The Dogleg Murders

The twelfth series opens at Whiteoaks, a golf club where a member is beaten to death with a golf club, and where the police soon discover the real game is gambling and extortion, with plenty of hatred in the clubhouse. It is a lovely joke of a setting. Golf is supposed to be a genteel way to waste an afternoon, and the episode is determined to show that the club conceals more vice than the fairways suggest. The victim was not the most popular man at the club, which narrows the field only slightly. A corpse among the fairways is the kind of image the show was built for.

Barnaby and DS Ben Jones work through the membership, who turn out to be a thoroughly unpleasant lot. Nicholas Day's Martin Crisp, Maggie Ollerenshaw's Eileen Fountain, and the Fountains played by Jamie Belman and Luke Neal keep the suspicion circulating, with Holly Gilbert's Becky Tunstall in the mix. The membership is a closed little world, the sort where everyone keeps everyone's score. Barry Jackson's Dr Bullard has the body, Kirsty Dillon's WPC Gail Stephens helps with the digging, and Jason Hughes's Ben Jones follows the money as it moves from hand to hand. Jane Wymark's Joyce provides a sane corner of the county for Barnaby to return to.

Andrew Payne and Caroline Graham wrote it, Richard Holthouse directed. The mystery is a proper whodunit with a properly English backdrop, and the script enjoys the contrast between the immaculate fairways and the behaviour of the people standing on them. The investigation stays on the course, so to speak, and the solution earns its place. It is a clean, old-fashioned case, and the golfing setting gives it a faintly ridiculous dignity.

Midsomer has a long history of taking respectable institutions apart, and the golf club fits the pattern nicely. But the real pleasure is the way the case keeps turning up fresh reasons to dislike the membership. Nobody comes out of Whiteoaks looking good, which is rather the point.