Dripping with Middle-class Snobbery: Rack, Ruin and Murder

Rack, Ruin and Murder by Ann Granger

Headline

Pp. 314

As cosy Cotswold murders go, this is a fine example. There’s a dilapidated old manor house, a family fallen on hard times, a local clan of ne’er do wells, and an unidentified dead body that turns up on someone’s sofa. Inspector Jess Carter has to scurry about the countryside splashing her car down narrow pot-holed roads and falling in drainage ditches to discover the identity of ‘the stiff’, as the corpse is generally called, and reporting back to Superintendent Ian Campbell, with whom she is bound to have a repressed romantic relationship – this is the second in a series that currently runs to six, so there’s plenty of time for this to develop.

With the help of the clueless Sergeant Morton, Carter rather fortuitously (and not entirely convincingly) uncovers the criminal elements of the tale. As in all families and small villages, there are buried secrets. Old Monty Bickerstaff (he of the erstwhile grand country house and biscuit emporium) has been keeping one for years. Now he is finding he can no longer cope without his daily whisky, memories of the past are starting to trouble him.

Later, when truths come to light, he remarks, “Secrets are buggers. The only place for them is out in the open where they can’t muck up anyone’s life.” This is clearly the homily of the novel, but without secrets there would be no murder mysteries, so they must remain, no matter what young Tansy Peterson argues. “They were all so bloody hypocritical in those days. They really were. They were dead set on respectability. That didn’t mean they behaved themselves, just that they buried any bad news, any scandal, as they saw it.” This allows for some clunky exposition as the Superintendent explains to young people today what things were like in olden times, and that it wasn’t easy to get a divorce, especially if you were a woman.

As with all death-by-numbers stories, there must be multiple characters, whom we can count as suspects, and they must all be described succinctly so that we can instantly form impressions. Granger’s portraits are one-dimensional and often snide; she is particularly prone to class and weight shaming, and clothes are often shorthand for character. Naturally, Jess is perfectly positioned as the manic-pixie-dream girl trope, “a terrier of a girl, with short dark-red hair, a pointed chin and widely spaced grey eyes that sparkled with intelligence.”

Other women are described by age, weight and perceived attractiveness, for example one is “pretty in a wan sort of way", while another is “an overweight blonde wearing tight black leggings that did nothing to disguise her plump thighs and bulging calves”. Older people get short shrift in the description stakes – they are largely past fanciable age and therefore barely relevant. It always reverts to age, such as three women who have been firmly and inescapably labelled: “The oldest woman was waving her arms above her head. The youngest, overweight, lumbered beside her, mouth gaping and badly dyed scarlet hair flying. Between the two extremes of age came a middle-aged third who must be Maggie Colley.”

Men don’t necessarily escape the class, weight and age censure either, and middle-class snobbery fairly drips off the pages with character outlines such as, “a burly, bearded man in grimy jeans and quilted body-warmer worn over a plaid shirt” or, “a short, podgy individual, wearing a ginger woolly cardigan, baggy brown corduroy trousers and slippers.”

This is a formulaic and relatively shallow murder mystery, with one-dimensional characters and a somewhat petty plot. But, it is heart-warming and life-affirming as the murder is neatly solved, and the charming Cotswold village can return being a peaceful idyll, until the next time, which we eagerly await!