Masterpiece Contemporary: Place of Execution, PBS, November 2 and 9

Reviewed by Curt Evans

Place of Execution is an interesting but logically and psychologically flawed British adaptation of a celebrated 1999 detective novel, A Place of Execution, by Val McDermid. (Apparently the people behind Masterpiece Contemporary were too hip to include the "A".) The crime drama is quite well-acted (it even had Phlip Jackson, the longtime Inspector Japp from the brilliant David Suchet Poirot series, ably handling a very serious role) and well-filmed. The first part is quite gripping.

The second half, however, collapses into a muddle of implausibility. It’s a good example of how a modern, supposedly realistic crime tale can ultimately end up no more realistic–or even less so–than the oft-maligned Golden Age detective novel, in terms of its exploration of human motivations and psychology.

Place of Execution involves the supposed murder of a young girl in a remote, inbred, Cold Comfort Farm type of English village in the early 1960s. No body is found, but the zealous young police detective finds evidence that the girl’s stepfather, the snobbish squire who looks on the locals as so much dirt on his shoe, raped the girl over a series of years and later murdered her.

The squire is put on trial, found guilty, and hanged. (Apparently Great Britain still allowed the death penalty for gun murders at this time.) Forty years later, however, a documentary filmmaker (a cliched harassed single mother trying to balance her career with taking care of her troubled teenage daughter; she’s played by Juliet Stevenson) discovers evidence that the court’s conviction of the squire may not have constituted the true solution of the affair.

Spoiler warning: to analyze the rest of the film, I will have to give away additional plot elements.

It turns out that not only was the snobby squire the rapist of the missing girl, but of all the children, male and female, of the village. However, he was not the murderer of his stepdaughter. No one killed her. She was part of a set-up by the whole village to frame the squire for murder–which succeeded splendidly, I must say!

Unfortunately, this is all quite ridiculous. In reality it is much more likely that the villagers would either have (1) gone to the police with evidence of rape (among other things, the rapist evidently took hundreds of explicit photos of his sex acts) and gotten this guy put away for that, or (2) had one of their number simply run a pitchfork through the squire’s entrails one dark night.

The villagers, after all, are portrayed as having been a bunch of rough, violent yokels; it’s exceedingly difficult to believe that they would have stood such horror for as long as they are claimed to have done, and then would resorted to such a complex plot as they are claimed to have hatched as a means of stopping the squire and his unspeakable activities.

This latter involves having the stepdaughter move to Canada (later followed by her mother) and the creation of much false evidence for the girl’s "murder" in order to lead police to the squire. At one point these people are portrayed angrily threatening the documentary filmmaker with bodily violence for snooping in the village. Ca we really be expected to believe that no one would have impulsively (and justifiably) killed the squire years ago for raping every child in the village?

This absurd solution seems to be driven by two imperatives, one traditional and one modern: (1) the need to come up with a "surprise" solution, as in a Golden Age detective novel (though any true fan of Golden age detective fiction would know something was up when the girl’s body was never found!) and (2) the author’s evident desire to make a class statement about how members of England’s traditional landed gentry are really ruthless exploiters, literally raping the peasantry. We’re asked to believe, in effect, that squires still ruled villages with iron fists in 1960s England as they may have done in the Dark Ages.

Whatever the author’s motives for concocting this ludicrous resolution, it is certainly no more "realistic" than one might find in a particularly arch Golden Age detective novel. In fact, the famous solution of a particularly brilliant and popular Agatha Christie novel I won’t name here (so as not to spoil it for those who have yet to read it)–where a kidnapper and murderer unjustly let off by the legal system is later himself murdered by an organized conspiracy of twelve men and women, a jury of his peers–is more believable than that offered in Place of Execution. Moreover, the brilliant, unapologetic puzzlemaker Christie didn’t make a fetish out of purported "realism" the way modern crime novelists so often do.

To be sure, McDermid skillfully and laudably follows Golden Age plot construction conventions here. We have the ostensible solution (the squire did it!), the false true solution (the obsessed police detective did it!!), and the final, true true solution (no one did it!!!). This is pleasing from the standpoint of pure plot enjoyment (however foreseeable to a Golden age aficionado), but it simply is not realistic. And that is a big fault, when an author tries to be realistic in portraying human character and then offers such a psychologically implausible (if nicely turned) solution.

This is why many critics have argued over the years that the mystery novel is a difficult balancing act between plot ingenuity (or contrivance) and realistic characterization. In a detective novel peopled by obvious puppets of the author, we don’t worry about apparent psychologically implausibilities that aren’t overly important or openly silly–when the puppets take a questionable step or two. In a crime novel that strives to be realistic, however, the resort to a psychologically implausible, if clever, solution is more jarring than pleasing.

Modern crime novels often outpace Golden Age detective stories in the graphic presentation of unpleasant, "real life" subject matter (as in this case, with the use of child rape as a plot device), but they are not necessarily any more plausible in their handling of human nature. Compare, for example, the novels of A Place of Execution and, say, Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun and their film adaptations and you’ll see what I mean.

–Curt Evans