craig McLachlan) who went to Europe to serve as an Army medic in World
War II but after the war returned to the small Australian outback town of
Ballarat where he was born, settled there, taking the job of police surgeon and
medical examiner and living with his partner Jean Beazley (Nadine Garner) —
series creators George Adams and Tony Wright make a big deal of the fact that
they’re not married, though how
they got away with that in the Australian outback in the late 1950’s is a
mystery. This episode, “A Foreign Field,” written by Marcia Gardner and
directed by Lee Rogen, deals with the finding of a corpse in the countryside,
and the mystery is as much about who the person is as to who killed him: he’d
been using the name “Lundqvist” and claiming to be Swedish, and in that guise
he’d married a local woman, Nola (Natasha Herbert). But all identifying marks
on his clothes, including the tags that would have indicated where they were
made and therefore, likely, where he had acquired them had been carefully cut
off — which at first leads one to believe he’s a fleeing criminal and didn’t
want anyone to know where he’d been. There’s an intriguing red-herring suspect
who claims to be a fellow Swede with no knowledge of English, but he knows
enough of it to understand the police’s simpler questions and answer “Si” when
he means “yes” — but there’s also another clue: a poem about Persephone by
Australian poet A. M. Hope and a volume of Hope’s poems in which that
particular page has been torn out.
Naturally, the official police couldn’t care
less about poetry, but Dr. Blake deduces that the poem about Persephone
contains a clue, a cipher that leads him to the Ballarat Historical Society
(Ballarat hardly seems like a big or important enough place to have enough of a history to merit an historical society,
though the impression we get was that in the 19th century Ballarat
was an important mining town and therefore it was considerably larger than it
is in the late-1950’s “present” in which the series is set) and the two women
who run the place, Elise Patrick (Edwina Wren) and Martha Harris (Sybilla
Budd). The gimmick is that the mystery “Lundqvist” was a master seducer of
women; he’d also been around the world posing as various nationalities,
including Dutch, and had literally
had “a girl in every port.” Dr. Blake suspects Elise of having an affair with
him and doing him in when he wouldn’t leave the Australian woman he’d married
for her, but he figures out the real
killer is Martha: it seems our mystery man was a Soviet spy and Martha, as a
member of the Communist Party of Australia, was in charge of making false
identities for him and producing any forged documents needed — only she fell in
love with him and was willing to leave the service of the international
Communist conspiracy for him if he’d agree to stop seeing other women, settle
down and lead a normal life. Only he had no interest in doing that; he was
committed to continuing his James Bond act (albeit on the other side of the
Cold War), traveling around the world and bedding (and, if necessary, marrying)
any of the comely (or not-so-comely) beauties he encountered while doing his
espionage thing. This wasn’t quite as compelling a program as some of the other
recent Doctor Blakes I’ve seen,
but it’s still a fun show and McLachlan’s cool, matter-of-fact performance in a
role that might have tempted another actor to jump, yelp and send his vocal
register up an octave the way Basil Rathbone played Sherlock Holmes really
“makes” this series — as does Nadine Gardiner’s Jean, who’s essentially Dr.
Watson to Blake’s Holmes but is genuinely helpful and in this show actually
gives the key clue that helps her partner solve the mystery: she recognizes a
set of numbers in the cipher, which Blake thinks are only a key to further
decoding, as the Ballarat Historical Society’s phone number.
