Caroline Graham

• Born: July 17, 1931
• Place of Birth: Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England

• TYPE OF PLOT: Police procedural; detective
• PRINCIPAL SERIES: Chief Inspector Barnaby, 1987-

Contribution

Caroline Graham began her writing career in 1971, primarily composing scripts for radio and television. Her first two novels, Fire Dance (1982) and Envy of a Stranger (1984), went virtually unnoticed, and she did not gain a measure of fame until her creation of Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby of Midsomer Worthy in The Killings at Badger’s Drift (1987) on the advice of her publicist. She published the seventh novel in her Chief Inspector Barnaby series, A Ghost in the Machine, in 2004. The novels in the Barnaby series, which are about unthinkable crimes in small English villages, remind the reader of mysteries by writers such as and , but through Graham’s inclusion of video cameras, cell phones, and computers, she brings her stories into the modern era.

Graham’s novels charm readers with layers of wit and dark humor. She fills her works with a vocabulary that reveals her botanical and theater interests and with alluring real-life characters ranging from blacksmith to librarian to lord of the manor. Her novels deal with village life and its inner workings, and using the picturesque village setting as a backdrop, she creates strange twists of plot that would seem to be more likely to occur in a larger city. Her characters often deceive others by having the appearance of wealth, although their true financial circumstances are quite desperate. Graham takes the reader into the ugly, hidden reality of some of the villagers’ lives. By highlighting the eccentricities of some of the villagers and their struggles with class, she has created an alluring setting for crimes that are shocking and ironic partly because of where they occur.

Biography

Caroline Graham was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, on July 17, 1931, to Horace Frederick and Edith Mary Harris. Her mother died when she was six years old. Graham attended Nuneaton High School on a scholarship. She left school at the age of fourteen to work in a mill. She worked at a succession of similar jobs until she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Graham served in the Navy from 1953 to 1955. During this time she met her husband, Graham Cameron, who was in the Royal Air Force. The couple moved around Europe before eventually settling in Lincoln, England. Graham began taking drama classes in London, and eventually joined a local repertory theater. Graham and her husband ended up divorcing after thirteen years of marriage. Graham moved to London, where she pursued acting, working odd jobs between acting roles. While employed at a marriage bureau, she met the father of her son, David. As a forty-year-old single mother, she decided to become a full-time writer.

Although Graham was focused on writing short stories, she was only able to publish journalism pieces. She eventually abandoned journalism when she moved to Suffolk, subsisting on government assistance for the next six years. She began writing radio dramas while taking a course on the nineteenth century novel. Doing the analysis assignments led Graham to believe that she could write. Her first couple of books were not successful, so she turned to crime fiction. Her first novel featuring Barnaby, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, received a Macavity Award for the best first novel in 1989, was nominated for an Agatha Award in 1988, and was recognized by the Crime Writers’ Association as one of the top hundred crime novels of all time.

In 1989, Graham completed her second mystery novel, Death of a Hollow Man (1989) and returned to school, receiving a master of arts degree in theater studies in 1990. She continued to write installments in the Chief Inspector Barnaby series, which became the basis of a British television series, Midsomer Murders, which first aired in 1997.

Analysis

Caroline Graham writes in the style of the classic English detective novel and has been compared to Agatha Christie and . Her settings are typically English country manors, village churches, cozy cottages, and local theaters. However, the darkness of her murder plots, which are often shocking, keep her mysteries from being cozies. Graham deliberately contrasts the peacefulness of her settings, villages under the jurisdiction of the Corston CID, with the darkness of her plots.

Graham’s series characters, Chief Inspector Barnaby and Sergeant Troy, who are introduced in The Killings at Badger’s Drift, appear in all of her subsequent novels except for Murder at Madingley Grange (1990). In her Barnaby novels, she uses her knowledge of the human condition to play upon class struggles, often showing how people must sell their possessions or revert to criminal behavior to pay their debts. Her stories chronicle the human condition and how a person responds when love, money, and societal acceptance are missing. The primary characters—Barnaby, Troy, and Barnaby’s family—remain constant, although the victims and witnesses prove to be downright strange if not evil. The architecture of the homes and their surrounding gardens are treated with descriptions that are as thorough as her depictions of characters.

The Killings at Badger’s Drift

In The Killings at Badger’s Drift, Emily Simpson, an older, never-married, well-liked woman, turns up dead in her bungalow after witnessing a strange event in the woods, and a brother and sister connive their way into the lives of members of a higher class while pretending to be less than amicable with each other.

Graham creates the idyllic setting of the village of Badger’s Drift for her horrific plot, which begins with the elderly Emily Simpson searching for a rare orchid in the forest. It is during this expedition that she witnesses a mortifying event, one that she feels she cannot describe to anyone. Her watchfulness, however, does not go undetected, and she is murdered. Due to her age, however, no inquest is held. Her friend Lucy Bellringer doubts the coroner’s ruling of death by heart attack and visits Chief Inspector Barnaby in an effort to open an inquest. Through his investigations into the death of Simpson and then another woman in the village, Barnaby discovers that the perpetrator is also responsible for a crime committed in the past.

In The Killings at Badger’s Drift, Graham focuses on the setting while juxtaposing the ideal against the eccentric. Her descriptive language portrays the possible suspects with emphasis on characterization and relationship dynamics. Graham is a master at describing village life, especially class struggle. She creates a microcosm filled with eccentrics, innocents, and misleading facades.

Written in Blood

In Written in Blood (1994), when the village of Midsomer Worthy’s Writers’ Circle decides to invite an author for a guest appearance at its next meeting, only Gerald Hadleigh objects. Gerald, who will host the meeting, has many friends and admirers in the village despite being secretive about his past. Unwilling to explain his objection to author Max Jenning’s visit, Gerald goes along with the invitation in the end, but he asks fellow member Rex St. John to make sure that he is not alone with Max. Rex does not ask why and fulfills his duty until he is tricked by Jennings, who “forgets” his gloves in Gerald’s house. The next day, Max has left town and Gerald is found bludgeoned to death. The reactions of the members of the Writers’ Circle range from gleeful to remorseful. Chief Inspector Barnaby and Troy interview each member who, in turn, reveals his or her own troubled past.

Once again, Graham creates detailed characters whose experiences have shaped their current personalities and behaviors. She reveals the various circumstances that result from her characters’ double lives and does not shy away from topics like homosexuality or drug use. What begins as a warm English cozy mystery ends with a wild twist, as Graham provides a bizarre denouement.

A Place of Safety

A Place of Safety (1999) is set in the peaceful English village of Ferne Basset where Lionel Lawrence, the former vicar, shelters a young runaway named Carlotta. Lionel's wife, Ann, accuses Carlotta of stealing her jewelry. The two get into a fight on the village’s bridge, and Carlotta falls into the water and disappears. Charlie Leathers witnesses the entire scene and decides to blackmail Ann. Leathers, too, ends up dead and his dog badly beaten. Another blackmail letter appears after Leathers’s death, so Ann decides to withdraw the money. Though she decides not to pay, she is robbed of the money. In this case, Chief Inspector Barnaby looks beyond the surface drama to discover the culprits responsible for the deaths and blackmail. In doing so, he uncovers secrets and relationships suppressed by those involved.

Graham’s plot in A Place of Safety is very similar to that of The Killings at Badger’s Drift. She begins with a character who witnesses an event that later causes the person to be killed. In addition, the primary characters are masters of deception, appearing to be someone other than who they are. Other shared features are the class struggle, here between Ann and Carlotta, and absence of love, which creates its own separate neurosis. Despite the similarity, A Place of Safety is a much more believable tale than The Killings at Badger’s Drift.

Principal Series Characters:

• Chief Inspector Barnaby is a middle-aged, slightly obtuse detective who works on behalf of the Corston Criminal Investigation Department (CID). Occasionally short-tempered, he is described as being down to earth. A family man, he tells his wife about various crimes and the characters involved, but he often abandons dinner and leaves his daughter’s performances when called to duty. Barnaby proves successful when thinking “outside the box.”
• Sergeant Troy a young, naïve detective who often believes that he has cracked the case before his boss Barnaby. He provides a contrast to Barnaby’s conservativeness with his speedy driving and overt displays of emotion. He often considers various aspects of interviews with witnesses or suspects unimportant and readily sighs when suspects offer more than the facts.

Bibliography

Fletcher, Janet, and R. E. K. Fletcher. Review of The Killings at Badger’s Drift, by Caroline Graham. Library Journal 113, no. 1 (January 1, 1988): 102.

Jennings, Max. “Caroline Graham.” British Council Literature, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/caroline-graham. Accessed 18 July 2024.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Melton, Emily. Review of A Ghost in the Machine, by Caroline Graham. Booklist 100, no. 22 (August, 2004): 1905.

Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Stasio, Marilyn. “Crime.” Review of Faithful Until Death, by Caroline Graham. The New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1998, 40.