Simon Bognor takes a holiday from the Board of Trade to visit the village of Herring St George and observe the ancient custom of the Popinjay Clout -- a colorful mix of food, drink and a bit of longbow shooting. All is going well until the VAT inspector is discovered pinned to a tree by arrows. A character in this novel is Sir Nimrod Herring, a name Heald found on a headstone in the Civil War cemetery in Richmond Virginia but which many critics thought impossibly far-fetched. This is a sort of pastiche of the traditional Golden Age whodunnit except that the traditional English village has been updated to the second half of the twentieth century - with disastrous results.