'Bookish' Recap: Episode 4

Bookish airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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The journalist Nerina Bean is dead, found dressed as a mailman extra for the film Lovelorn in London at the bottom of stairs in the studio where the movie is filming. Reviewing footage from the shoot, Gabriel notices that the mailman extra in the background of the shots suddenly gets shorter in between shots: Nerina has taken over. When he and Bliss question the actual mailman extra, he explains that Nerina paid him to borrow his uniform, so he went home early. She was writing a story about the film’s star and needed one more piece of evidence, she told him.

There are some letters on Nerina’s hand, seemingly writing that rubbed off backwards onto her sweaty hand: “ty wins.” It must be a fragment.

Gabriel and Bliss continue to investigate the attempted poisoning of Stewart Howard, Lovelorn in London’s star. Billy, the film gofer whom Stewart just fired as his assistant, has diabetes and thus has a syringe on hand – which could have been used to inject chocolates with strychnine.

Trottie and Nora have been going through back issues of the fan magazine Picturegoer for clues, and found that one writer who always signed letters “Basilisk” continually praised Sandra Dare, Stewart’s co-star and fiancée, and inveighed against Stewart. Perhaps this super fan decided to “free” Sandra of Stewart. 

Trottie brings this information to Gabriel at the studios, explaining its possible significance in front of the crew. They’re on a break from filming, and when the director and writer Jesse Mackendrick drinks his coffee, he starts twitching and collapses, just like Barbara Markham, the extra, did before she died. 

Trottie rushes to make him swallow mascara from the nearby make-up artist: charcoal will counteract strychnine. As Jesse is carried to an ambulance, he asks someone to fetch his bag. Gabriel does, “accidentally” knocking it over first and grabbing a sheaf of papers inside. He then goes and tries coffee straight from the urn from which Jesse was served – everybody else has been drinking it, and it is unpoisoned. 

The sheaf of papers Gabriel grabbed is a script for a new film titled A Plea for Christiana. Gabriel searches his bookshop for the material it was based upon and finds a book about the trial of Christiana Edmunds – and there’s a scrap of paper in it with Jesse’s family crest upon it. Jesse must have browsed the book while living on the same lane as Book’s shop last year.

Christiana Edmunds fell in love with a married doctor and then convinced herself he was in love with her, too. She gave his wife poisoned chocolates so that she could be with him. Furthermore, Gabriel has searched old athletic news, knowing that Jesse was a runner, and found a story about Jesse’s abuse of strychnine as a stimulant to get him through a race – it’s only poisonous in larger amounts.

Jesse is “Basilisk.” He is in love with Sandra and hates Stewart, and wants to kill him and then make Sandra an even bigger star in a “real” film. The publicity she would have received from being widowed would be huge, and his wealthy family could finance the film. Even his initial failure at murder has not stopped him – but Gabriel is a step ahead of him. Gabriel tries to offer Jesse a chance to step away from a second attempted murder, but Jesse doesn’t take it. Fortunately, Gabriel surmised from an unusual last-minute rewrite by Jesse that he was going to poison Stewart with strychnine via a tiny pin on a typewriter used on set while filming. Gabriel has had Billy and Jack replace the pin with an unpoisoned one.  

Jesse faked his own poisoning after hearing Trottie tell Gabriel about “Basilisk,” in order to throw them off his trail. But he faked the effects of strychnine too quickly – it takes a while to have an effect. 

But Jesse didn’t kill Nerina. He has an ironclad alibi for her time of death: he was rewriting the script with his secretary.

He tries to run, but Jack tackles him. In the kerfuffle, Sandra flees to her dressing room and locks herself in.

Because Sandra is responsible for Nerina’s death. Gabriel has figured this out from spotting a film reel hidden under a couch in Sandra’s dressing room at the studio: Kitty Wins the Calcutta Sweep, which has the letters that were left on Nerina’s hand. He then looked it up in an old film almanac. Sandra was in it under a different name, and Nerina had learned about it, as she told Sandra. But if the lost film was revealed, Sandra’s career would have been over, because everyone would have learned she had been in a film long ago and was thus older than they believe. 

During a break in filming, Sandra ran into Nerina leaving the film vault at the studio with a copy of the film – that was the final piece of evidence Nerina needed for her story. She and Sandra fought over the film, and Nerina fell backwards off the stairs to her death. It was an accident.

Everyone worries that Sandra is going to light the film on fire in her locked dressing room – and film is explosive. But she instead dresses up and reappears, going with Gabriel to destroy the film in a solution the vault uses to get rid of worthless old movies. She then turns herself into Bliss when he arrives. 

Jesse will hang, but Sandra might get off easier since Nerina’s death was an accident – or at least Gabriel portrayed it as such, and Sandra is a good actress. The Books will never know for sure.

The Books decide to sit Jack down and tell him the truth. But he has already guessed at something: he thinks Trottie is his mother, since there’s a photo of his dad at a keyboard in her room, and she has been married once before – Jack discovered the marriage certificate. 

“We have rather a lot to tell you,” the Books tell Jack. His father wasn’t Trottie’s lover but Gabriel’s.