What is it about the British?

Perhaps living in their 'green and pleasant land' gets boring. Planting daffs cannot, it seems, compare to planting bodies, and listening for the cuckoo's first call pales as a pastime when weighed against heeding horrible noises emanating from the Common.

Whatever the reason, our highly evolved cousins across the pond, with their carefully cultivated manners and emotional sangfroid, are the bloodiest minded people on the planet. They devour murder mysteries by the hectare. Eat 'em up, they do, with the proverbial spoon, the way they might attack a blood red summer pudding or a blue-veined, port-infused Stilton. More than that, and to a significant degree, they have dominated the mystery genre in the author department for well over a century,

While Americans like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, and Robert B. Parker are masters of the hardboiled mystery, no one beats the Brits at their own game of Murder Most Eccentric.

Sometimes it is the characters who are queer ducks and odd beans. At other times, it is the act of murder itself. If you've ever seen Midsomer Murders, now heading into its eleventh year, you'll know what is meant here. Only a labyrinthine brain nurtured on Marmite and Bovril could come up with so many devious, lurid, and macabre ways to die and yet invest them with just enough absurd humor to fend off repugnance.

Christie. Who else but a Victorian-born Briton with pluck and a large helping of commonsense psychology could have invented the perspicacious Miss Marple of St. Mary Mead or the pear-shaped Poirot, a Belgian sleuth with a disdain for British mores, particularly (but not exclusively) of the edible variety?

Conan-Doyle. And who else but a great Briton could have found in Dr. Joseph Bell the living, breathing manifestation of Sherlock Holmes, arguably the most widely known character in all of fiction?

Mortimer. Often the authors of British mysteries are as fascinating as their characters. The recently deceased John Mortimer pulled Horace Rumpole together from his own and his father's personae both in and out of the courts. Mortimer's obituary in the Guardian reads, "His greatest achievement was to create, in Rumpole of the Bailey, a lawyer whom the world would love." We can imagine Horace in his dotage finding out, as Mortimer did, that he'd sired a long lost son out of wedlock. Sadly, the author never got 'round to writing that storyline.

Dexter. Morse is not so much a doppelganger of the author Colin Dexter as an enhanced version. Where Dexter is short, hard of hearing, and quick to point out that he is not handsome, Morse (as portrayed by John Thaw in the television series) is easy on the eyes and not held back by impairments as severe as Dexter's deafness. Both are clever, crossword solving, literary minded, music adoring introverts but Dexter wins out in his ability to solve the mystery, sending Morse blindly blundering down many avenues before the answers reveal themselves to the Inspector's otherwise sharp mind.

James. Phyllis Dorothy (P.D.) James invented for herself a fictional lover in Adam Dalgliesh, the poetry writing Scotland Yard Commander who lost his wife and only child in childbirth and has never remarried - perhaps because James cannot bear to give him up to someone else. Her two Cordelia Gray mysteries, featuring a young woman who finds herself suddenly in possession of a private detective business, are equally compelling. Actors Roy Marsden (followed by Martin Shaw) and Kate Baxendale bring Dalgliesh and Gray fully alive on the television screen.

Horowitz. A new member of British mystery's supreme court is Anthony Horowitz, a prolific writer of children's books and television screenplays, among other works. He is the creator/writer of Foyle's War, a series set in Hastings on the south coast of England in the 1940s. It stars the inimitable Michael Kitchen as Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, a man who sometimes wishes his work was less plodding policeman and more war-effort relevant. By weaving war and wartime exigencies with local criminal activity, Horowitz gives us a very rich look at the times and how ordinary (and not so ordinary) people dealt with them.

Cozy mysteries are a British specialty. Oh, yes, there are murders, all right - sometimes galore. The country house weekend where people get bumped off as habitually as the grouse and the village fete awash with corpses - under the tombola drum or beside the coconut shy or behind the Punch and Judy curtain - are a staple. But you won't be bothered by sexual escapades more daring than a suggestive giggle and a quietly closing door just ahead of the servant's padding footfall on the hallway carpet. Nor will you have to agonize over scenes that appear to have been cut by censors from serial killers' home movies.

Margery Allingham's Albert Campion mysteries are good examples of the cozy as are Dorothy Sayer's Lord Wimsey novels, Gladys Mitchell's sixty-six Mrs. Bradley books, and those by Ngaio Marsh that feature Inspector Roderick Alleyn and his wife, the painter Agatha Troy. And, of course, the ubiquitous and most beloved "cozies" author of them all, Agatha Christie.

Both the books and the TV series based on them are perfect for blustery November nights as eaves take up their toothless whistling or during Finnish February weekends when roads are impassable. In fact, they are ideal any time you want to experience comfy warmth melded with a light frisson of fear. The men in these stories are often of lordly or patrician background, the settings are places you would love to visit (charming villages, bustling towns, large and luxurious private homes, city hotels of long and respectable patronage), the women are forthright and independent, and the murders, if not memorable, are always entertaining and occasionally mystifying for the duration of the book.

In Caroline Graham's books, the first of which is The Killings at Badger's Drift, the author has created a world as specific as those of Tolkien, Milne, or Lewis Carroll. It is a confined area made up of stunning English countryside populated by the very rich who have become that way, it sometimes seems, only by way of blackmail, corrupt business dealings, or filching and pillaging their neighbors' equally ill-gotten gains.

Sprinkled throughout the nobs are cutthroat working class coves, interfering (and, on occasion) homicidal busybodies, delightful newcomers concealing the fact that they or their kin are mentally deranged, and a whole host of locals or passersby who, with the inevitability of sunrise, have the great misfortune in every episode of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Graham's policeman and eventual solver of the mysteries is Chief Inspector Barnaby. As played by John Nettles, he's a normally good-natured family man with a wife and daughter and, so far, three younger sidekicks who have come along one at a time to add both comedy and romance to Midsomer doings.

There have been so many deaths in Midsomer, which comprises 34 villages bearing such sprightly medieval names as Midsomer Mallow, Midsomer Wellow, Newton Magna, Midsomer Parva, Fletcher's Cross, and Luxton Deeping, it has been pointed out that not a single resident would be left above ground had this not been a fictional undertaking.

These stories cannot be considered part of the cozy or cottage genre (even though Midsomer abounds with cozy cottages). They have murders that involve incest, being set alight both by manmade means and via spontaneous combustion, bludgeoned by wine bottles hurled from a catapult, and drowned inside a television set (those last two in the same episode). But, as mentioned earlier, the writers and actors somehow pull this off in a way that makes it more tongue-in-cheek than abhorrent.

The sex here could be considered graphic by cozy readers' standards but it leans decidedly toward the irreverent and sly rather than the blatantly obscene. One of John Nettles' complaints over the years is that he and his wife (played by Jane Wymark), while being an obviously happy married couple, aren't free to show it. "I'd really like to have the occasional bounce with the missus," Nettles muses, "but we're not allowed. It really is a case of 'no sex, please, we're British.'"