Modern Hardy country
Richard Cobb
RED HERRINGS: A SIMON BOGNOR MYSTERY by Tim Heald Macmillan, £7.50 No doubt all this has something to do with 'baying been born and educated in Dorset', a relatively rare condition that happily brought Bognor's creator from Sherborne to Balliol, an encounter stead- fastly profitable to both. Tim Heald is touchingly loyal both to county and to college. Certainly every time the rather cheerless, clumsy Bognor ventures out of the Board of Trade and is once more on the move, it is in the direction of the West Country. Only once does the action take place as far east as Oxford and Woodstock. This time the annual Clout is clearly located in the sort of bosomy area of the West in which one would expect to see burial mounds and very Long (and potent) Men in chalk on the side of hills. Herring St George can only be in Dorset, 1985 Hardy country, with no girls groaning in labour or swinging gently from the gallows. We can leave that to Peeping Tom.
On the contrary, we are at once intro- duced to a trendy pseudo-rural world of Peregrines, Samanthas, Emeralds and Barnwells. The pub has been done up tastefully and offers the latest in cuisine minceur; the publicans are gays. But there is nothing trendy about Sir Nimrod, of Conquest vintage. This time, Bognor's wife, Monica, is on the scene and very intelligently participant. She is given to expressing her thoughts and musings in pretty streamlined French — vachement au point — acquired no doubt as the result of a convent education (the Sacred Heart, Tunbridge Wells?).
Most of the inhabitants of the village are a pretty rum lot, including the sleazy vicar, the Rev. Barnwell Larch. The Chief Inspec- tor is an earl, a contemporary of Bognor's at Oxford, but not, regrettably, a Balliol man (Lincoln would be my guess). There is a swami in the neighbourhood. Cold Com- fort Farm was placed in the Sussex Downs before they became part of the stockbroker belt. Herring St George is a good deal more remote from London, but it is also in the process of being invaded and colon- ised. Martin Amis comes up in the con- versation — he is looking for a country property in the area. Others will follow in his wake. The hotel bedroom is called `Myrtle% bad things happen in 'Myrtle'. Bognor and Monica would have been better advised to have taken 'Ragwort', but it didn't have a bidet and `Myrtle did.
This is a good story, briskly paced. Tim is an old hand at this sort of thing. The villains are easily identifiable almost from their first appearance, but they are pretty thick on the ground, which makes the going quite confusing. The author, I hap- pen to know, has recently been improving his Real Tennis, so we get a bit of that too, culminating in a very deft, clinching shot. The hero, not unexpectedly, turns out to be one of Bognor's Balliol contemporaries. That is not to give away too much. Both Bognor and Tim Heald can always be relied upon to stand by the old Coll. Quite right too.
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