by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 10 p.m. last night I
watched a two-part episode of the British TV show Midsomer Murders — which has actually been running for 24 seasons,
longer than Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and is a series of murder mysteries set in the
fictitious “Midsomer County” in central England. This was a two-part story
called “A Vintage Murder” and dealt with a struggling vineyard owned by William
Carnarvon (Mark Bonnar) and his wife Diana (Ruth Gemmell). The show opens with
a large outdoor party at which the Carnarvons are supposed to introduce their
latest product, a white sparkling wine they have great hopes for; they’re
hoping it will be a spectacular success and save the vineyard from going broke
and out of business. My husband Charles pointed out to me that, while the
United Kingdom doesn’t exactly have the reputation of being one of the world’s
great wine producers, parts of Britain have similar climate to northern
California and British wines have acquired more of a reputation for quality in
the last two decades or so. The Carnarvons have flown in respected wine critic
Nadia Simons (Naoko Mori) — the character is visibly Asian but presumably
acquired an Anglo name by marriage, though she’s single at the time of the
story — to review their new product. Only, in the middle of their event, Nadia
pronounces the new wine as so awful it’s virtually undrinkable, and later we
find that Nadia was a corrupt critic; the wine magazine she was associated with
had fired her for accepting bribes from vintners for quality reviews. The
Carnarvons were clearly giving her an all-expenses-paid trip and various perks
to buy a positive review, so the only reason she would give a negative one is
if someone else bribed her even more. Also among the dramatis personae are local hotel owner Louis Payton (Lloyd Owen)
and his son Kevin (Max Bennett —who looks so much like Owen they’re believable
as father and son), who doesn’t want to inherit the hotel but has instead gone
to work for the Carnarvons as an apprentice vintner and wants to make
winemaking his career.
Meanwhile, the Carnarvons also have a son who doesn’t want to follow in their
footsteps: Ryan (played by Tom Rhys Harries, a young man of almost unearthly beauty),
who’s introduced playing the piano at his parents’ big event and has been
studying for a career as a classical virtuoso — though he’s being distracted
from his practice schedule by his infatuation with Tina Tyler (Sandra
Bartlett). Her parents are still grieving
over the death of Tina’s younger sister 10 years earlier — she was run down by
a hit-and-run driver and her parents Roger (Wayne Foskett) and Judy (Rosie
Cavallaro) are convinced Nadia Simons was the culprit. Their vengeful fantasies
are activated by Nadia’s sudden reappearance in town, and soon enough Nadia is
herself run down in a car after she got plastered, DCI John Barnaby (Neil
Dudgeon, the series’ star) takes her car keys away and offers her a ride to the
hotel where she’s staying (Payton’s place — no pun intended —which is the only
one in town) but she instead calls a friend and waits at a bench, swilling down
one of two bottles of wine she’s boosted from somewhere, presumably the
Carnarvons’ cellar. We get the message that she’s gone from someone who samples
wine for a living to a hopeless alcoholic, and when she’s killed the medical
examiner reports that she had such an advanced case of alcohol-related
cirrhosis of the liver she was going to die in a year anyway. As if that wasn’t enough, a number of people at the
Carnarvons’ party got severely ill from drinking their wine — not from the wine
itself, but from someone at the Paytons’ bar lacing the inside of the glasses
with anti-slug pesticide, not enough to kill anybody but enough to make them
sick and add to the bad reputation of the Carnarvons’ product. Like most
British mysteries Midsomer Murders throws a lot of red herrings our way, but unlike many of them it racks
up so much of a body count that for a while you get the impression that everyone is either going to end up a victim or a perp.
Elspeth Rice (Selina Griffiths) is a formidable woman who’s both Judy Tyler’s
private nurse and the head of a local group of farmers’ wives determined to
close down the Carnarvon winery because, among other things, its water
consumption is draining the local pond. She comes on so much like Miss Gulch in
the Kansas framing scenes of The Wizard of Oz that when she rode off on her bicycle I started
humming Mussorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain,” and it ultimately turns out it
was she, not Nadia, who ran down
the little Tyler girl a decade earlier. Meanwhile, it turns out that Judy Tyler
killed Nadia because she still believed Nadia had killed her daughter, and she
also kills Louis Payton by shoving him out of a window and causing him to be
impaled on some sort of stake being used in a construction project to remodel
the hotel. In a last-ditch attempt to break up Ryan Carnarvon and Tina Tyler
someone kidnaps her and locks her under the floor of the wine cellar just as
someone else opens the taps of the barrels in which William Carnarvon was
keeping his wine. The kidnapper turns out to be Kevin Payton —it has to be either him or one of the Carnarvons because
they’re the only people who knew that space under the wine buildings’ floor
existed — though the wine saboteur was Matilda Stowe (Claire Bloom, whose
presence in this cast puts everyone else one degree of separation from Charlie
Chaplin and Laurence Olivier!), William Carnarvon’s formidable mother-in-law,
who had saved her late husband’s fortune and put it in trust for Ryan rather
than let her son-in-law get his hands on it and use it to prop up the failing
vineyard. Oh, and did I mention someone nearly gets asphyxiated by an assailant
who sabotages the wine building by filling it with carbon dioxide? “A Vintage
Murder” was quite a nice tale even though the complexities of its plot would
probably have made even Raymond Chandler blush, and it’s certainly not the sort of nice, little story, with just a little
murder to spike the milk of human kindness with acid, Agatha Christie and her
imitators were famous for and are what most people think of when they hear the
term “British murder mystery.”
