Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

by Maureen Johnson

It is possible that you will find yourself in a placid and tedious little corner of England; it is just as possible that you will end up in an English Murder Village. You will not know you are in a Murder Village, as they look like all other villages. When you arrive in Shrimpling or Pickles-in-the-Woods or Wombat-on-Sea or wherever it is, there will be no immediate signs of danger. This is exactly the problem. You are already in the trap.

Perhaps today you will arrive by train, that most murdery of conveyances.

English villages follow an ancient blueprint from a simpler time, when babies drank beer and everyone had a sheep. Time may march on elsewhere, but not in the village. They don’t like change in the village.

The village hall is a factory where petty grudges are made, and there is no grudge like a petty, hobby-related grudge. Oh, you giggled at Edith’s sonnet? Sounds like someone’s about to be found clubbed to death with a typewriter, their mouth stuffed full of poems.

If anyone offers to show you their vat, say you need to get something from your car, start the engine, and run them over. The constable understands this sort of thing. Tell him about the vat.

You don’t need a doctor. You have the internet.

Birds are related to dinosaurs. Did you know that? And like the dinosaur, the birdwatcher will soon be extinct because looking.

Villages are built on traditions. Since the times of old, they have observed the rites.

Some of the details have changed, but the song remains much the same. Birth, death, planting, death, harvest, death, springtime, death, sports, death…

If you enter a town while the fête is happening, you are already dead.

It’s like the Hunger Games, but dangerous.

The highest trophy in the cricketing world is literally an urn full of ashes, so you can’t pretend you weren’t warned.

Sometimes, the murderer is you.

The manor is not a house or a home; it is an extension of a biological line, a symbol of dynastic power.

The Attic Good idea. Save time. Go right to the ghost part of the house.

Walls All the best stuff happens inside of them.

Occasionally emerges just after dusk to stand in the doorway of the dining room and tell everyone how they are going to die.

Unlike regular people, the residents of the manor require others to help them perform basic tasks.

The aristocracy have three passions: inbreeding, collecting stolen artifacts, and engaging in recreational violence.

The Open House Come in, poors. Look around! You simply must see the east wing.