Undesirable Elements

Crabbe is sent to a small hotel where a group of people connected to each other by business are staying. The setting is a closed circle of the kind detective fiction uses, and the episode plays it as a puzzle about who among them is doing what to whom. The hotel's kitchen and the hotel's guests are both part of the investigation.

The case centres on a death and on a set of financial arrangements that the guests have between them. Crabbe's attention moves between the dining room and the office, and the episode's answer depends on noticing what the guests eat, what they pay for and what they avoid, which is the sort of detail the series uses in place of forensic evidence.

The restaurant strand is lighter here, carried by the ordinary running of Pie in the Sky, with Margaret concerned as always about whether any of it is worth the money. The episode uses the contrast between a hotel that charges for its standards and a restaurant whose owner will not lower his to make its points about both.

By the end, the death is explained and the financial arrangements are understood. The culprit is identified, the case is closed, and Crabbe returns to Middleton. The episode is a well-made example of the first series' house style rather than a departure from it, and it treats a death as the occasion for working out how a set of people were living rather than as a source of horror.

The comedy is in the hotel's pretensions and in Crabbe's refusal to be impressed by them. The series never mistakes grandeur for quality, and a place that charges a great deal for food that is not good is, in this programme's terms, already suspect. That suspicion is what the episode works with, and it is what leads him to the truth about the people staying there.

It is one of the first series' tidier constructions, and it is notable for the confidence with which the programme handles the traditional closed-circle form while keeping its own voice.

It is worth noticing that the series gives its detective no special insight beyond the ordinary observation of a man who has spent his life paying attention to food and to the people paying for it, and that this is presented as expertise rather than as luck. It is worth noting that the programme never treats the hotel's grandeur as a quality in itself, which is the same judgement Crabbe makes about food and the reason he is the right detective for a case that begins with a bill rather than a body.