Midsomer Murders: "Saints and Sinners" (Bentley Productions, ITV, PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a rerun of a 2016 episode of the British TV series Midsomer Murders, dealing with a fictitious “Midsomer County” in central England in which detective chief inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and a younger, cuter detective sergeant – here Charlie Nelson (Gwylim Lee), which my husband enjoyed since his name is Charles Nelson, investigate oddball murders that frequently involve some sort of big public event that the killer or killers are trying to sabotage for their own reasons. The episode we watched was called “Saints and Sinners” and deals with the annual festival of “Midsomer Cecily,” which honors a deceased martyr of 16th Century England who was standing up for Protestantism in the fiercely Roman Catholic era of so-called “Bloody Mary,” the daughter of Henry VIII who took the throne after the death of her younger half-brother Edward VI and sought to exterminate any challenges to the Roman Catholic orthodoxy she had inherited from her mother, Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon. For years the local vicar, Rev. Peter Canby (Malcolm Sinclair), has been doing a land-office business exhibiting the alleged remains of the martyr Cecily Milson, which are on display in the local church and around which an annual “Cecily Day” festival is held.

Only Peter Canby’s brother, historian Christopher Canby (Adan Gillen), is convinced that the bones on display in Peter’s church aren’t those of the rean Cecily Milson, so he invites an archaeological team to do a “dig” on the grounds of the former Milson estate to see if they can excavate the remains of the real Cecily. The leader of this dig is Zoe Dyer (Kim Virhana), who announces to her team that she’s found Cecily’s real bones and can prove it. To celebrate she marches her team to the local bar and offers to buy drinks for everybody, only to find her generosity angrily rejected by the townspeople, who are making money from the Cecily Milson festival and don’t want its authenticity questioned by a team of scientists or anyone else. Later Zoe goes out to the dig site with a bottle of champagne, intending to meet someone – she’s married to fellow archaeologist Alex Dyer (Jonathan Aris) but is given to extra-relational flings with some of her younger, hotter, hunkier assistants, and at the moment the flame she wants to haul her ashes is Jared Horton (Ralf Little). Instead she literally gets buried alive when an unseen assailant shoves her into the burial site, then uses a steam shovel literally to bury her alive. She is knocked unconscious by the force of the blow, and though she at least partially comes to later it’s too late to save her from the relentless onslaught of the dirt.

Later her husband Alex is killed when a tombstone is dropped onto him, and still later Christopher Canby, the historical researcher who led the Dyers to the dig site in the first place, is literally stabbed in the back with a 16th century pike just as he’s on the phone to a book publisher saying he has a sensational scoop that will make a best-seller. It seems that when the Milsons were dragged into prison and Cecily was tortured to death while her parents fled to France (not exactly the most hospitable place in Europe for Protestants fleeing religious persecution, either; remember the massacre of the Huguenots in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572), they collected their belongings, including quite a lot of gold jewelry. They buried the treasure somewhere on the estate where the modern-day archaeologists are digging up the remains of the real Cecily Milson. Most of the archaeologists are convinced the “treasure” is a myth, but a so-called “nighthawk” – an unscrupulous person who brings a metal detector to archaeological sites in search of valuables – named Dexter Ingram (Stefano Braschi) has found the clasp with which the treasure box was fastened, itself solid gold and verified as authentic because it’s shown on a contemporary painting of the original Cecily Milson.

So the treasure exists after all, and after a long period of being embroiled in other intrigues – including the adulterous affair between Rev. Peter Corby’s Black associate pastor, Bartholomew Hines (Kingsley Ben-Adir), and Rhiannon Sawney (Pippa Nixon), a white married woman (we do get a nice, reasonably hot soft-core porn scene between them even though they were fully clothed and so I didn’t get any of the color contrasts of skin on skin that usually excite me about interracial sex scenes), and the murder of the previous pastor in 2002 or 2003 of which Rniannon’s husband Noah (Edward MacLiam) may have been implicated – some valuable, if modern, precious-metal pieces from the church’s altar are found during the course of this story – ultimately the police deduce that all the killings have something to do with the treasure. They’re ready to arrest Peter Corby for the murder of his brother, whom he’d long hated, but in the end the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Penny Henderson (Julia Sawalha), a research assistant on the dig, and her motive is to eliminate rival claimants to the treasure, to which she las a legal right because she’s the last surviving descendant of the original Milson family. She tries to hold someone hostage but eventually the police talk her down and arrest her – and also arrest Rev. Peter Corby for fraud.

One of the key things about Midsomoer Murders is that the cops almost never arrest just one person; instead, ikn the course of their investigation, other crimes come to light, so even if the poiice can’t arrest someone for murder they can stilel arrest them for something. – in Peter’s case for fraud. Midsomner Murders is a consisteltly interestng show even though the writers (here, Lisa Holdsworthy) tend to overdo the sheer number of suspects and make it hard to keep track of all of them. The series as a whole has a kind of pastoral gentility relatively common in British mysteries, though American whodunits generally are a lot more in-your-face about violence and the darker sides of human nature.