Recommended Reading 0

Caroline Graham’s Inspector Barnaby novels.

As my two or three regular readers know, I’m a mystery buff and have been since I first read A Study in Scarlet while recovering from having two impacted wisdom teeth extracted when I was a teenager.

I delight in the television show Midsomer Murders and watch it whenever I can; I’ve seen most of the episodes several times.

Graham’s novels led to the Midsomer Murders television series, which has now entered its third decade. The first episodes were adapted from the first six novels in the series. As John Nettles points out in his introduction to a recent edition of Death of a Hollow Man, in order to adapt the stories to television, it was necessary to abridge them (think, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books). The original novels are much richer than the Midsomer Murders versions, which are rich and complex in themselves. The novels have even more characters and even more complex plots.

Reading the originals while trying to relate them to the shows I’ve watched with so much enjoyment has been a delight. And it’s also a learning experience: Caroline Graham’s terminology and references have me turning to my favorite search engine (not, by the way, Google or–retch–Bing) to look up cultural references and English slang.

Read them in order. You won’t regret it.