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

Product Information

I relished looking forward to reading this one; it was everything I hoped – an utter delight from beginning to end! I feel fairly confident that I will as the characters grow on me the novels will continue to improve.

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." 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.) A cosy crime novel by ex Communards musician Reverend Richard Coles. This was a decent read and a solid start to the Canon Clement series that left me thinking that it has a lot more to offer. We get a good insight into the characters and the novel was well written making it an entertaining read. What was with all the pretentious words/phrases? For the first chapter or two I didn't mind. Oh how nice I thought, it's not dumbed down. Then the novelty wore off. As readers we were expected to be familiar with a load of French and Latin phrases and some pretty hard vocab. I didn't understand why; I can't imagine the cast of characters would really have used that language, so maybe it was just the author showing off. Whatever it was, it was quite annoying. There were also a lot of historical and literary references and ecclesiastical terminology. I was really looking forward to reading this book. I like the author, Richard Coles and am always on the look out for a new crime series so this book based around the Rector of a small English village sounded perfect. It was a bit disappointing though.

The Church Times Archive

But between a family of idle aristocrats, embittered clam frogs and the son of a punk-looking Lord, he has a good range of suspects. So much was over-explained, like the past of characters or the surroundings of an area. This really didn’t add anything to the narrative whatsoever. I still found most characters very bland, their pasts barely reflected who they were in the present. The church events or religious pondering felt particularly unnecessary to the plot. In the early stages of this book the biblical references served to link those stories to the world of Champton. I really liked that approach. Gradually the book resorted to simply telling us all about specific church services. Funerals were written about in a detailed way, complete with Bible quotes, and prayers were written out fully. I get why this is important to Coles, or to Daniel, but it didn’t serve the plot in any way. 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. 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”. That points the way to the second volume: threatened pastoral reorganisation has been staved off only temporarily, we sense, and the author hints that it will be resurrected, with murderous consequences. I can hardly wait.

This book simply didn’t know what it wanted to be; diaries of a reverend, a murder mystery, or a comedic twist on church life. Blending it all together means we’ve got a murder mystery that doesn’t center murders, a comedic plot that never develops, and detailed descriptions of church services which feel too lengthy and out of place.

Throw in some tonally-jarring casual mentions of animal death and the 2-star rating is cemented. Whether you're a cat person, a dog person or a rabbit person, you're guaranteed to feel a little twinge of pointless distress at some point along the way. 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. Murder Before Evensong is a gentle and humorous read.
The characters and the setting are all an absolute joy. Canon Daniel Clement was a likeable main character but I couldn’t quite see him as a solver of murders. As always in this type of novel, there were a host of other characters from the nearby Lord of the Manor to the women who run the flower arranging. The most memorable of these was probably Audrey, Canon Clements mother who definitely has her own opinions about what is going on and misses nothing. Most of the other characters were sadly, pretty forgettable.

English villages are notorious havens for murderers – think of all the untimely deaths to have taken place across the county of Midsomer or in Agatha Raisin’s new home of Carsely in the Cotswolds. Now, with a nod to its most famous predecessor, Miss Marple’s home of St Mary Mead, the quintessentially English village of Champton joins the fray. “Two murders… in as many weeks. That must surely be way above the odds for an English country village, even St Mary Mead. What on earth is going on?” says the daughter of one of the victims. Canon Daniel Clement is Rector of Champton. He has been there for eight years, living at the Rectory alongside his widowed mother – opinionated, fearless, ever-so-slightly annoying Audrey – and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda. 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.I also could’ve done with some explanation on specific church terms. I’m interested in Protestantism and Catholicism, but didn’t have much knowledge on the Anglican Church. A lot of the terms used I was therefore unfamiliar with. On top of that a lot of vocabulary used I didn’t quite get the hang of either. This is largely due to me not being a native English speaker, or me not being familiar with Latin phrases, but the way the sentences were structured definitely didn’t help either. A lot of (to me seemingly) posh words were bundled up in huge sentences. Initially I re-read these sections, but as I started to realise there wasn’t much important information to be found I started skimming over them instead. It therefore wasn’t as accessible as other cozy crime novels would be. Author Richard Coles is well known in the UK for being a previous member of The Communards and also for appearing on many television shows as a witty and companionable guest, so I was keen to read his first mystery and I was delighted that I found it a really enjoyable read.

I’m pretty sure I read most of this book without actually reading it, because I couldn’t bother. Most of the story is about the daily occurrences of the parish and there is no crime investigation. Sure, murders do happen, but, contrary to what I thought, this is not a story where the vicar, rectory, or whatever, investigates them. He just stays there, doing what he normally does, until the last chapters of the book, where he has a certain, I don’t know, realisation?, and he knows exactly who the murderer is. And I can assure you it is nearly impossible to guess in this instance. It could be anyone from this cast of indistinguishable characters, or no one, because there doesn’t seem to be any discernible motive. There is a motive, however, and, when I thought my eyes couldn’t roll anymore, after the reverend’s sudden realisation of who the murderer is, they still rolled some more as I read about the motive for the murders. It was bad. I already mentioned the indistinguishable characters, but what about the poor dialogues? They were terrible.Devotees of Midsomer Murders and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories will feel most at home here’