The Advent of Murder - Martha Ockley

Faith Morgan is the relatively new vicar at St James's, Little Worthy. Faith used to be a policewoman & some of her former colleagues, especially former boyfriend Ben Shorter, find her change of career, & her vocation, hard to accept. In the first book in the series, The Reluctant Detective, Faith found herself in the middle of a murder investigation when she'd only just arrived in Little Worthy. Now, when murder touches Faith & her congregation again, she finds it difficult to resist doing a little investigating of her own. Her police training & natural nosiness are an irresistible combination.

Advent is a busy time for Faith. She has all her usual duties plus the Christmas pageant to organise. Churchwarden Pat Montesque never lets Faith forget just how important the pageant is to the parish & Faith's immediate problem is finding a donkey to carry Mary in the procession. On her way to talk to new parishioner Oliver Markham, the Joseph in the production, Faith comes across a police team investigating the discovery of a young man's body by the river on Markham's land. Detective Inspector Ben Shorter is heading the investigation but Faith gets more information from Sergeant Peter Gray, a friend & parishioner. The boy, Lucas Bagshaw, has been hit on the head & had then fallen into the river somewhere upstream of the place where he was found.

Faith discovers that Lucas belonged to the youth choir run by junior choirmaster Jim Postlethwaite, a charismatic man who is determined to make a success of the choir even if some of the clergy at the cathedral are sceptical. Lucas had dropped out of school following the death of his mother some months earlier. His father had never been on the scene & his only relative was his mother's younger brother Adam, an ex-soldier & alcoholic. Lucas's best friends Vernon & Anna, known as V & the Dot, are shocked by his death but unwilling to give Faith or the police much information. As Faith struggles to balance her busy work life with her sister's increasingly urgent demands that they talk about their mother's health, she also becomes more involved with the investigation into Lucas's death. Everyone involved has secrets they are determined to keep but murder tends to reveal much more than just the name of the murderer & this case is no exception.

This is the first mystery & the first contemporary book I've read in a while. A mention of The Reluctant Detective on a blog somewhere reminded me that I downloaded this second book & hadn't yet read it. That's one of the disadvantages of a Kindle, it's so easy to forget what I have on it. Discovering that the third book in the series, A Saintly Killing, is due to be published next month, made me want to read this one immediately. I'm so glad I did because I enjoyed it just as much as the first book.

Faith is such a sympathetic character & her great enthusiasm for her new life & vocation is very touching. This time, we learn a little more about some of her parishioners, particularly spiky Pat Montesque & Faith also has a little flutter of romance with Jim Postlethwaite. Unfortunately taking him along for dinner with Peter Gray & his wife is a disaster when Ben Shorter turns up with his date, the pathologist working on the Lucas Bagshaw case. Jim's uneasiness & Ben's antagonism make for a very uncomfortable evening. It shows Faith how difficult it can be to separate work & friends & her previous life in the Force from her new life in the Church. I enjoyed all the details of Faith's working life & her tentative relationship with a cat she calls The Beast is also endearing if you happen to be a cat lover. We know who's going to come out on top there. I'm very much looking forward to reading the next book in the series & I'm determined that it won't get lost on my Kindle. I'm going to read it before it disappears from that first screen!

Barbara Pym Reading Week - An Unsuitable Attachment

The rejection of An Unsuitable Attachment was a turning point in Barbara Pym's career. At the time, it must have seemed as though it marked the end of her career. The book was finished in 1963 & her publishers didn't want it. No other publisher wanted it either. Barbara Pym's letters to her friend, poet Philip Larkin, are bravely resigned but her disappointment is obvious.

Of course it may be that this book is much worse than my others, though they didn't say so, giving their reason for rejecting it as their fear that with the present cost of book production etc etc they doubted whether they could sell enough copies to make a profit. 12 May 1963

An Unsuitable Attachment wasn't published until 1982. Famously, Barbara Pym was "rediscovered" in 1977 when the Times Literary Supplement ran an article about the most over- & under-rated authors of the century. Only one writer was mentioned twice as being under-rated (by Philip Larkin & Lord David Cecil) & that was Barbara Pym. Suddenly her books were publishable again. Quartet in Autumn was published & shortlisted for the Booker Prize. An Unsuitable Attachment & The Sweet Dove Died (another rejected manuscript from the 1960s) followed were also published for the first time along with her final novel, A Few Green Leaves, published after her death in 1980.

In a way I can see why the publishers rejected this novel. It was certainly out of step with the early 1960s, the era of the Angry Young Men of literature & the theatre. It's slightly old-fashioned & slightly self-indulgent in the way that characters from the earlier novels pop up or are dragged in. The appearance of Everard Bone (Mildred is at home with a cold) at a dinner party & Harriet Bede in Rome accompanied by a pale young curate, don't add to the narrative & the mention of the death of Wilf Bason's mother would be meaningless to anyone who hadn't read A Glass of Blessings. When Rocky Napier from Excellent Women is mentioned in A Glass of Blessings, it evokes a real feeling of nostalgia for the War in Wilmet & Rowena & we feel we know & like them better because they were two of the many young Wrens who fell in love with glamorous Rocky in Naples. However, I loved all the references & it's been so many years since I first read An Unsuitable Attachment that it was as enjoyable as discovering a new Pym.

Mark Ainger is the Vicar of St Basil's, a distinctly unfashionable parish in North London. His wife, Sophia is described as a faded Pre-Raphaelite beauty & her main interest in life seems to be their cat, Faustina. Sophia's sister, Penelope, is a fashionable but discontented young woman who is getting to the age where she feels she should marry. Their congregation is typically Pymian with blunt, hearty Sister Dew & the Pettigrews (Edwin, a vet, & his sister, Daisy who's obsessed with cats & runs a cattery) typical of the parishioners.

Ianthe Broome moves into a house in the parish after the death of her mother. Ianthe trained as a librarian after her father died & works in a library specialising in politics & sociology. Ianthe is in her early 30s, always beautifully & suitably dressed, reads Elizabeth Bowen, attends church & delights in having her own house & garden after years living in a tiny flat with her mother near Westminster Cathedral.

Ianthe works with Mervyn Cantrell, the head librarian. Mervyn is prickly, pedantic & always delights in catching Ianthe out in a cataloguing mistake. He seems to be interested in Ianthe but does he really just covet her furniture, that "lovely Pembroke table" & her Hepplewhite dining chairs? When Miss Grimes retires, Mervyn appoints John Chellew to take her place. John is a very handsome young man but is he really suitable to work in the library? Ianthe is attracted to him but he's younger than she is & she's unsure how he feels about her.

Anthropologist Rupert Stonebird lives opposite Ianthe. He's come back to the Church in middle age as anthropologists sometimes do. He's also a bachelor & Sophia can't decide whether he should marry Ianthe or her sister, Penelope. On a parish trip to Rome, Ianthe meets an old acquaintance, Father Basil Branche, a handsome but delicate priest escorting two elderly ladies around Italy. The unsuitable attachments multiply & Sophia's matchmaking has very little effect as Rupert, Penelope, Ianthe & John diffidently circle each other in a mass of misunderstandings.

An Unsuitable Attachment is definitely early period Pym. The parish setting, the delicate gradations of class between the characters & the humour. It's a very funny novel. I loved the observations on working in the library, the comments about celibacy among librarians & Daisy's finicky ministrations to the cats she looks after. Mark is another of Pym's many ineffectual clergymen, giving sermons that are over the head of his congregation & offering to buy dinner & then dithering between rock salmon & plaice & deciding on plaice with an extra piece for Faustina. In tone, the novel is closest to Excellent Women although we never get to know Ianthe as well as we do Mildred with her ironic first person narration. I loved An Unsuitable Attachment & I'm looking forward to rereading more Pym before this centenary year is over.

There's a copy of An Unsuitable Attachment, and many other books by Barbara Pym, available at Anglophile Books.

Clerical Errors - D M Greenwood

I love a good clerical crime. D M Greenwood was one of my favourite mystery writers back in the 90s & I'm really pleased that Ostara Publishing have begun reprinting her novels featuring Theodora Braithwaite as a deaconess whose common sense & intelligence is much needed in the backbiting murderous corridors of Anglican Church. Clerical Errors is the first book in the series & introduces Theodora, tall, calm, kind & a woman who sees the foibles & problems in the Church while still devoting her life to it.

Julia Smith, a young woman at a loose end & looking for a role in life, arrives for a job interview at the diocesan office of St Manicus. She's bewildered by the Church hierarchy & unsure that her meagre typing skills are up to the job but she is offered the post by Canon Wheeler. As she recovers from the interview in the Cathedral, she is startled to hear a woman screaming. When she goes to investigate, she discovers a man's head in the font.

This is not a good start to Julia's working life but she is taken under the wing of Theodora, who works in the diocesan office & Ian Caretaker, an administrator in the office. Julia soon realises that Canon Wheeler is a bully, a man of obscure origins using the power of his position, & the absolute loyalty of his secretary, Rosamund Coldharbour, to intimidate more timid souls. He also takes advantage of the frailty of the current Bishop & obviously has his eye on his next step up the diocesan ladder. The dead man is Paul Gray, a young priest from a local parish. There was a little mystery & some murky scandal in his past but there seems to be no real motive for his murder & in such a horrible way. Was the placing of his head in the font a message to another member of clergy or to the Church?

Theodora & Ian begin investigating the murder but are they becoming sidetracked by other strange events such as the discovery of some of the Cathedral candles being used in what looks like a Satanic rite? The police are being thwarted by the closed shop mentality of the clergy & Canon Wheeler enjoys wrong footing them at every turn. Ian's contempt for Canon Wheeler is obvious & the Canon is determined to get rid of him. Ian's talent as an administrator would make it hard for him to be dismissed but is there something in his past that could trip him up? Then, a second murder takes place & the secrets of everyone caught up in the case are uncovered.

I like Theodora as a character very much. I found this first book a little frustrating as there wasn't really enough of Theodora & much more of Julia Smith who, apart from discovering the bodies & being a convenient audience for Theo & Ian's speculations, doesn't really have much to do except follow them around. I know we see much more of Theo in the later books as I read them all when they were first published & I'd like to read them all again. Theo is in the tradition of the great loner detectives, partly because of her job & vocation but also because she's an observer. This, & her compassion, is what makes her such an engaging character. She is a little on the sidelines, watching everything & everyone but keeping her own counsel. Her knowledge of the personalities involved here is what leads her to the murderer. The Cathedral setting is also beautifully evoked, not surprising really as D M Greenwood was the Director of Education for the diocese of Rochester until her retirement in 2004. She wrote nine novels in the series in the 1990s. I've always loved a good clerical mystery. Kate Charles is another favourite & I enjoyed the beginning of a new series,  The Reluctant Detective by Martha Ockley last year. I hope both these authors publish new books soon. Until then, I may have to invest in some more D M Greenwood.

Wormingford

I had an unfortunate introduction to Ronald Blythe. I had to read his classic account of English village life, Akenfield, at high school & I didn’t enjoy it at all. I think teachers have a lot to answer for. How many people do you know who have been put off Shakespeare, Jane Austen etc because they were forced to read them at school? Luckily, I wasn’t put off Shakespeare by being forced to sit through the class laboriously reading Macbeth aloud (and it’s still my favourite Shakespeare) but I think I’m the exception to the rule there. Apart from poor Ronald, I’ve never been able to read John Steinbeck after reading The Grapes of Wrath in Form 5. Akenfield was published in the late 60s & Ronald Blythe has been writing about the countryside ever since. I’ve just read the first two collections of his weekly columns for the Church Times, Word From Wormingford & Out Of The Valley. Blythe is a Reader in his parish which consists of three congregations at Wormingford, Mount Bures & Little Horkesley. The books follow the seasons & the liturgical year with observations of the natural world, parish matters, the garden & the adventures of Max the cat. The Stour Valley has artistic connections. It is Constable country, Gainsborough was born here & Blythe knew the artist John Nash who lived in the area. He also loves the poetry of John Clare & as president of the John Clare Society is in demand to give talks about the poet. I enjoyed the gradual feeling of learning about the parish. Ronald Blythe spends quite a bit of time walking & meditating on life, his past & the changes that modern times have brought to his village & the Church. I read the books straight through but I think they could also serve as books to dip into as the seasons pass just to glean a little bit of country wisdom from a long life well lived by a happy man.