The Killings at Badger's Drift (Inspector Barnaby, #1) (Midsomer Murders)

by Caroline Graham

[Cameron Trost]

So many years after first discovering The Killings at Badger's Drift on TV, I decided to give the original novel a go. The long and short of it is that the book misses out on matching the spellbinding atmosphere and quirkiness of the Midsomer Murders series by a country mile. We have Barnaby and Troy, whose personalities are quite different from those of their onscreen incarnations, and that was an aspect I quite liked; Barnaby is more caustic and overweight and our redheaded Troy more abrupt and "common". The atmosphere is there, with great descriptions of village life, cottages, and flowers in rural England, and the characters are delightfully stereotypical, which really is the point, isn't it? The unravelling of the mystery, however, ought to have been more developed in the book. There are three murders solved at the end of the book. The identity of the culprit/s wasn't surprising and the solution wasn't particularly clever; it was rather convoluted in fact.

In summary, as is often the case with well-known mysteries since the Golden Age, the story was interesting but the mystery itself weak. I probably won't go out of my way to read more of Caroline Graham's work. Do you know of other authors with similar settings but a strong fair-play mystery at the centre of the plot? Do let me know.