Midsomer Murders: "Claws Out" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 18, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Thursday, January 22, after the two Law and Order episodes I watched with Charles, I briefly lighted on CBS for what I hoped would be another Elsbeth episode but it was another Matlock show instead. So instead I went on to PBS for another rerun of Midsomer Murders, this one an episode called “Claws Out” that begins with the murder of Frank Bailey (Nathan Sussex). Frank Bailey formed a major tech company and then sold it and retired, but when he settled in Midsomer County he found a number of people complaining about the mysterious disappearances of their pet cats and dogs. So he started investigating and soon formed a business as literally a pet detective. He’s currently on the trail of a large dog named “Storm,” a Czechoslovakian variant of a German shepherd, whose owners are Aden Hughes (Adam Scarborough) and his wife Eshani (Mina Anwar). We first meet Eshani at an Indian restaurant called Tandoor (no “i”), where she’s predictably upset when a waiter spills food all over her tight-fitting red dress. We also learn that Andrew’s ex-wife is now the wife of the owner of Tandoor, only they had the occasional fuck for old time’s sake. While all this is going on Sarah Barnaby (Fiona Dolman), wife of the show’s central “sleuth” character Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon, who’s also listed as executive producer), is trying to train her dog for an upcoming “Dog Agility Contest” sponsored by Madeleine Saunders (Josette Simons), a tall, rail-thin African-British woman whose son Edison died years before while he was in medical school and seemingly headed for a stellar career as a doctor. Edison left instructions that on his death his organs were to be donated for transplants, and Madeleine gave Edison’s heart to Reece Fleming (Joe Edgar), either the younger son or the grandson of crusty, irascible old landowner William Fleming (Duncan Preston). Fleming also has a son named Perry (Charlie Condou), who works locally as a gardener and who’s supposedly Gay, though as with the Gay character on last night’s Law and Order and all too many “movie Gays,” we never see him either emotionally, romantically, or sexually involved with another man. There’s also a real young cutie named Tai Yang (Tom Moya), who’s more or less the boyfriend of Madeleine’s daughter Danielle (Tia May Watts) – we’re introduced to both him and Reese Fleming in Danielle’s bedroom, though when Madeleine walks in on them everything appears to be innocent.

Madeleine is determined to send Danielle to medical school to fulfill her ambition, frustrated by Edison’s death, to have a doctor in the family, but Danielle couldn’t be less interested in it. Instead she wants to take at least a year off her education and tour the world with Tai, starting with Canada. Tai is the nephew of Frank Bailey, and he’s living in a trailer (a “caravan,” they call it in Britain even though it’s just one unit) on William Fleming’s land. But when Frank Bailey is killed, and his body stuffed inside the kennel formerly occupied by the Hughes’s dog Storm, his will is read and it leaves Tai one-half of his estate. Needless to say, his widow Kim (Catherine Tyldesley) isn’t happy about this, and when Tai is himself murdered a week before his 21st birthday Kim heaves a sigh of relief that now she’s going to get all her husband’s fortune. (At the end she takes down the sign that said, “Frank Bailey/Pet Detective” and puts one up with her own name.) A third victim emerges: Lorna McIntosh (Josie Lawrence), who at first appears to be a dotty old lady, well out of it mentally, who’s collected other people’s cats and is raising them herself. Later she turns out to be a retired information technology professor (there’s a nice bit of dialogue where Barnaby’s associate, detective sergeant Jamie Winter – played by red-headed hunk Nick Hendrix – realizes that they’d been assuming that she was the widow of Professor McIntosh and now they know she was Professor McIntosh). Alas, Lorna gets strangled by an unseen assailant wielding a dog trapping device with which she’s dispatched to cat heaven. In the end [spoiler alert!] Perry Fleming turns out to have been the killer of both Frank and Tai, though he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer already (given that I lived through the 1980’s, once I heard a Gay man had been diagnosed with a terminal disease I immediately assumed it was AIDS!). The real villain turns out to be [double spoiler alert!] Madeleine Saunders, who for reasons that escape me at the moment (one of Charles’s complaints about this particular episode is how weak writer Helen Jenkins was in terms of giving people actual motives) wanted to target Tai for having allegedly led her daughter astray, though on her orders Perry killed Frank by mistake before she aimed him correctly at Tai because they were both wearing similar motorcycle outfits. Then Madeleine dispatched Lorna herself after she realized Lorna might be a witness. After the previous Midsomer Murders episode shown one week earlier, “Book of the Dead” – a well-constructed thriller with a plot that made sense – “Claws Out” was a real disappointment, and it’s hard to believe that Madeleine could get Perry to commit murders for her by threatening him with an allegedly “cancer-sniffing dog” that could “out” him as terminally ill.