Murder before Evensong by the Reverend Richard Coles
Recently the Reverend Richard Coles gave a fascinating interview through the Guardian. A veteran of many jobs besides the ministry, he mentioned that he’d wanted from childhood to write mysteries. By exposing him to all manner of human frailties, his pastoral work has provided fodder for his stories.
Canon Daniel Clement is a fully realized character: flawed, yet aware of his quirks and prejudices. We see this as Daniel interacts with others, calming navigating the peril
Audrey, his widowed mother, who lives with him and his two dachshunds at the shabby Rectory, is a perfect foil for her son’s patience, calm, and willingness to compromise.
While parishioners wrangle over whether to install a lavatory in the church, Daniel refrains from overtly taking sides. He sees his role as helping people work out how to deal with the issue. But this greatly frustrates Audrey. Over a Lancashire hotpot in the Rectory kitchen, she comments, “‘I wish you had the powers of assassination. That would sort it out.’”
Another parishioner has a milder view, opining that rectors often “need someone on their side to do their fighting for them when they’re turning the other cheek, as they have to do.”
Though Daniel finds his mother’s lack of empathy and self-awareness curious, he remains unfazed by her inappropriate behaviour and remarks. Audrey is a veteran. “After the war, her boredom with peacetime only lifted when she was finally appointed head of the local branch of the WVS, upgraded now to the Royal Women’s Voluntary Service,“ and had to “organize a response to a mock nuclear strike.” This entertained her greatly, as she “skipped” between medical stations “with blankets, tea urns and biscuits, those invaluable defenses against radioactive fallout.”
Daniel’s Sunday evening dinner is decreed by Sabbath tradition. Audrey makes the soup and sarnies, and they eat watching TV. When it’s time for their walk, the dogs look at him, “tails wagging in anticipation of prayer.” Perhaps surprisingly, Daniel loves “the indelicacy of dogs, the enthusiasm with which Cosmo would try to shag the Bishop’s leg” or lick an unlovable face.
In a moment of prayer and meditation, he recalls a Romanian parishioner who was horrified to find dogs in the church; in his country, this was deemed a profanation “requiring the remedy of prayer.” This makes Daneil wonder if “perhaps the same impulse had brought him to church, to correct and cleanse and rehallow.” On completing his prayers, he contemplates the way the sun shines through a particularly gaudy stained glass window, which, he reflects, “looks rather like Tom and Jerry, not that the artist could have foreseen that.”
The minister doesn’t “think of his employment as a job, or not quite,” and thus, he rarely takes a day off, instead, doing what needs to be done at the appropriate time, “when and where possible.” He considers inactivity “as important as activity,” yet finds it “hard to justify in a world which measure[s] achievement more and more narrowly,” giving no credit to those who appear to be idling. Such people, he feels, are looked down on, viewed with suspicion “in a brave new world of balance sheets and productivity.” Reflecting that “our measurements will only be as sound as the measures we use to establish them,” he recalls incidents in his past that illustrate. He once had to correct “a keen rural dean who wanted to apply the methods of business to the calculation of souls saved,” and he also recalls exchanging a guilty look with the Secretary of State for Energy, Mr. Benn, when the lights came up in the cinema after they’d been the only ones at a lunchtime screening of The Eagle Has Landed.
We see how well he knows people, with all their foibles, in scenes like the one where he visits the estate’s man of all work. Offered violently black tea, “drink it he must,” because there are “formalities to be observed here more than at any Japanese tea ceremony…Edgy in person [is] always Mr. Liversedge, and any offer of hospitality, from either party, must be accepted…Daniel observed toujours la politesse in his dealing with gypsies and travellers.” He sees through his own congregation as well, watching them as they settle into “the quiet inattention which the faithful of the Church of England bestow on preachers.” Going through the approved checklist with a couple who wish to marry, he reflects that in the C of E, clergy are “obliged to take on the role of bureaucrats thanks to its hybrid identity as a sort of religious branch of the civil service.”
Larger cultural themes emerge. Among Bernard’s three children, he deems that “Honoria, with her aptitude for business, her social confidence and glamour,” would have been the best one to inherit the estate. Her shy elder brother Hugh is off happily farming on the Canadian prairies. For her part, Honoria sometimes worries that “Hugh might get trampled by horses, or fall under a combine harvester, or be eaten by a bear.” Yet she knows primogeniture allows no deviation from the rule of passing the estate to the eldest living son, so it would be her younger brother Alex upon whom “the ermine would fall.” Despite loving both her brothers, she can see “that might not work out well for the House of de Floures.”
A grimmer aspect of the feudal system, exacerbated by the war, is a reminder of babies born out of wedlock, who “had to be discreetly dealt with.” Mothers were sent away and adoptions arranged. Officially denied space in consecrated ground, the wee ones who died nevertheless “went in alongside their ancestors without much ceremony or even a marker, often against the unvisited north wall of the church.” Only a few years back, “the clerk used to write ‘Born into Bastardy’ in the baptism register for children whose parents had not married.”
Calm as he is in dealing with the officious flower guild, Daniel is by no means immune to making judgments about others. These are often harmless, like the passing thought that Margaret, one of the church ladies, has “an annoying habit of turning whos into whoms.”
In conversation, Daniel is well able to deliver a deft reprimand. When Honoria asks why he didn’t say much at the funeral, he gently corrects her, pointing out that he said the usual things, straight from the Prayer Book, and adds firmly, “We don’t improvise.”
The novel is rife with moments of gentle humour and irony. Obliged by his position as lord of the estate, Bernard hosts the drinks after the funeral ceremony by taking from his cellars “an overly oaky Australian Chardonnay he doesn’t like,” and is forced to make “grudging small talk” with a friend of his son’s “up for the weekend” who “lacked the social sense to realize that an early departure is generally appreciated when a murder occurs at your host’s.”
The book delivers smiles and laughter through abundant fresh comparisons. Coles likens the sharp descent of a credit card machine to a guillotine, and the scratching bestowed on a dog’s tummy to “flattery on a Tudor king.”
Gradually replacing the more pleasing “dusty blue of flax,” the garish yellow of the rapeseed crops alternating between swathes of green make Daniel think of the Norwich City Football Club, and the song of the larks seems “the musical equivalent of a full English breakfast.” Seeing a parishioner angrily striding towards him, he thinks of “a Jehovah’s Witness on the attack.”
The unwelcome news that his parish is to be amalgamated with another, quite different one, he mentally likens this cost-cutting move to “marrying a walrus to a pyramid.” When asked to officiate at the wedding of Hugh to a woman from Canada, he wonders if Canadians have wedding customs “like dancing on logs or hallooing into an echoing valley.”
This cosy mystery is slated to become a series. After enjoying the second volume, A Death in the Parish, I look forward to the next.