Midsomer Murders: “Red in Tooth and Claw” (Bentley Productions, ITV, PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s episode of Midsomer Murders, an engaging British mystery show set in a fictitious rural county called “Midsomer” located in central England that’s been running steadily since 1997, was originally aired on January 14, 2017 though the copyright date was 2016. It was called “Red in Tooth and Claw” and dealt with a so-called “small pets fair” hosted at the estate of Delphi Hartley (Susan Hampshire, who played the wife of John Churchill, founder of the Churchill dynasty, in the 1970’s British TV miniseries The First Churchills). “Small pets” seems to mean rabbits, guinea pigs and other assorted “cute” rodents, and the intrigue kicks off when Tim Benson (Steve Pemberton) is confronted by Seb Huntington (Maxim De Villiers). At first I thought Seb was going to turn out to be an animal-rights activist attempting to sabotage the show for political reasons – before the confrontation we see him open the rabbit cages and turn all the beasts loose – but he really works for real-estate agent Cleo Langton (Stirling Gallacher – that’s a woman, by the way) and he’s trying to get Delphi to sell the estate to him, which would put the small-pets fair out of business. Tim Benson is fiercely protective of his prize-winning rabbit Hercules, who’s won the competition five years in a row and could therefore fetch up to 200 pounds in stud fees every time he impregnates an identically pedigreed female rabbit – only the release of the rabbits has imperiled the whole rabbit-breeding business in the area because, loosed and free to roam wherever they will, the rabbits are screwing each other like, well, rabbits, without regard to their carefully maintained pedigrees or bloodlines.

Benson is also the owner of a pet supplies store called Furtastic with his estranged wife Alisa (Sara Crowe), and when Seb is found stabbed among the rabbit cages with blood all over him – his killer stabbed him and apparently hit an artery, resulting in a quick and massive loss of blood that killed him relatively quickly, both Bensons claim they were in the shop doing a stock check that night. Only Cleo was the only one of the two who was actually doing that: Tim was actually at his daughter Belinda Thissel’s (Vanessa Hehir) home. She’s the wife of the local hotel owner, Perry Tressel (Tom Price), who two decades earlier wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper calling for the end of the small-pets show on the ground that it was cruel to the animals, but since then he’s become reconciled to it, at least partly because the revenue from guests coming in from out of town to attend the show is a major part of his income. At the end of the first episode (the producers of Midsomer Murders made their episodes two-parters but PBS blessedly edits them together into a single continuity for their showings) Cleo Langton, the real-estate agent Seb Huntington worked for, is herself killed. It seems that, even though she’s a rabbit breeder herself, she’s developed a late-in-life allergy to rabbit fur. Her own rabbit is short-haired and that she can handle, but long-haired rabbit fur is literally death to her – she starts inhaling it in her car and ends up collapsing and dying as she frantically looks for the anti-allergy injection pens she always carries and finds they’re no longer there.

There’s also a subplot involving a family from India, father Jayesh Varma (Navinder Bhath) and his sons Dhruv (Simon Nagra) and Shray (Amit Shah), and Cleo Langton’s daughter Tegan (Aisling Loftus), who was dating Seb even though Shray had a crush on her. It also turns out that the prize-winning rabbit Hercules was murdered before the action began by Alisa Benson – who had given her husband the rabbit-or-me choice and then got pissed off when he picked the rabbit – which forced Tim to find another, similar-looking rabbit and pass it off as Hercules to get the stud fees. There’s also the increasing indebtedness of Delphi Hartley, who as a sideline writes historical romance novels but can’t get them published anymore because modern-day publishers want her to ramp up the sexual content. (They probably also want her to submit her manuscripts on computer files, or at least typewritten: the one book of hers we see – which she burns at the end when she realizes there’s no longer a market for her work – is written in longhand.) She grimly acknowledges that though she’s published 30 books, she could be accused of writing the same book 30 times (recalling Stravinsky;s joke about Vivaldi: “He didn’t write 900 concerti, he wrote one concerto 900 times”), and eventually both Millers get arrested for fraud in his case and for – I wasn’t sure what, killing a rabbit? – in hers, but neither of them are the killers.

The killer turns out to be Shray Varma (who was a logical suspect because he seemed so otherwise peripheral to the story, though his brother Dhruv was having an affair with Alisa Benson – though her only motive was to piss off her estranged husband and his was to get the job fixing the air conditioning in her building, or something), whose motive was his unrequited love for Tegan Langton and her determination to eliminate anyone who might get in his way of getting her: not only her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s boss but her estranged father Errol Judd (Sean Gallagher), a recovering alcoholic who has spent the last three years in Thailand and wanted Tegan to join him there. There’s also the case of Delphi’s missing furs, which which she was hoping to bail out her estate by selling them, which Shray stole and kept in a freezer because Delphi had warned everyone concerned that they had to be kept in really cold temperatures so they don’t shed. (Fur garments have become so politically incorrect they’ve pretty much passed from the scene, which is just fine as far as I’m concerned; unless you’re an Inuit or someone else who lives in similarly ultra-extreme cold, you have no need for them.) This wasn’t one of the better Midsomer Murders shows I’ve seen – the sheer number of suspects and multiplicity of motives got confusing after a while (which is my above synopsis was so long), and the whole idea of a “small pets show” seems a bit too twee and doesn’t have quite the dramatic possibilities of dance contests, choral competitions or some of the other rural challenges they’ve built previous shows around, but this is the sort of good-natured British mystery I have a soft spot in my heart for even though I generally prefer the more hard-boiled American stuff of Hammett, Chandler and the others who have followed in their wake.