the times | Saturday May 28 2022 saturday review 19paperbacks
And Away... The Autobiography
by Bob Mortimer Gallery, £8.99
Here we go: a lovely, life-affirming
memoir by the comedian and angler
Bob Mortimer. Sure there are plenty
of jokes but there are also shards of
sadness — his slow recovery from
heart surgery in 2015, the blackspots
of his childhood, such as his father’s
sudden death, crippling shyness,
depression. Worry not, stories such
as The Kid Who Got Dragged
Through the Hedge, The Penis
Retracting Guy and The First Date
at the Electricity Substation lighten
the mood again. “The first half of
And Away is incredibly sad,” Caitlin
Moran wrote, but “as the second,
joyous half... makes clear, Bob
Mortimer’s subsequent massive
fame in the UK came with no darkside... There are no bleak episodes.
It’s just... fun.”The Man Who Died Twice
by Richard Osman Penguin, £8.99
This cosy crime thriller by the
Pointless presenter probably needs
no introduction, but here goes.
Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron,
the septuagenarian sleuths and
stars of Richard Osman’s 2020
mega-selling debut The Thursday
Murder Club, are at it again. Their
second caper starts when ex-spy
Elizabeth receives a letter from
a dead man, involves missing
diamonds worth £20 million. Once
again the wisecracking narrative is
interspersed with extracts from
Joyce’s diary — “I’m waffling on,
aren’t I?” — and once again the
famous four require the assistance of
lovelorn PC Donna De Freitas and
loved-up DCI Chris Hudson. “Why
change a successful format? Thisslick sequel will leave you buzzing
with ‘the gentle hum of
contentment’,” was the verdict of
crime reviewer Mark Sanderson.X Troop: The Secret Jewish
Commandos Who Helped Defeat
the Nazis by Leah Garrett
Vintage, £9.99
X Troop, part of 10 Commando,
was the brainchild of Dickie
Mountbatten, the head of combined
operations. Its recruits were mostly
Germans, and usually Jews, who had
fallen foul of the Nazi regime. They
were eager to get their own back.
Eighty-seven men joined it; half —
an exceptionally high proportion for
soldiers — would become casualties
of war. Leah Garrett, an American
historian, focuses on the experiences
of three of the volunteers. Some of
this story has been told before,
notably by Ian Dear in 10 Commando
and by Helen Fry in Churchill’sGerman Army,
although
perhaps not so
vividly. “Garrett
does not
address, in her
upbeat account,
any of the
more awkward
questions
about the
commandos
but... what the
book does do
compellingly is to remind us that in
war, as in history, it is ordinary
people who make the difference,”
James Owen wrote.The Country of Others
by Leïla Slimani Faber, £8.99
In 1947 recent bride Mathilde, a
white Frenchwoman, arrives in her
new home, a remote farm outside
Meknes, in French-ruled Morocco.Her new Arab
husband, Amine, a
former PoW, is blunt
and proud. “That’s
how things are here,”
he replies when she
objects to his plans.
The novel, which
follows the lives of the
couple into the mid-
1950s, simmers with
violence. The local
population is beginning
to turn on the white
occupiers. “The Country
of Others is a morally difficult,
slow-burn story about lives being
suffocated by circumstance, one
that’s carried off with greater
sympathy and realism than anything
Leïla Slimani, above, has done
before,” John Phipps wrote. “It’s a
rather unusual thing: a big leap
forward in novelistic vision from
an already established writer.”id thatinH
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oF
ather Brown, Brother Cadfael,
William of Baskerville, Sidney
Chambers: there is no shortage of
priestly private investigators in
crime fiction. What their creators
— GK Chesterton, Ellis Peters, Umberto
Eco and James Runcie (son of Robert
Runcie, a former Archbishop of Can-
terbury) — knew and exploited is that
there is nothing more shocking than
the vilest of deeds in the holiest of
places. Now we can add a new
name, Canon Daniel Clement,
rector of Champton St Mary,
the creation of the “Strictly
Rev” Richard Coles, priest and
broadcaster.
Champton St Mary is a pic-
ture-postcard village where
primroses and snowdrops gar-
land the winding lanes and
there is always walnut cake for
tea. It is so far removed from real-
ity that it might just as well have
been called Trumpton. Murder
Before Evensong is set in 1988 when
Wo ga n was on the box and Céline
Dion won the Eurovision Song Con-
test in Dublin. Although this may
nominally be the late 1980s, there is
no mention of lady vicars, homopho-
bia or racism causing rifts in the CofE.
Daniel shares the rectory with his
aged mother, Audrey — “she had aWhy the church
is such a lovely
place for a murder
Mark Sanderson gives
his verdict on the Rev
Richard Coles’s first
whodunnit and hails
other clerical sleuths
remarkable lack of self-awareness, an al-
most complete lack of interest in the inner
life” — and his two dachshunds, Cosmo
and Hilda. The sausage doggies discover
the bloody corpse of the churchwarden
while Daniel is communing with God. Un-
fortunately, it takes 100 pages of burbling
and dawdling to reach this point.
This stab at cosy crime feels like the re-
sult of an unholy alliance between Barbara
Pym and EF Benson, author of Mapp and
Lucia. Each banality — Nathan, a young
gamekeeper, is said to have “good looks:
good tan, good teeth, nice curly black hair”
— is balanced by such highfalutin words as
“demesne” or “discalced”, or a quotation
from Galileo, Martin Luther or the like.
The churchy stuff convinces; the rest
does not. Has any eight-year-old boy
ever said: “I adore Victorian neogothic
church architecture”? The police
presence is minimal. Detective
Sergeant Neil Vanloo, who
grew up among the Moravian
Brethren, is virtually the sole
representative of law and or-
der. My guess is that he will
one day take down more than
Daniel’s particulars.
It’s a shame this is such a
misfire. The house of God is an
ideal location for murder. A
cathedral, church or convent is
a picturesque, atmospheric and
mysterious setting. Those who
dwell within the cloistered environs
provide a ready-made closed com-
munity and a handy supply of
suspects. They may devote their
lives to doing the Lord’s work, but,
being human, they are prey to
temptations of all kinds.
Charles Dickens, as so often, got
there first. The Mystery of Edwina quasi-cult; Edmund Crispin sends his
sleuth Gervase Fen to a provincial cathe-
dral in Holy Disorders (1945); Antonia Fra-
ser, in her first novel to feature Jemima
Shore, gets her to a nunnery in Quiet as a
Nun (1977); and Colin Dexter takes Inspec-
tor Morse to St Oswald’s, Oxford, in Ser-
vice of all the Dead (1979). Dexter’s fourth
novel — which comprises four parts, The
First Book of Chronicles, The Second Book
of Chronicles, The Book of Ruth and The
Book of Revelation, makes explicit the simi-
larities between devotion and detection,
both ways of seeking the truth.
If there is one crime writer’s work in
which religion underlies everything it
must be the stoutly Anglican PD James. In
such works as A Taste for Death (1986) —
which begins with the discovery of two
bloody bodies in the vestry of St
Matthew’s, Paddington — and Original
Sin (1994) she portrays the Church of
England as a bastion of tradition and de-
cency that is under threat from outside
(modernising) forces.
Crime novels, in a similar way, show a
struggle to regain order when an act of vio-
lence threatens the status quo. WH Auden
wrote a great essay on the subject, The
Guilty Vicarage, for Harper’s magazine in
May 1948 in which he said: “As to the mur-
derer’s end, of the three alternatives —
execution, suicide, and madness — the
first is preferable.” James’s Death in Holy
Orders (2001) has a literally earth-shatter-
ing, and exquisitely ironic conclusion.
Twenty years on, murder in the cathe-
dral is as popular as ever. Lesley Thomson,
in The Distant Dead (2021), and Rachel
Blok, in The Fall (2022), use Tewkesbury
Abbey and St Albans Cathedral respec-
tively to add an otherworldly dimension to
cases of mundane malefaction.
Coles’s priest, like his praying and prying
fictional predecessors, does make good
use of the cleric’s ability to move up and
down the social scale with ease. It makes
little difference to him whether he is drink-
ing champagne with the nobs or chit-chat-
ting with the snobs who arrange the
church flowers. He absorbs rather than
extracts information from them, feels pat-
terns forming until — “let there be light!”
— the identity of the killer is revealed to
him in an epiphany.
William of Baskerville, in Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose (1983), puts it rather
better: “Recognise the evidence through
which the world speaks to us like a great
book.” Alas, Murder Before Evensong is not
a great book.Drood centres on Rochester Cathedral (re-
named Cloisterham). “Old Time heaved a
mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault;
and gloomy shadows began to deepen in
corners; and damps began to rise from
green patches of stone; and jewels, cast up-
on the pavement of the nave from stained
glass by the declining sun, began to perish.”
Bell-ringing resounds throughout The
Nine Tailors (1934) by Dorothy L Sayers.
The vicar’s daughter believed the first cler-
ical detective was the prophet Daniel who
might be said to demonstrate investigative
skills in the apocryphal stories of Susanna
and the Elders and Bel and the Dragon.
Thereafter many successful crime writers,
ringing the changes, have gone to church
at least once.
Ngaio Marsh’s Death in Ecstasy (1936)
features the unchristian goings-on withinALFABIO DE PAOLA/REXRichard Coles
and, below left,
James Norton
in James
Runcie’s
GrantchesterMurder Before
Evensong
by Richard ColesWeidenfeld & Nicolson,
368pp; £16.99