Richard Coles : Murder at the Monastery

Another book from the age of the celebrity writer. But Richard Coles has a more interesting background than most. He has been a Greek scholar, a musician in a rock band, The Communards, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Anglican vicar, a competitor in Celebrity Masterchef, Come Dancing and Celebrity Mastermind (which he actually won, his subject being the Mapp and Lucia novels of E F Benson). I have not seen any of this as it does not come to us in the Colonies (nor to the U S, I think.)

He has also worked for the BBC and written for The Times and is a comfortably gay man. So when what appears to be a cosy crime set in a monastery comes to my notice in the early days of winter when the rain is making up for lost time, it seems just the thing.

Our hero Cannon Daniel Clement has just solved a murder and is getting quite a bit of notice in the press. He has fled to Ravenspurn, the monastery where he spent several years training to be a monk, before deciding that his path lay elsewhere. But he is not here to avoid the press; he is here because he has what can only be described as a ‘broken heart’. The friend and colleague, a young policeman, he has become close to, has just announced his passion for a young woman. It is clear that Daniel has been deluding himself in thinking that their relationship has possibilities. He keeps bursting into tears, feeling lost and bereft.

The monastery is Anglo Catholic, which seems to me to be like Roman Catholic, only without the Pope. The monks have regular prayer time, and periods of silence. There are also novices who are monks in training. And it is one of these young men who dies in circumstances that cause Daniel to suspect murder.

It all takes a long time to come about and an even longer time to solve.

In the meantime we have a thread about Daniel’s mother Audrey and her dogs, another about the daughter of the Lord of the Manor and her choices , about her brother Alex who decides to stay for a few days seeing there is some good cocaine around, and his lover/servant Nathan.

The coming into being of the monastery is described as fulfilling a haven for weary soldiers returning from WW Two, going on to,

…become a fixed feature of the Church of England, restoring a dash of Catholic character to a Reformation experiment, like a tot of brandy in a cocoa.

In practice this meant gorgeous liturgy, fine scholarship, good preaching and a sort of ecclesiastical campery unique to the Anglo-Catholic tradition…drag names were unofficially conferred upon new brethren with their saints’ names: Dark Mavis, Wobbly Wendy, Gloria Monday…Trude the Obscure.

We also have sermons, a great deal of praying and quotes in Greek. It becomes clear we are in the 1990’s, Lady Di is still alive and, more importantly for this story, a huge debate is tearing the Church of England apart; the Ordination of Women. This was voted on in 1992 and is one of the main causes for anger and rifts in this monastic community . As one man says,

‘You might as well ordain an owl. Or a pillar box’.

It is only three quarters of the way through the book that it appears the only death in the book is really murder. The culprit is revealed. It is of course an inside job. The answer had to found to who let the fox among the chickens.

Readable, but a bit too much preaching and rather unnecessary doctrinal exposition for me. But reading this did cause me to make a discovery. Did you know Murder in a Monastery is a genre?  Who would have thought it?

The most famous (and which I think I failed to get through many years ago) is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

Then there’s Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael.

A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter J Miller

The  Monastery Murders by E M Powell.

 The  Monastery Murders by Donna Fletcher Crow

Murder in the Monastery by Lesley Cookman.

And, the only one I have sent for, Murder at the Monastery, by Tor Freeman, a graphic novel featuring Sister Clawdetta (who is, of course , a cat)

That tells you something about me.