Rural Gore

 

On the case: Chief Inspector Barnaby and sidekick Sergeant Jones

I must begin by announcing a week’s intermission in the blog, which I shall hope to reanimate on September 11.  We are about to fly to the south of France for a week of restorative hanging out with very old friends.  Such a prospect can never be anything but pleasing though I do have to register in my current circumstances some small degree of apprehension about the travel, my mode these days being rather slow and creaky.

            For the past week or so I have been feeling so valetudinarian, indeed, that I have shamefully little to report by way of achievement.  What with infirmity and an ever expanding realization of the extent of the mess that continues to be American politics, I have mainly sought escape and a surcease of sorrows in the “free” Netflix available through my computer.  I have immersed myself in an apparently endless British detective series—“Midsomer Murders.”  I am generally late in learning about these things, and my many hip readers doubtless already know all about it.  But it is in my opinion very well done, and it satisfies my own requirements for an enjoyable murder mystery.  The first of these is that there is not the slightest possibility of taking the murder part (usually several murders per episode) very seriously, any more than one can take the plot of the medieval pastourelle seriously.  Content is merely the necessary implication of style.  Secondly, the episodes are seriously long—roughly an hour and a quarter—so that I generally nod off for a moment or two, and I am never smart enough to figure out who did it.  And when I do find out who did it, I still am never sure why.

            The series, which is very well written and for the most part very well acted, gains most of its power through cognitive dissonance.  Midsomer is an imaginary British county in southern England (think Oxfordshire).  Its county town, Corston, is presumably some version of Banbury or Swindon; and the place is thick with the most beautiful ye-olde, Costwoldy  English villages the Tourist Board can come up with, each replete with a fine old church, a sixteenth-century manor house, thatched cottages and domestic gardens to die for.  There is always at least one great pub (pre-pinball), and pleached alleys, meandering streams and old canals, and absolutely gorgeous stonework everywhere.  This idyllic time-warped landscape is populated by a mixed population of Angela Thirkell characters, some really nasty vestiges of the old ruling class who have adopted very contemporary vices, and little old ladies galore.  These folks regularly bump each other off at an average rate of three per hour--by blade, rope, water, poison, farm machines, asphyxiation, explosion, fire, and (default mayhem) blunt force trauma to the head.  There are quite a few more or less conventional gunshot deaths, usually by birdshot fired at close range from muskets first used at the Battle of Marston Moor.  In one of the more macabre episodes two victims are actually guillotined during the filming of The Scarlet Pimpernel in the courtyard of a baronial mansion in the village of Midsomer Magna.  It is typical of the work’s delightful surrealism that everybody in the film’s cast, including the pensioners imported as extras from the Old People’s Home to form a chorus of oppressed peasants, treat the first beheading as roughly as important as an extra’s sprained ankle.  Nobody bats an eye.  The usual motives are sex and money, but in very kinky versions of each; some of the killers are simply crazy as coots.  Character stereotypes walk shamelessly at will through the episodes: the concealed bastard heir, the grizzled village hermit, weird, obsessive hobbyists.  That portion of the Anglican clergy (of either sex) who are not actually the murderer themselves take clerical fuddy-duddyism to levels not to be found even in Trollope.  

 Convener of the Women's Institute, Midsomer Noxia

            The director has a great time with “conventions”.  There is an amiable old forensic pathologist, George, and nearly every episode features the obligatory scene in which the chief detective arrives on the scene to find George and his mates, all of them decked out in nifty little blue plastic jump suits suggesting they ought to be in “Star Wars”, discussing the peculiarities of some atrocious wound or the surprising contents of the defunct’s GI tract, which may or may not include a revelatory flash disk.  This being a British show, much is made of class distinctions.  The CID officers get all the glory.  The regular coppers, referred to as the “uniforms,” are numerous but silent; they also serve who only stand and wait—and, of course, endlessly and obscurely rummage around the outdoor crime scenes with long poles, occasionally scoring an old candy wrapper.      

 Alexander Pope's Tower, Stanton Harcourt, Oxon.

             I don’t recognize any of the villages, though I probably should.  Sixty years past I spent a fair amount of time cycling around such places in the environs of Oxford.  There was a charming village (at least in memory) called Great Tew.  It witnessed the apex of my brief but spectacular cricket career.   There I hit a ball so far into the woods, baseball style, that they never found it.  Another timeless beauty spot was the village of Stanton Harcourt.  It has a connection with the poet Alexander Pope, who was a friend of the lord of the manor, who loaned him a romantic tower in which to work away at his translations of Homer.  A curious and tragic incident took place on the estate about that time.  A betrothed couple of agricultural workers, having sought refuge beneath a large tree in a sudden rain shower, were killed by a lightning strike.  Pope wrote a conventional moralistic squib about the incident, which can be found in his complete works.  To his friend Mary Wortley Montague he wrote something a little naughtier:

Here lie two poor lovers, who had the mishap
Tho’ very chaste people, to die of a clap.

There have been several electrocutions in the “Midsomer Murders”, but as yet no orchestrated lightning.