The German Woman

A German couple living quietly on the Sussex coast are arrested in the first wave of enemy-alien internment, and the charge against them is a photograph. Thomas Kramer had taken a picture of his wife Elsie at the seaside with a Royal Navy ship in the background; because he is German, a camera is forbidden to him. Elsie collapses under the arrest and dies of a heart attack. Their nephew Mark Andrews, a serving soldier who actually owned the camera, appeals to the local magistrate Henry Beaumont and is turned away. It is May 1940, and the series' first move is to show the British state doing to its own refugees what the war is supposedly being fought against.

Into this setting comes DCS Christopher Foyle, refused a transfer from the Sussex force for the third time and left in Hastings. He is issued with a driver from the Mechanised Transport Corps, Samantha Stewart, who turns out to be a young woman; he tells her to take him where he needs to go and not to ask what he is doing. His current case is a racket in which call-up papers are mislaid for men whose families can pay, run through the corrupt civil servant Bob Keegan, and the thread leads into the Beaumont household. Beaumont has used his influence to keep his second wife, Greta, a Sudeten German refugee, out of internment: a doctor has certified her as too ill to be moved although she rides out daily. The town resents the exemption, and the resentment curdles when a single German bomber empties its load and kills a barmaid, Tracey Stephens. Ray Pritchard, her young suitor, is left bereaved.

Greta is then found murdered on her ride, almost decapitated, and Foyle establishes that piano wire had been strung between two trees on her usual route, which places the killer inside her routine and probably inside her household. A second killing follows: Ian Judd, who had been blackmailing a member of the Beaumont circle, is murdered to keep him quiet. The man responsible is Michael Turner, an attorney attached to that circle. Turner was conducting a secret affair with the underage Tracey and intended to marry Beaumont's daughter Sarah to reach the family fortune; Greta opposed the marriage and knew enough to stop it, which is why the wire was set for her. That resolution should be handled with caution: it rests on detailed recounts of the episode rather than on the reference article, which states the case differently, and a writer would want to see the film before printing the killer's name as settled. Foyle meanwhile talks Paul Milner, a former policeman whose leg was amputated after the Norwegian campaign, back into uniform as his sergeant, and his son Andrew is called up into the RAF.

The premiere's strength is that it establishes the series' argument before it establishes its detective. The internment policy is not a backdrop; it is the engine, and the solution leaves the class structure that waived the rules intact, which is why the ending is melancholy rather than consoling. Rosamund Pike plays Sarah Beaumont and Robert Hardy the magistrate, and the household side of the plot is carried with an assurance the mystery does not always match. The weakness is structural: Greta's death is withheld for roughly half the running time, and the first hour is crowded with internment, the call-up fraud and the Beaumont set-up before the murder takes hold. It is nonetheless the right opening, because it introduces the Foyle, Sam and Milner team and shows a new series prepared to be about its setting rather than merely to use it.