by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a rerun from 2013 of the quite good British TV
series Endeavour, a spinoff of the Inspector
Morse series featuring Endeavour Morse
(Shaun Evans) as a young man working police cases in Oxford in 1965. While one
doesn’t really believe that the rather callow Shaun Evans could grow up to be
the dyspeptic, disillusioned recovering alcoholic and opera fan Inspector Morse
John Thaw played in the contemporarily set (at least starting in 1987, when it
debuted) series from which this spun off, the Endeavour stories have been interesting in that quiet,
slow-moving, oddly polite way with which the British usually do mysteries. This
episode was called “Rocket” and centers around the British Imperial Electric
Corporation (referred to mostly as “British Imperial” or by the indigestible
initials BIEC), whose owners are a long-separated couple named Henry and
Estella Broom (Martin Jarvis and Rosamond Halstead). The Brooms have three sons
— at least until one of them, Harry, died mysteriously — and the episode kicks off
with a visit to the factory by Princess Margaret in 1965 to witness the
production of the first “Steadfast” surface-to-air missile. The company has a
deal to sell 36 of these to Crown Prince Nabil (Darwin Shaw, looking rather
uncomfortable in a Valentino-style burnoose — I used to wish Yasir Arafat had
dressed like that instead of wearing that silly kaffiyeh that looked like he’d
made it himself from a dish towel, but maybe I was wrong) of the “United
Hashemite Kingdoms” — i.e., Jordan, which is the only state actually ruled by
Hashemite Arabs.
There’s a certain question about the guidance system which
writer Russell Lewis mentions and then drops rather casually, but the main
intrigue begins when a factory worker named Percy Malleson (James Merry) is found
murdered in a closet off the factory floor, the killer having taken advantage
of the distraction of Princess Margaret’s visit to do the deed unnoticed.
Malleson is discovered to have had a stopwatch on him when he died, and the
cops and the factory management instantly suspect he was there as a management
spy doing time-and-motion studies to figure out ways to speed production, and
this would have aroused the antagonism of the workers in general and the leader
of the plant’s union, Reg Tracepurcel (Craig Parkinson), in particular. But it
turns out that “Percy Malleson” wasn’t the victim’s real name; he was actually
well-to-do enough to have shoes custom-made for him (there’s a marvelous scene
between Morse and the shoemaker, a prissy old queen type, in which the
shoemaker gives the background on his mysterious customer and adds with more
resignation than bitterness, “He never paid me for them, you know”) and he
turns out to be someone who fled to South Africa rather than be suspected of
the murder of a girl who disappeared on the day of another Royal distraction, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth
II on June 2, 1953 (three months and two days before my birthday, and at the
rate things are going and especially
given how much longer-lived the Windsor women are than the Windsor men —
Elizabeth’s and Margaret’s mother lived to be 101! — I’m unlikely to see
another British coronation in my lifetime!).
Malleson fled to South Africa and
hid out there for 12 years, then returned and took a job at British Imperial because
he suspected one of the Broom sons was really responsible for killing the girl
— it wasn’t known for sure that she was dead until the investigation of
Malleson’s murder led to a search on the Broom property and the discovery of
her remains — and in the meantime there’s another death on the British Imperial
factory floor, worker Lenny Frost (Jack Roth). There’s also a rocket scientist
who worked on the “Steadfast” who turns out to speak German — because before
1947 he was in Germany working on their rocket program at Pëenemunde — though this, too, is a plot line
dropped by writer Lewis without so much as a by-your-leave. Eventually it turns
out that the Broom boys are innocent of the crime and the real villain is [spoiler
alert!] the union boss Reg Tracepurcel, who
was having his own affair with the missing girl and killed her in a fit of
jealousy or something. It also turns out that Morse has been dating one of the
women who works in the British Imperial offices and pumping her for
information, though she dumps him at the end (he’s got two tickets to the
opening of Ingmar Bergman’s new movie but she backs out of the date — and of
course writer Lewis couldn’t resist the old joke about Bergman, having one of
Morse’s fellow cops say, “I thought she was cracking in Casablanca”) and it’s unclear what Morse does personally after
that even though at least he has the satisfaction of having solved the murders.
At least in the final sequence we get to see Morse do the two things the
character is most famous for — listen to opera (not Wagner this time but “Va,
pensiero,” the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s star-making opera Nabucco) and drink. “Rocket” wasn’t thrilling drama but it
was a nice, quiet, relatively civilized British murder mystery with an interesting
central “sleuth” character — even though he got a good deal more interesting
when he got older!
