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.
Tho’ very chaste people, to die of a clap.
There have been several
electrocutions in the “Midsomer Murders”, but as yet no orchestrated lightning.
