The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Meet the surprising heir to Barbara Pym
Rev Richard Coles has swapped ministry for ‘cosy crime’ mystery – and the church’s loss is fiction’s gain
MURDER BEFORE EVENSONG by the Reverend Richard Coles 362pp, W&N, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £7.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
In the 1940s Raymond Chandler declared war on English crime fiction, and its depiction of picturesque villages as the milieu of murder: his aim in his own novels, as summarised (slightly disapprovingly) by WH Auden, was “to take the body out of the vicarage garden and give murder back to those who are good at it” – gangsters, lowlifes etc. In the decades since, that body has yoyoed in and out of the vicarage garden countless times as realism and anti-realism have gone in and out of fashion in the genre.
In reaction to our stressful times, perhaps, it is the anti-realists – the authors of “cosy crime” – who are currently in the ascendant, and this particular bandwagon is attracting many of our more literate celebrities. The latest is Richard Coles, 1980s pop star turned cleric and ubiquitous broadcaster, whose recent retirement as vicar of Finedon in Northamptonshire has enabled Justin Welby to take his proper place as the best-known practising Anglican clergyman.
Perhaps because Coles’s fellow Strictly Come Dancing contestant
Ann Widdecombe has already beaten him to the use of that show as a cosy mystery backdrop (see her novel The Dancing Detective), Coles has set Murder Before Evensong in a Northamptonshire village – similar, one suspects, to his own parish, although the action takes place in 1988, when Coles was still living it large with the Communards.
The start is reminiscent of Coles’s 2016 memoir Bringing in the Sheaves, showing how a rural clergyman – here it is Canon Daniel Clement, Rector of Champton – has to administer to his flock’s needs, both spiritual and temporal, and try to outmanoeuvre the village busybodies. Here, however, Coles is free here to unleash a splendidly caustic wit on those parishioners who deserve it – often through Daniel’s acidic mother Audrey, his housemate at the vicarage.
For the first 100 pages, as Daniel locks horns with his flock over the matter of whether the vintage pews in St Mary’s can be moved to make way for a new lavatory, Coles rivals Barbara Pym in his ability to make supremely low-stake conflict gripping. When, eventually, Daniel stumbles on a churchwarden dead from a stab wound in the neck – not in the vicarage garden, but in St Mary’s itself – the intrusion of violence into this carefully realised mundane world is truly shocking.
Auden said that the best detective stories are set in “Eden-like”
places where the corpse “is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet”: this effect is harder to achieve now that Eden-like, Midsomery murders are commonplace in books and on television, but Coles has pulled it off.
Thereafter the bodies pile up and Daniel plays detective. The whodunnit element of the story is far from perfunctory, but the book always seems most real and most fascinating when it returns to the incidental details of what it is actually like to be a vicar (on Daniel buying a “pencil eraser” in the post office: “He never asked for a rubber in a shop lest it cause sniggering… it was a habit all clergymen acquire quickly: not to provide an open goal for humorists.”)
Coles has declared that his early retirement has been prompted by the Church of England’s increasing intolerance: “as more parishes tip into unviability,” he wrote in The Sunday Times recently, “the churches that are viable […] are places where gay people are not welcome, and that rules me out”. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a live-and-let-live message at the centre of the story (we know nothing of the bachelor Daniel’s sex life, incidentally, although there is a hint at the end about what the promised sequels might reveal).
He clearly still loves the C of E, however, and manages to convey even to this heathen reader some of the low-key but potent magic of its rituals. One can’t help feeling that writing the novel was Coles’s way of vicariously continuing his involvement with the parish and the Church from which he has now exiled himself.
Like all the best cosy mysteries, this is comforting but not anodyne. And the style suits the content perfectly: wonderfully feline when it comes to jokes, but moving easily to unselfconscious wisdom when required. Auden would have admired this novel for meeting his requirements for the classical detective story: but he might also have recognised Coles as being, at his best, a fellow artist with words.