Audio books have become a therapy whilst sitting in the constant traffic jams that are part of everyday life. The congestion causes a nine mile journey to take 45 minutes. (Yes, public transport is available, if the connections were right, the nine mile journey could be completed in two hours).
The problem is selecting material to which to listen.
Detective stories have been the first choice since childhood days. The tales of Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Sherlock Holmes, Paolo Baldi, and miscellaneous other sleuths have helped to overcome the impatience caused by erratic traffic lights, drivers in the wrong lane, bin collections in the middle of rush hour, cyclists who prefer not to use the cycle lanes provided by the city council at great expense, and all the other annoyances encountered by a bad and grumpy driver.
Choosing a new selection for listening this week, the name of Anthony Horowitz caught the eye. The Foyle’s War television series had been excellent, so the audiobook Magpie Murders seemed likely to offer engagement of a similar quality. The story, set in 1955, centres upon a German private detective living in post-war London, Atticus Pünd.
It seems strange not to have encountered Herr Pünd before. His character is full of surprises.
Magpie Murders brings the detective from London into a gossip-filled village in an English shire. It took only a few minutes to realize that the story was set in the north-eastern corner of Somerset and that the police force involved was the Bath and Somerset Constabulary.
Pünd encounters Detective Inspector Chubb, a police officer with whom he has co-operated and Chubb (a good Somerset name) is a man who understood what Somerset meant to its natives. Investigating a murder that involved extreme violence, he considered Somerset to have been violated.
Raymond Chubb did not like murder. He had become a policeman because he believed in order and he considered the county of Somerset, with its neat villages, hedgerows and ancient fields to be one of the most ordered and civilised parts of the country – if not the world. Murder changed everything. It broke the gentle rhythm of life. It turned neighbour against neighbour. Suddenly nobody was to be trusted and doors, which were usually left open at night, were locked. Murder was an act of vandalism, a brick thrown at a picture window and somehow it was his job to put together the pieces.
Horowitz captures a feeling of how secure life felt in our village and the sense many older people now have in being in a place that is not what it was.
Interestingly the television series Bergerac and later Midsomer Murders both magnified their melodrama by placing the many, many, murders in apparently idyllic surroundings.