Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

By Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper

A weekend roaming narrow old lanes, touring the faded glories of a country manor, and quaffing pints in the pub. How charming. That is, unless you have the misfortune of finding yourself in an English Murder Village, where danger lurks around each picturesque cobblestone corner and every sip of tea may be your last. If you insist on your travels, do yourself a favor and bring a copy of this little book. It may just keep you alive. 

Brought to life with dozens of Gorey-esque drawings by illustrator Jay Cooper and peppered with allusions to classic crime series and unmistakably British murder lore, Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village gives you the tools you need to avoid the same fate, should you find yourself in a suspiciously cozy English village (or simply dream of going). Good luck! And whatever you do, avoid the vicar.

I can vouchsafe that this can be read in one sitting because I did, in fact, read it all in one sitting, while I was improbably stuck without phone or kindle with a sleeping baby on top of me.  The only book within grabbing distance* was Your Guide and serendipitously, I managed to finish the whole thing without waking the baby.  

It's one of those books that I've always found a bit gimmicky, you know, one hit wonders that are charming enough to pass the time, but are more for gifting, reading once, and then putting to the side and forgetting.  That being said, it was still delightful.  I'm probably a core audience member for it, since I got really into Midsommer Murders during the first year of the pandemic** and (as you may know) am very much into country house murder books by Agatha Christie***. And if you like Midsommer Murders and enjoy the idea that these little villages are constantly beplauged by murders, you will enjoy Your Guide. It covers all the bases, the village fete ("A nice way to spend a summer's day and thin out the local population"), people who leave messages ("All messages in a Murder Village are bad news. It means someone Knows Something. Don't leave messages. Don't hang around people who do."), the Folly ("It's a small, fake temple at the far side of the pond, perfect for picnics, trysts, and casual strangulations"), the farmer ("Constantly fielding offers from city folk who want to turn the farmland into a shopping center and fielding tthose same city folk who want to turn the farmland into a shopping center.") and of course, the vicar ("When you see the vicar, run.").

There's cute in-jokes about (ironically) the same trope that Connie Willis mentions in To Say Nothing of the Dog, i.e., that the butler did it for the first fifty books and then he became the most obvious suspect, so they had to use other people. And a couple of quizzes which test your knowledge and ultimately teach the greatest lesson of all: that sometimes, [SPOILER] in order to avoid being murdered, you must become the murderer.  True wisdom.

*Untrue, I had three books within grabbing distance, because I was still in my own house, after all, but How the Word is Passed isn't exactly light reading to pass the time while a ticking time bomb is waiting to go off on your stomach at any time, and the other book was soft cover and hard to hold without using both hands.

**I still enjoy them, but lack the time to watch them, what with the aforementioned baby and all.

***Mrs. Marple is probably closer to the Your Guide vibe, but I hate Mrs. Marple.  I know I've talked about this before****, and I know I should try again as an adult, but man, it's annoying to feel like half of Christie's oeuvre is unavailable to me because of that old bat.

****Maybe I haven't talked about this before! I loathe Mrs. Marple, her allusions to things like "Oh, it reminds me of the vicar and the bookblack boy" and then you find out the vicar stole the bootblack boy's money and the bootblack boy stood up in the middle of service and denounced him and the vicar went off and became a pirate out of shame, and so that's how you know that the real killer was the cook, because the cook was also doing it out of revenge, are so obnoxious as a reader, since we DON'T KNOW ANY OF THESE PEOPLE OR SITUATIONS and it feels like a cheat to keep the clues away from the reader to avoid spoiling the mystery too soon, and also Mrs. Marple acts so self-effacing, but she's just as self-satisfied as Poirot.  Call a spade a spade, at least Poirot acknowledges his own non-humility. 

*****This doesn't have any corresponding note above, so you shouldn't even be here but I also wanted to point out that Maureen Johnson is the author of the Truly Devious series, so I'm now a real fan of hers, and Jay Cooper's illustrations have a fun, Edward Gorey-esque tone to them which greatly enhances the book.

24: A Book You Can Read in One Sitting