A long time between murders. (First Person).(memories of village of Garnant in Wales and reflections on its developments over the past half century)

FOR THE LAST sixteen years I've lived in Washington, DC, a city in which a half-dozen murders in the course of a weekend are not uncommon. For the first sixteen years of my life I lived in a community that witnessed only one murder in more than a quarter-century.

That singular event happened nine years before I was born; but in a Welsh mining village where the oral tradition remained strong, it was still being talked about when I was a boy, with an appalled fascination and a loving attention to detail. Looking back, I can see that as murders go it was rather commonplace--not the kind of thing that would get the attention of an Hercule Poirot or an Inspector ...