Murder Before Evensong
The Rev Richard Coles
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99, pp368
English villages are notorious havens for murderers – think of all the untimely deaths to have taken place across the county of Midsomer or in Agatha Raisin’s new home of Carsely in the Cotswolds. Now, with a nod to its most famous predecessor, Miss Marple’s home of St Mary Mead, the quintessentially English village of Champton joins the fray. “Two murders… in as many weeks. That must surely be way above the odds for an English country village, even St Mary Mead. What on earth is going on?” says the daughter of one of the victims.
Murder Before Evensong is Richard Coles’s move into fiction, after a handful of bestselling memoirs including Fathomless Riches, about his decision to become a priest after a life of rock’n’roll in the Communards, and The Madness of Grief, about the unexpected death of his partner, the Rev David Coles. It introduces us to Canon Daniel Clement, rector of Champton St Mary, who, like Coles, is the owner of dachshunds, in Daniel’s case the obstreperous but delightful Cosmo and Hilda.
Daniel throws the cat among the pigeons when he tells his congregation that he intends to install a lavatory in his church, instantly infuriating half of his parish who can’t bear the thought of desecrating this “jewel of English Perpendicular, singled out for architectural merit and pastoral beauty, [which] had managed without [one] for four centuries”. Soon enough, the first body has turned up – one of the relatives of the local patron and landowner Bernard de Floures is stabbed in the neck with some secateurs (which feel like the perfect choice of weapon for the cosy crime genre).
The police arrive, including the rather pleasant DS Vanloo, and Daniel begins to wonder who, in his rapidly fracturing community, might have been driven to murder. Coles does a wonderful job of bringing his congregation to life, from flower arrangers Mrs Stella Harper and her sidekick, Mrs Anne Dollinger, who “like many of their kind… had become flowery almost to the exclusion of everything else”, to his mother, Audrey, who “sometimes reminded him of Pope Pius IX, who responded to the loss of sovereign powers over the papal states by making himself infallible”, and his annoying brother, Theo, an actor who is visiting to research a new role.
Coles moves seamlessly between humour and something deeper; sitting in the church for compline, the last service of the day, Daniel at last finds some peace. “As his mind and body stilled, the lavatory controversy, Stella Harper’s hostility… they all began to fade from his thoughts. And in that vacated space, silence unpacked itself and through the static and hiss, a deeper silence came, like the depths of the sea,” writes Coles, giving readers a small glimpse into what it might be like to take holy orders. “And then the silence was broken by the sound of the dogs gurgling with pleasure as Theo, already bored, tickled their underbellies.”
The bodies stack up and the mystery unfolds – slowly, but then this is a slice of cosy crime. It might follow hot on the heels of another celebrity’s venture into the genre, in the form of Richard Osman, but Murder Before Evensong is not just bandwagon-jumping. Charming and funny, it is just what you’d expect from the excellent Coles and it’s the first in a series, so we have more Daniel, Cosmo and Hilda to look forward to.
The Guest House
Robin Morgan-Bentley
Orion, £14.99, pp352
Not nearly as cosy as Murder Before Evensong is Robin Morgan-Bentley’s The Guest House, in which Jamie and Victoria decide to take a last break in a guesthouse in the North Pennines before their baby is born. When they wake up the morning after arriving, the couple who greeted them the night before have disappeared. They’re locked in, their mobile phones have vanished and so have their car keys. Then Victoria feels her contractions starting. This jumps back and forth in time, from a bleak present to a terrifying past, as Morgan-Bentley slowly reveals the truth. It’s disturbing and tons of fun.
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