From Pine View Farm

At Psychology Today Blogs, Thomas Henricks explores why some persons are susceptible to conspiracy theories. Here’s a bit of one factor he discusses; follow the link for the full article.

Participation in virtual worlds is another form of this self-chosen commitment. In that light, New York Times technology writer Kevin Roose compares involvement in online conspiracy theories to play in massive multiplayer online games. Conspiracy sites invite people to co-create and sustain a shared, alternative reality. Featured there are recurring characters ? heroes, villains, and fools ? for the viewer to savor. Storylines ebb and flow. There are challenges to decode messages and solve mysteries. Participants seek to be “in the know” and to pass on, via social media, their insights to others. Strangers get to know and trust one another, albeit through the safety of distanced communication. Players sense that they are part of something much bigger, and more daring, than the circumstances of their ordinary lives.

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.