Book review: Murder Before Evensong - Revd Richard Coles

As one of Britain’s most well-known and popular clergy, Revd Richard Coles is a man with many strings to his bow. Famously the only C of E priest to have had a no. 1 single (in his time as lead singer with the Communard), he is also a radio presenter and non-fiction writer, and has now turned his hand to the genre of cosy crime fiction.

The setting is perhaps unsurprisingly middle class middle England – a village parish in which the Rector is known and loved by all, knows the comings and goings of his entire flock, and life appears generally to be routine and comfortable. It took too long, though, for me to establish precisely when the book was set; nothing explicit was said in the opening chapters, but it gradually became clear that this wasn’t actually an entirely contemporary novel, but is in fact set in 1988. At times this became quite distracting – mentions of someone’s reliance on cappuccinos, or a photocopier in the Rector’s study pulled me very abruptly out of the story as they felt perhaps anachronistic. It’s not that these would be impossible, but they felt jarringly unlikely for the kind of village that this was set in. (For context, the town parish I grew up in certainly didn’t have a photocopier for the vicar in his house; all duplicating was done on the Gestetner stencil machine in the vestry!).

The difficulty with setting a book so clearly within a Church of England context is finding the appropriate level of explanation so that readers who know and are comfortable there don’t feel patronised or over-explained, but those readers for whom this is not a familiar environment are given the context they need to better understand the setting. Throughout the book there is a very odd mix of churchy and non-churchy knowledge assumed and explained. I felt that it may well be too churchy for anyone completely unfamiliar with the Church of England – quotes from the prayerbook, hymns and psalms occur fairly frequently – but for anyone who is very at home with Anglican services, it over-explained and indeed at times felt rather patronising.

The story opens with the vicar preaching a sermon in which he introduces the idea of installing a toilet in the church – while perhaps not the best way of presenting the suggestion to the congregation at large, this was certainly a topic of discussion at many churches and up down the country in the 1980s. This is quickly followed up with a PCC meeting (the main committee responsible for looking after all church matters); between this meeting and the after-church conversations following the sermon, a large number of characters are introduced very briefly and in quick succession, but without any real information to distinguish them from one another. Indeed throughout the book, the lack of character development is a real weakness for me, as the initial quick thumbnail sketch of individuals is really all that we know of most of them. Even those people who feature as main participants in the events as they unfold are not developed with any kind of complexity, but remain very one-dimensional.

This lack of complexity applies to the Rector, too – Canon Daniel Clement comes across as somewhat smug and complacent, and I found it very hard to see why he was apparently so popular with his parishoners, as I didn’t at any point get the sense that he really cared for or about them. His somewhat uncharitable thoughts while distributing communion were something which, while entirely possible, were not something I feel reflects well on clergy to present as a natural and normal feeling. And I simply can’t imagine a good parish priest who was involved with his congregation passing off a funeral to the Bishop and abandoning the family as they were going to the crematorium after the funeral, so that he could reveal the murderer to the police.

Perhaps the biggest consequence of the lack of character development was the lack of satisfaction with the resolution of the whodunnit. Only once the murderer is revealed are we told crucial things about their background; without this knowledge it appears to have come from nowhere and seem utterly incongruous. And (trying not to say too much, being careful about spoilers), one significant event is left almost entirely unexplained.

Revd Coles makes the curious choice to describe one character as ‘gypsy’, a word which he uses quite a few times in the book. I found this very surprising and uncomfortable, as although the word was used quite widely in the 80s, it is generally accepted now that it shouldn’t be used. Traveller or Romany would have worked just as well, if it was essential that this was the character’s background, without echoes of the complacent middle-class looking down on and ‘othering’ those who didn’t live like them, and making this small change in the language used wouldn’t have affected the story or the (for me already slightly inconsistent) 80s setting at all.

Overall this book was a miss for me. I didn’t hate it, but didn’t particularly enjoy it. The poorly resolved mystery was something of a letdown, and leaves me very unlikely to buy the second one when it’s published, or to try any of Revd Coles’ other books. 3/10