Murder Before Evensong: The instant no. 1 Sunday Times bestseller (Canon Clement Mystery)

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I was hoping (given The Reverend Richard Coles' past life and amusing anecdotes) for something like Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club books, but featuring a rector, alas it was not to be. I kept reading right to the end but the style didn't change. I don't think I will be requesting the next book. Second, this was like some nineteenth century novel that you got forced to read at school, billed as a funny detective story. There was an interminable amount of detail about the life of a rector, the prayers, the ceremonies, and a lot in Latin which meant nothing to me. In addition, frankly there are absolutely no clues whatsoever to help the reader guess the murderer and the identification of the murderer comes out of left-field. Half of Daniel's (and his mother's) thoughts went straight over my head, too obtuse and loaded with religious terminology. Eventually Daniel rose from his stall, the dogs uncurling from his feet, and walked them down the aisle to where he had discovered Anthony's body. The crime scene had been cleaned by the specialist team; they had done such an excellent job that an ghouls in search of bloodstains would have to use their imagination. They would, of course, and the murders would enter local folklore, generate tales of dogs refusing to go into church, or birds no longer singing in the trees around the bath house." The book started well and the initial murder was sufficiently well carried out to spark my interest but then the book really sagged. The story wasn’t bad but there was just so much detail that the plot became bogged down. The story was set in the late eighties and this was primarily established by many updates about what Daniel and his mother were watching on TV. There was just too much incidental information that did nothing to give us extra information about the characters or the plot.

MANY clergy, in full retreat from a life of remorseless professional benignity, acquire a taste for murder of the fictional variety. Richard Coles ( Feature, 17 June) has relinquished parish ministry to write a murder mystery — the first in a trilogy — featuring an involuntary clerical sleuth, Canon Daniel Clement, AKC, Rector of the rural parish of Champton St Mary.Also, huge props to the editor who saw the dialogue line "Why would anyone murder Bob?" and inserted a tidy comma to make it "Why would anyone murder, Bob?" despite Bob not being in the conversation due to having been, er, murdered. (Quoted from memory and name changed to avoid spoilers.) Canon Clement may not be Coles’s alter ego, but he embodies some of the qualities that make Coles such an effective priest; and we see foreshadowed the institutional changes that lie ahead, not least in the balance between activity and inactivity: “‘Our measurements will only be as sound as the measures we use to establish them,’ he once said to a keen rural dean who wanted to apply the methods of business to the calculation of souls saved.”

A dispute over installing a toilet at the church where the main people campaigning against were middle aged / elderly women? Too ridiculous for words. The Rector of Champton, Canon Daniel Clement is lives with Audrey, his widowed mother and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda in the Rectory. The big news in the parish is the announcement of a new toilet in the church which seems to cause more rumpus than anyone expected. So the scene is set for more than one murder in the company of a cast of finely drawn characters, immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with parish life. Coles is a sharp observer of human nature, but his observations are tempered with both humour and compassion, and much of the pleasure in the book lies in the incidental asides: “uncertainty and cluelessness, the hallmarks of authentic Christian discipleship”, or “supper, a light collation, he hoped, after the pound and a half of date and walnut cake he had felt duty-bound to consume”. Murder Before Evensong is a gentle and humorous read.
The characters and the setting are all an absolute joy. Champton joins St Mary Mead and Midsomer in the great atlas of fictional English villages where the crimes are as dastardly as the residents delightful’

Ultimately we found out who did it because the rector had an amazing moment of insight during his sermon at the funeral for one of the victims. Riiiiiight. Clever bloke! The policemen were portrayed particularly poorly as people who ambled around chatting and drinking tea and never actually doing any crime solving at all. Devotees of Midsomer Murders and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories will feel most at home here’ Canon Daniel Clement is Rector of Champton, a small village with its own stately home owned by Bernard de Floures. The most exciting thing to happen in Champton is the argument as to whether the church should install a lavatory or a buttery for the flower arrangers, then Bernard de Floures' alcoholic cousin is found by Daniel, murdered in one of the pews, with a pair of secateurs no less! But no sooner have the press departed to pastures new and the village returned to some sort of normality, than another body is found floating in the lake.