UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift (1987)

 

The British cozy—the village whodunit with a small cast of characters/suspects and a semirural English setting—is the place to find more Briticisms per page than any other genre of English literature. When they walk up the shingle path it’s really gravel, every yard is a garden, the mangel-wurzels growing over there are beets, the herbaceous border is an edging of perennial plants, and the saloon parked in the layby probably has a body in its boot.

Caroline Graham breaks the cozy mold in this, her first mystery, because the killings at Badger’s Drift are grislier than the usual Miss Marple deaths, while her Inspector Tom Barnaby makes the book more like a small-town police procedural. Barnaby runs the crime investigation unit in Causton, the county town—Americans would say the county seat—of the county where the village of Badger’s Drift is located. All these locales and names are fictional, though the county bears some resemblance to Somerset.

Inspector Barnaby’s major cross in life, aside from his assistant the foolish Sergeant Troy, is his wife’s inability to cook a decent meal. Imagine Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret or Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache in such a horrid pickle, as it were. Poor Joyce Barnaby can even ruin a salad. As a result Barnaby’s pills for upset stomach are as distinctive to him as Sherlock Holmes’s pipe, and he jumps at the chance to eat at the station cafeteria instead of going home.

Barnaby is an old hand who knows how to ask questions and then shut up until he gets a response from his subject, however recalcitrant or truculent. He isn’t brilliant, but he’s smarter than most of those around him. If you judge a mystery by how well the solution is concealed, this one should rank high for you. My own approach is not to try to solve the puzzle, but if the solution is so obvious that I can see it without trying, I don’t think much of the mystery. Caroline Graham does a good job of surprising us with her ending here. And the book has an inventive use of the red herring when Barnaby solves a cold case that looks like it will break open the mystery of the current murders, but it only diverts suspicion from the real culprit. Graham’s style is workmanlike, she can be funny, and there are no literary pretensions here, although she presents us with both a real clue and a false one derived from Elizabethan plays.

In 1997 this book was adapted as the first episode of the British ITV series The Midsomer Murders, which is still running, though Graham wrote only seven novels featuring Inspector Barnaby, and only five of these were used in the ITV series. In 1990 the Crime Writer’s Association placed The Killings at Badger’s Drift on its list of “the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time.” I think you’ll like it.