RESULTS

The clamorous voices in Louise Doughty's subversive village mystery, An English Murder, are either laughing or screaming at the cozy genre formula they seem to be trapped in. True, there's not been a peep from Mr. and Mrs. Cowper, but that's because they're dead, rotting away in the dreary cottage where they were murdered. And no one's heard a word from their teenage daughter, who seems to have disappeared. But everyone else in the tiny hamlet of Nether Bowston, in the picturesque county of Rutland, has much to say about the murders, and also about their narrow lives, and they proceed to say it in aria-like chapters that pretty much demolish all those tidy and reassuring conventions of the English country mystery. In her sane but unforgiving style, Doughty strips away the artifice about murder to show 'how mundane it is -how it can happen and mean almost nothing' to people trapped in the isolation of their own small worlds.

'Elijah Smith was born in the graveyard of the church at Werrington, a village in the Soke of Peterborough. I can tell you this for certain, as I am his mother and so was there at the time.' Clementina is barely sixteen when she falls pregnant. Other girls had been put out on the highroad for less, but Clementina's Dei and Dadus stand by her. But the Travellers are treated with suspicion wherever they go, and soon the family are rounded up by the 'gavvers', accused of poisioning local livestock. As the Romany people struggle to survive the changes of the 20th century, Louise Doughty charts one family's path through persecution and tragedy, asking, can the Romany spirit survive in a century that no longer has space for them?