Customer Reviews
Excellent set - By: Elisabeth, 05 Oct 2008 
This is an excellent, thoroughly enjoyable 'Midsomer Murders' set. The first ones (based on the Caroline Graham books) are particularly good. Barnaby & Troy make a great team & the guest casts are uniformly superb.
Great timing for the delivery!! - By: Mr. J. De Andrade Vergueiro, 26 May 2008 I got this for my dad, & I was very impressed on how fast it arrived to mein the UK.
Successful entry in a great British mystery tradition. - By: Themis-Athena, 05 May 2006 They are amateurs & pros, London dwellers moving equally comfortablyin international society asin that of their occasional forays into the English countryside, & lifelong inhabitants of those rural settings. They investigate crimesin the Thames valley & cities as large as Oxford, midsize towns like a certain Kingsmarkham, & villages with such all-English names as St. Mary Mead or King's Abbot. And they have been portrayed by some of Britain's finest contemporary actors, from Jeremy Brett & David Burke/Edward Hardwicke (Sherlock Holmes & Doctor Watson) to Roy Marsden (Commander Adam Dalgliesh), Patrick Malahide & William Simons (D.C.I. Roderick Alleyn & D.I. "Br'er" Fox), John Thaw & Kevin Whately (D.C.I. Morse & D.S. Lewis), David Jason (D.I. "Jack" Frost), George Baker & Christopher Ravenscroft (D.C.I. Reginald Wexford & D.I. Mike Burden), Peter Davison & Brian Glover (Albert Campion & Magersfontein Lugg), Edward Petherbridge & Harriet Walter (Lord Peter Wimsey & Harriet Vane), David Suchet/Albert Finney (Hercule Poirot) & last but not least Joan Hickson as Miss Jane Marple, the grandmother of all English village detectives.
To that illustrious group, British author Caroline Grahamin 1987 added another sleuthing couple, the middle-aged D.C.I. Tom Barnaby & his young colleague D.S. Gavin Troy, coppersin a cluster of villages which, collectively, make up an area known as Midsomer County, & which could easily rival Agatha Christie's very own St. Mary Meadin per-capita occurrences of treachery, crime, & bloodletting. The series' first entry, "The Killings at Badgers Drift," was so successful that it won a Macavity Award for best first mystery and, for its author, an instant loyal following. Before long, the books had spawned a television series, which at almost 40 episodes has long since outrun the number of its print originals. Starring as Barnaby & Troy are Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus John Nettles, best known to TV audiences as Jerseyan Detective Sergeant Jim Bergeracin the 1980s' series of the same name (based on the books by Andrew Saville), & Daniel Casey, whose most notable other roles to date have been appearancesin the BBC's "Our Friendsin the North," ITV's "Steel River Blues" (for which he gave up "Midsomer Murders"in 2004), & the 1998 Catherine Cookson adaptation "The Wingless Bird." Nettles & Casey are an engaging team, not quite faithful to their characters' literary versions - which however works well to their advantage; particularlyin the case of Daniel Casey's Troy, who despite a certain learning curvein political correctness is less brash thanin the books, & who presents a good foil for Nettles's emphatic Barnaby;in turn overall more reminiscent of George Baker's Wexford than of Nettles's own Bergerac, whose domestic bliss is spoiled, again & again, by the callings of his job, to his regret as much as to that of his culinarily-challenged wife Joyce (Jane Wymark) & theater-bound daughter Cully (Laura Howard); yet, he is to much of a professional not to heed those callings every single time.
With the release of the series' individual episodes long underway & "region 1" box setsin the process of being marketedin the U.S. for quite a while, too, this first setin region 2 encoding is a most welcome opportunity for fans of the series to reacquaint themselves with this winning pair of detectives & the not-so peaceful, albeit wonderfully filmed setting of rural Midsomer County. Crucially, it also includes the TV version of "The Killings at Badgers Drift," which (re-)introduced the characters of Barnaby & Troy (as had Caroline Graham's book, ten years earlier), & among whose high profile roster of guest stars were screen luminaries & TV regulars such as Elizabeth Spriggs, Jonathan Firth, Rosalie Crutchley, Julian Glover, Christopher Villiers & Renee Asherson. In addition to the 1997 pilot, this set features the series's complete first two seasons (1998 & 1999).
Episodes included:
The Killings at Badger's Drift (1997)
Writtenin Blood (1998)
Death of a Hollow Man (1998)
Faithful Unto Death (1998)
Deathin Disguise (1999)
Death's Shadow (1999)
Strangler's Wood (1999)
Dead Man's Eleven (1999)
Blood Will Out (1999)
Death of a Stranger (1999)
