I had picked Revolt of the Zombies largely because I wanted something relatively short that would end in time for us to watch ”The Curse of the Ninth,” a better-than-usual episode of the British TV series Midsomer Murders. Set in the fictional “Midsomer County” in the center of England, in the approximate area of Birmingham and Manchester, this series generally deals with murders centered around an annual festival. Its series star is detective chief inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon), who had a rotating cast of characters including a younger partner named Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix, who unlike his namesake Jimi is white and doesn’t play guitar) and medical examiner Dr. Kam Karimore (Manjinder Virk), who in this episode exits Midsomer County to take a job in Montreal, Canada. (That’s one way of getting rid of an inconvenient character.) I liked this one better than most Midsomer Murders episodes mainly because it deals with the world of classical music: a talented but egomniac composer-conductor, Malcolm Faulconer (James Fleet) is about to premiere his ninth symphony at the local summer music festival. He’s also running a competition for music students and is about to award the top prize to reclusive young violinist Jacob Wheeler (Callum Blake), who supposedly is so absorbed by his musical career he has no time for women. In fact he’s carrying on a secret affair with a married woman in town.
Jacob is killed just after he’s announced as the pricze winner, and among the key suspects is Zak Sowande (Matthew Jacobs Morgan), African-British son of a gardener, Warwick Sowande (Cyril Nri), who’s just been laid off by the wealthy couple who own the estate on which the festival is taking place, Hamish Rafferty (Robert Daws) and his wife Candice (Rosie Holden). Candice has launched a distillery on the property making designer gin, and to finance this she’s got her husband to jack up the ticket prices (the festival used to be free) and turn the event into as much of a cash cow as possible. Jacob is found murdered – predictably, we first learn of this when he’s called to take his palace in the orchestra for the second half of the concert and he doe3sn’t show up – and the priceless Stradivarius violin he was playing, on lona from a Dutch collector, is missing. Ther’es also a power struggle within ht orchestra for the position of first violinist, which has just been vacated by Jacob’s death, and among the claimants are Falconer’s own son Dan (Joseph Prowen) and Jacob’s sister Natalie (Florence Spencer-Longhurst). And if those weren’t enough suspects for you, there’s also Vernon De Harthog (Simon Callow), a violist in the orchestra with a record of petty thefts from previous groups he’s played with, who’s only eliminated when he himself is found dead from hand-ground strychnine poison used in the Raffertys’ garden to control pests. There’s also a frustrated musician turned blogger named Ivo Baxter (Colin Michael Carmichael), who stole the Stradivarius after Jacob’s murder because he didn’t think anyone else in the orchestra was entitled to use so valuable an instrument.
That’s one of the trademarks of Midsumer Murders – the sheer number of crimes uncovered in the main investigation and the large number of characters who end up in police custody at the end – but overall I quite liked this one, especially because of its clever use of the superstition that any composer since Beethoven is cursed to die either just before or just after finishing this ninth symphony. Franz Schubert died after composing just seven finished symphonies and one famously unfinished, though Symphonies 7 and 10 have been cobbled together from fragments he left behind. Anton Bruckner died after completing three of the projected four movements of is ninth symphony (though he’d actually written two earlier symphonies before his numbered ones, and when Bruckner and his friends discovered one of them among his manuscripts and they urged him to publish it but debated on what number to give it, Bruckner famously said, “Just call it Die Nüllte – ‘The Zero’”). Gustav Mahler died after having started a 10th Symphony, though once again he left enough bits and pieces that various musicologists have written their own completions. On the other hand, there have been composers since Beethoven who’ve completed more than nine symphonies; Dmitri Shostakovich made it to 15 and fellow Russian Nikolai Miaskovsky made it to 27. British composer Havergal Brian completed 32 symphonies in the 20th century, and American Alan Hovhaness cranked out 66 – a number approaching Haydn’s 104 and competing with Mozart’s 41 in a much shorter life span.
