A Ghost in the Machine by
Caroline Graham
pbk out January 05
(Headline)
at £6.99
I'm probably the only person in England who has never watched 'Midsomer
Murders' on the television. Nor have I read any of Caroline Graham's other books.
So I come to this latest Chief Inspector Barnaby story unsullied with preconceptions.
What I found was a classic, traditional English "cosy", laden with eccentric
characters, and the sort of Englishness that only ever existed in novels like this.
When Mallory Lawson's aunt dies and leaves him a grand house in Forbes
Abbot, it is just in time to rescue him from the horrors of headship at a failing inner
city school. He plans a grand existence in the country, along with Kate, his wife, who
will start a small literary imprint publishing fine novels. The only fly in the ointment
is their errant daughter, Polly, who seems to owe a lot of money to a not very nice
man. They soon discover their neighbours are a strange bunch of people, all with
their own dark secrets festering away in their bosoms. Andrew and Gilda Latham are
a couple who despise each other, because he has married her for her money, and she is
obscenely fat. Ashley Parnell, once the flower of manhood, is wasting away with an
unknown illness. And Judith, his wife, is almost happy because it prevents his
philandering. Of course, every nice English village has to suffer a council estate, and
Forbes Abbot is no different. Lurking on the council estate is the clairvoyant and self-
centred Ava Garret, with her ill-treated daughter, Karen. And then there's Dennis
Brinkley, financial advisor. He is a quiet and reserved individual with a secret
passion. His hobby is medieval machines of war. Full size and fully-functioning
replicas. The undercurrents of this peaceful village stay below the surface, until Polly
tries to get her hands on her great-aunt's legacy a little earlier than intended. Then the
dam bursts, and Dennis is found dead.
Graham is meticulous in her delineation of all the sundry characters as the
story slowly unfolds. Every one has a long and not very attractive history, that
Graham goes to great lengths in relating. So she builds a sense of the minutiae of
their lives, and their foibles. And we lap it up, while knowing it is only in such a
place in such a novel that such people can possibly exist. You can almost hear the
tinkle of china tea-cups, and the soft sound of crustless cucumber sandwiches being
masticated. It's the sort of unreal place that American tourists come in search of, half
expecting a real Miss Marple to emerge from the rhododendrons. The murder, fully a
third of the way through the book, comes as something of a surprise. And even then it
is assumed to be an accident, and Mallory is allowed to clean up the scene of the
crime immediately afterwards. Only in an English cosy could such a thoroughly nice
middle-class act be allowed by the police. When the jovial Chief Inspector does at
last get on the case, you just know everything is going to turn out for the best. And it
does, as Graham relates in the same meticulous detail at the end, tying up all the loose
ends as neatly as Mallory Lawson did at the original crime scene. Put your tongue
firmly in your cheek, turn each page genteely, and revel in the uncomplicated and
thoroughly faux-English characters Graham creates.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
A Ghost in the Machine by
Caroline Graham
