After being a pop star in his 20s (as keyboard player in the Communards with Jimmy Somerville), Richard Coles became an Anglican vicar and then a broadcaster (notably as a co-presenter for 12 years on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live). The 61-year-old is now a bestselling novelist: his second “cosy crime” book, A Death in the Parish, featuring the country vicar and occasional sleuth Canon Daniel Clement, is out now in paperback; a third mystery follows this summer. He lives in East Sussex with his two dachshunds Pongo and Daisy.
You have just completed a seven-month nationwide tour called Borderline National Trinket. It looked like an exhausting schedule...
It’s been quite a do. The last time I toured I was in my 20s, and hotel breakfasts and midnight kebabs in your 20s are not so injurious to your health and wellbeing as they are in your 60s. So you’ve got to work out a way of doing it. But the shows were great.
Do audiences ask you about the books now?
Yes, they’re fascinated in what they detect as resemblances somehow between the facts of my own life and the elements of my fiction: you know, country vicar, feisty mother, two dachshunds, an aristocratic estate and all that stuff. But one of the reasons why I like fiction is so I can make things up... Apart from my mother features in Audrey [Clement’s mother] quite a lot.
Was it a long-held ambition to go into crime writing?
Well, the first proper book I ever got when I was a boy was the Sherlock Holmes short stories from my grandfather. I actually made my parents buy me a deerstalker and I used to wear it around Kettering, and was obviously beaten up daily – and rightly so. But I was fascinated by this idea of an enigmatic figure on the edge of things, who sees what others don’t see and puts right things that have gone wrong.
Along with Richard Osman, Rob Rinder and Janice Hallett, you have led a recent boom in cosy crime. What do you put that down to?
Two things are happening, I think. Partly, if your name has recognition then you’re more likely to have a conversation with a publisher than ever before. So there’s an opportunity there. But I do think crime fiction in particular does have an appeal at the moment because my sense is that everyone is worried, really. And in crime fiction, you’re in a settled world and all of a sudden, it’s thrown upside down. And then somebody works out what’s happening and tries to fix it. I wonder if that speaks to a sense of my own anxiety in uncertain times.
How does having a No 1 novel compare with having a No 1 record?
No one rips your shirt off if you’ve written a bestselling crime novel, I find. Well, they haven’t yet. And they literally do rip your shirt off if you had a No 1 record. But it’s enormously gratifying to have a hit in your 60s when the last one you had was in your 20s. That’s lovely and feels like vindication, I suppose.
Is a TV adaptation in the works?
A script has been done for the adaptation of the first one – not by me, so in my mind I’m casting it now. One of the blokes who worked on the adaptation said: “There’s only one person who can play Daniel.” And I said: “Who?” And he said the same name I’d been thinking, so that’s good. But I’m keeping that to myself.
What can you say about the next book in the series?
It’s called Murder at the Monastery and it pretty much does what it says on the tin. Daniel goes off on retreat to the monastery where he was a novice before he was a priest. And while he’s there, Daniel being Daniel, there is an unexplained and unexpected and violent death.
When and where do you like to write?
I’ve got into the pattern now: the day I finish a book, literally, I start the next one because I like to keep my discipline. And because I’ve been on tour for the past six months, this last book has been written in a slightly different way. So in hotels in Swindon and on a train to Cardiff… I could probably write anywhere, pretty much. Noise-cancelling headphones are one of the great inventions of civilisation.
You must be adapting to a new life: you retired from the clergy a couple of years ago and left the BBC last year. Do you miss those jobs?
I really enjoyed being a vicar and presenting Saturday Live, but they also they took up quite a lot of time and energy and attention. So one of the things I was quite looking forward to was getting a bit of time to do other things. I spend more time at home and I wanted to get seriously back into playing the piano. And I have a new partner now, Dickie, and I want to put a life together, really [Coles’s husband, David, died of liver disease in 2019]. But I do miss being a vicar very, very much. So that’s where I am.
Your career has really jumped around, hasn’t it?
Yes – I wonder what that’s about? I suppose that sounds like a jack of all trades. But I’m more struck really by the continuities than the discontinuities between them. Having said that, I think my CV looks like the work of a fantasist, actually. But it did happen and I don’t know why. Curiosity, tirelessness, restlessness, a sense of some appetite that needed to be satisfied.
Do you have unfulfilled ambitions?
Well, I would like to be a painter, but I can’t paint. And I’m fascinated by engineering, and I’m absolutely hopeless at that too. So, too late now. I’m at an age where you start to realise that you’re probably not going to acquire the 10,000 hours of skill to build a suspension bridge now.
• A Death in the Parish by the Rev Richard Coles is published by W&N (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
