A Tale of Two Hamlets

The title, "A Tale of Two Hamlets," borrows from Dickens, and there is something Dickensian about the whole affair. When the heirs of the aristocratic Smythe-Webster family start dying, Barnaby is called in, and the case turns out to be less about a single murderer than about the weight of family history pressing down on everyone involved. The Smythe-Webster name has been keeping secrets for years, and those secrets have a habit of killing. The two hamlets of the title give the story room to breathe, one village on each side of the family's good name.

The clan is assembled in full: Rupert, Wendy, Simon and Laura Smythe-Webster, plus Frank Webster, who carries the family name with a different spelling and possibly a different agenda. Jonathan Hyde plays Frank with his usual air of clipped menace, and Ronald Pickup's Rupert is the weary patriarch, a man who has spent decades not saying what he thinks. Beth Goddard's Wendy and Phoebe Nicholls's Laura round out a family portrait that would make a Victorian novelist blush. The younger generation has inherited every bad habit on display, and Leo Bill pops up as Darren, a bit of local colour in a house full of money and grudges.

Alan Plater and Caroline Graham wrote the script, and Plater's hand shows; the dialogue has a proper literary texture, the sense of people who have been talking around each other for years. Peter Smith directed. Barnaby and Troy do the rounds of the big house and the village beyond it, and the investigation slowly becomes an excavation of the family's foundations.

It is a strong entry, the sort of episode where the motive matters more than the method. The killer is less interesting than the thing that made them, which is exactly the kind of mystery Midsomer does best. But the village survives, the house stands, and the secrets are a little closer to the surface than they were. That is progress of a sort.