I have now read eleven books set in the same kind of village. Different names, same village. There is a green. There is a pub with a name that sounds like a crime. There is a church, a vicar, and a woman who runs the post office and knows everything, which is a shame, because she is going to be found face down in the vestry by chapter six.
By my count the population is about 400. The murder rate is one every two weeks, three in the run-up to the summer fête. Nobody leaves. Nobody raises property values as an issue. Nobody at the county council has ever once said, “Hang on.”
The demographics
Every village has the same residents, in the same proportions:
| Resident | Count | Fate |
|---|---|---|
| Retired schoolteacher with a sharp eye | 1 | Solves it |
| Vicar | 1 | Knows too much, says too little |
| Doctor who is a bit too keen on the widow | 1 | Suspect, then not, then yes |
| Woman at the post office | 1 | Chapter six |
| Colonel | 1 | Furious, harmless, red |
| Newcomer from London | 1 | Everyone’s first guess, everyone’s wrong |
| Cats | 14 | Witnesses, uncooperative |
The maths is unkind. If one in four hundred people dies every fortnight, the village is empty in fifteen years. The series is on book twenty-three. I have questions about where they’re getting the new people from, and I suspect the answer is a bus.
The economy
There is one shop. It sells everything. It is run by a man named something like Arthur, who is a grumbler, and who will later be revealed to have been in love with the victim in 1974. There is a tearoom that serves scones at a volume no 400-person village could sustain unless the entire population ate four a day, which, to be fair, they might. There’s a solicitor. There is always a solicitor. Nobody in the village has ever needed a will more than the solicitor has needed them to.
Nobody has a job that requires them to be anywhere between the hours of nine and five, which is why they are all available to be interviewed in their gardens.
The crime
The victim was unpleasant. This is the rule. Cozy mysteries have one firm moral position, and it is that you should be nice to people, because if you are not nice to people, you will be found in the vestry. The victim shouted at a child, or kicked a dog, or was going to sell the field. By page thirty the village is lightly relieved.
The method is always something domestic. Nobody is shot. People are poisoned with something from the greenhouse, or struck with something from the kitchen, or pushed off something from the parish. The village is a closed system. Even the weapons are local.
The detective
She is sixty-eight. She was not consulted and she does not care. She notices that the postmistress’s cardigan was buttoned wrong, and from this she will, over 290 pages and six pots of tea, deduce the entire thing. The actual police are a man called Inspector Something who is competent in a way that gets him nowhere. He will thank her at the end with visible pain.
I love her. I would like to be her. I am, in a small way, already her: I have a chair, I have opinions about cardigans, and I have never once been invited to the fête.
Why I keep going back
Because nothing about it is real and all of it is true. The village is a place where being observant is a superpower, where the worst person has a very bad day, and where the order of things is restored by someone who was underestimated, by teatime, with the scones still warm.
Out here, the worst person often has a very good decade. In there, he gets the greenhouse.
So I’ll take the next one. Population 400. One of them has about a fortnight.