Bomber's Moon

As a follow-up to the new set of episodes of Inspector George Gently, BBC TV have screened a repeat of Bomber’s Moon, which was first shown last year. I missed it then, but caught up with it last night.

In this story, when a Northumberland boatman discovers he’s hooked an eyeball in the water, the police are called, and soon a body is found. This struck me as a rather grisly scene, not conventional Sunday night viewing, but typical of the way in which the Gently shows combine the mundane with the startling. The deceased proves to be a German who had settled in the locality after the war, but almost twenty years after the cessation of hostilities, it seems that some old enmities have yet to be resolved.

The victim’s rather unpleasant son is an early suspect, but the solution proves to have its roots in the past. I thought it rather foreseeable that the dead man’s previous career as a bomber pilot would have a part to play in the story, and this was another example of why the Gently shows tend to be rather frustrating.

Production values are high, and there is much of interest in the 1960s backdrop. But the mysteries tend to be commonplace, and DS Bacchus – in this episode plagued by money troubles – is a constant source of irritation. When I compared him in a recent post to Captain Arthur Hastings, I think I was doing Hercule Poirot’s sidekick a disservice!