Coffin, Scarcely Used by Colin Watson, first Penguin edition, 1962. Cover design by Germano Facetti.
This is the first of Colin Watson's Flaxborough Chronicles, a series of detective stories set in a small Lincolnshire port, generally identified with Boston. The books are gently funny; the crimes tend to the whimsical, even grotesque — the main death in Coffin, Scarcely Used is of a local newspaper editor, found up a pylon, electrocuted, with a mouth full of marshmallows — and Watson's dogged detective, Inspector Purbright, approaches them with an answering eccentricity, taking pleasure in spoofing or unnerving local dignitaries, hinting at a contempt for the established order under a mask of deference.
The appeal lies in Watson's sceptical view of English provincial life, with its cliques and rivalries, respectability and vice, all lubricated by hypocrisy; he's a forerunner of Reginald Hill. But Flaxborough seems smaller than Hill's Wetherton, though it's hard to be sure: neither is to scale, at times seeming quite metropolitan, encompassing a variety of locales and supporting a range of classes and many enterprises, criminal and legitimate, at other times villagey enough for everyone to know each other.
Several of the Flaxborough novels were dramatised on BBC television in the 1970s under the title Murder Most English, with Anton Rodgers as Purbright and Christopher Timothy as his naive sidekick Sergeant Love. The theme tune was an earworm; it's probably for the best that I can't find it online.
Apart from the Flaxborough Chronicles, Watson was best known as the author of Snobbery with Violence (1971), a study of English crime novels and class between the wars, in which he coined the term "Mayhem Parva" for the villages whose homicide-rich environments have supported so much fiction. The continued popularity of The Midsomer Murders suggests that criticism makes nothing happen. Honestly, sometimes I think I might as well be a poet.
Facetti's cover design for this is brilliant, if a little too dramatic for an essentially comic story. This copy cost £1.99 at the Amnesty Bookshop in Cambridge: it's tattier than I'd like, but it doesn't crop up often and usually costs a lot more.
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