Death in Disguise is the third in Caroline Graham’s Inspector Barnaby
series of novels set in the chocolate-box villages surrounding the fictional Buckinghamshire town of
Causton, familiar to British TV viewers as the
Midsomer Murders series . In Death in Disguise, the action takes place not in one of the Midsomer villages themselves, but in the oft-renovated Elizabethan manor house at Compton Dando, its rather grand full title being “The Lodge of the Golden Windhorse”; shortened, inevitably, by the locals to “The Windhorse”. The current occupants are a self-sufficient quasi-religious group led by Ian Craigie, or The Master, as he is known to his followers, they being an assortment of social misfits, self-styled faith healers, mystics and general oddballs. They’re heavily into organic food, herbal remedies, vegetarianism, and general self-deprivation, and their reluctance to participate in village life has rapidly earned them the contempt of the once-inquisitive local community.
It’s a contempt shared by the politically-incorrect Detective Sergeant Troy, Barnaby’s assistant, and, as bigoted and intolerant as Troy is showing himself to be in these novels, the fact is, he has a point where this lot is concerned. They’re a pretty smug, self-righteous crowd, most of them are as miserable as sin, and there isn’t a single one who could realistically command a degree of sympathy or respect from even the most tolerant and liberally-minded of souls. It wasn’t long, then, before their sanctimonious martyrdom and general spiritual mumbo-jumbo – and believe me, there’s an awful lot of it here - began to get on my nerves, and it was with some considerable relief that I got to the part where The Master is murdered, felled by a knife thrown at him in a darkened room during one of resident hippy May Cuttle’s ‘regressions’, seemingly a regular occurrence at mealtimes at The Windhorse.
The occasion is the twenty-first birthday ‘celebration’ of Suhami (formerly Sylvie) Gamelin, a rich heiress from a dysfunctional family, whose mother is the permanently stoned Felicity, and whose father Guy, a loathsome bully, ignored his daughter for the bulk of her childhood and then spent her adolescent years plagued by guilt, attempting to over-compensate for his earlier lack of parental concern. Suhami has decided to hand over her inheritance to the Windhorse coffers, and The Master has invited the Gamelin parents to the birthday dinner, ostensibly to convey his reluctance to accept Suhami’s generous donation, and to discuss with them the most diplomatic way of refusing the offer. When he is killed, suspicion automatically falls on Guy Gamelin as the murderer, but Barnaby is not convinced, and as he and Troy delve into the backgrounds of the various Windhorse residents and their guests, they begin to suspect that The Master’s murder is somehow linked to the recent death of James Carter, a former member of the commune; a death previously ruled by the coroner to be accidental.
As is invariably the case with the Midsomer Murders stories, the potential suspects are, with few exceptions, delightfully exaggerated and over-stated, and here it’s no different, except without the ‘delightfully’. Truth be told, I didn’t warm to any of the ‘cranks and nutters’ as Troy is wont to refer to them, and after a long and tedious build-up filled with cosmic ramblings and the like, the poor old Master’s demise came as a spot of welcome relief. From an evidence-gathering point of view, it was a fairly good yarn, with the entertainment being provided in the main by Troy and his blinkered opinions and generalisations, although even Barnaby himself began to display a healthy cynicism towards the Windhorse’s occupants from time to time. Unfortunately, I couldn’t, in all honestywork up a great deal of enthusiasm for the rest of the novel, and indeed, the question that Barnaby ought to have put to the murderer once he had discovered who it was, is why he or she didn’t take out the whole boring lot of them in one fell swoop? Why stop at The Master?
Characterisation-wise, Barnaby has come out of his nondescript shell a little since the first novel (influenced by Troy, possibly) but it’s the younger man who wins the day for me in this book. It’s Troy’s persistence in digging into Craigie’s past life which proves to be the turning point in the case, and it’s his cynicism which provides a welcome antidote to the tedium of the of the residents’ New-Age ramblings. Chauvinistic, boorish, small-minded and even a touch racist – we tend to laugh at him rather than with him – much of what he says in his simplistic way has a ring of truth to it, and you can’t help liking him in a perverse sort of way.
The end, when it came, was welcome, although I’d long since given up wondering who’d done the deed, and it’s one of those instances where, I suspect, that if I were to read the book again at some point in the future, I’d probably be unable to remember the identity of the killer, or even care, for that matter. All the loose ends were tied up a little too neatly and everybody who hadn’t, by this time, been bumped off, ended up living happily, and rather conveniently, ever after. A disappointing addition to the Inspector Barnaby series, then, countered only by the wonderfully-irreverent Troy.