PICTURING clergy is easy
because he knows so many, James Runcie observes. He goes so far as
to confess that, when he sees a priest striding towards him, he
almost flinches, in the way people do when they see an advancing
policeman. He feels that he probably ought to know them -
unsurprisingly, perhaps, for the son of a former Archbishop of
Canterbury, the late Lord Runcie.
So, he had plenty of
material to draw on in creating the Revd Sidney Chambers,
Cambridgeshire vicar, desirable bachelor, and reluctant sleuth. The
second of Runcie's projected series of six novels, The
Grantchester Mysteries, which span the years from 1953 to
1978, comes out in May this year, after the favourable critical
reception of Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death,
published in 2012.
It is not the mechanics of
plot or the cleverness of murderers that attracts him. It is more a
case, he says, of "whydunit than just whodunit, or howdunit. . .
I'm interested in the moral implications of crime, and of a society
changing and of a central character ageing."
Although he does possess "an
incredibly gory book on the morphology of death", the novels have a
marked absence of blood and gore: "They're strangled, and that's
it." And he is also keen on "closing the bedroom door, and not
doing sex scenes, or viscerally describing a whole lot of
stuff".
All of this, he
acknowledges, could lay him open to accusations of creating cosy
crime. "Sometimes, I think I'm not writing crime at all. But I like
it to be thoughtful crime. Crime is just a way of telling a story.
One of the very literary themes is failure, false expectation, and
pomposity, human vanity: in Johnson's phrase, 'the vanity of human
wishes'." He wants to produce "something entertaining, with a moral
undertone".
THERE is an impishness in
his description of Chambers: "tall, with dark brown hair, eyes the
colour of hazelnuts, and a reassuringly gentle manner". It has
echoes of Barbara Pym, one of his favourite writers and the subject
of a drama documentary, Miss Pym's Day Out, which Runcie
made for the BBC (he is still best known as a documentary-maker).
Much of her humour, he points out, comes from showing how the women
of the parish deal with "the uniquely clerical mix of pride and
incompetence".
And there is the dilemma.
"We're not allowed to talk about priestly vanity and
attention-seeking because it's not supposed to exist," he says. "It
can be a real problem if clergy take themselves too seriously, but
obviously you have to take yourself quite seriously because it's a
serious business."
He deplores comedy vicars in
the vein of Dick Emery, but loves the TV series Rev for
its honesty and its power to move. "I'm trying to pull off a
similar thing, if you like, of lulling people into a sense of
comedy and cosiness, and then cutting into something. . . My
favourite writer is Chekhov; so I'm always going to go for those
Chekhovian moments, if possible: people mumbling to themselves
'What's the point?' in corners of rooms. Rev gets it
really well."
One tag that his publishers,
Bloomsbury, have given his eponymous hero is "Father Brown with
attitude". Speaking in advance of the screening of the new BBC TV
series, he says that "I like writing about clergymen and women
best. My character had to be an An- glican, because if he's a
[Roman] Catholic like Father Brown, he can't marry."
RUNCIE was born in 1959, and
spent his childhood "in a village with trainee clergymen". His
father was the principal of Cuddesdon Theological College from 1960
to 1970. That was a strong influence, and he says that when he was
creating Chambers, "it was hard not to keep slipping back into old
photographs of my father and his friends. I've got team line-ups of
ordinands; so I kind of look at those, and do see them all."
He looks and sounds very
much like his father, with the same warmth and charm, and the same
ready laugh. There is, he says, "a bit of my father" in Chambers,
together with several other of the clergymen and their families who
surrounded him while he was growing up - not least two of his
father's closest friends, Jim Thompson, the former Bishop of Bath
& Wells, and Dr Mark Santer, the former Bishop of
Birmingham.
The Rt Revd Richard
Chartres, the Bishop of London, who was at Cuddesdon during that
period, and went on to be Robert Runcie's chaplain, has not
featured yet, "but he's going to have to appear at some point,
because I can't let him get away with it." And now that Dr Rowan
Williams has retired as Archbishop of Canterbury, it would be
"quite tempting" to put him in, "although, as soon as you start on
the eyebrows, he'd be too recognisable."
He has decided to end the
series in 1978, in order to avoid entering the decade in which his
father was prominent. There would be a danger there, he says, of
blurring the lines between fiction, biography, and
autobiography.
His chief focus is the rapid
social change in a period in which the death penalty remained, and
homosexuality was still illegal - Chambers is not gay, but has
friends who are - and which was marked by clear social
demarcation.
The Church has had to adapt
-"or not" he says, mischievously - to a fast-moving century. Two
areas of the '60s that he describes as "a bit of a minefield", and
is wary of entering, are thalidomide and abortion, but he says:
"You can't just ignore things that happen to priests: they see
everything, really. You just have to go into these areas and see
what happens."
THERE are many decisions to
be made about the future of Chambers. Readers will have to wait for
the second book, Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the
Night - the phrases in the titles are inspired by the Book of
Common Prayer - to discover how he found his vocation.
"Does he stay a vicar?" he
ponders. "He should really be pro-moted. But if he is, then the
detective has to go with him; so it has to be London, and then
he'll have to go back and visit Cambridge. . . Or else he's
punished because of all this detective stuff, and blocked from
preferment because he's too busy doing all this detecting. . .
"Early on, I had this mad
idea that he'd become a bishop." And then, perhaps, Archbishop of
Canterbury, I suggest, and he throws back his head and laughs.
"Yes! With a daughter who goes to Cambridge, and then takes over
and becomes the detective. Six more books. Completely mad."
He is three-quarters of the
way through the third book, and he has avoided what he calls the
Midsomer Murders problem of rooting your detective in only
one place. "You have to get him out of Cambridge and into London,
so that more crime can take place; otherwise, the whole village is
dead."
Chambers is a good sleuth,
because he can go where the police cannot, and is privileged to
hear intimacies. He has a penchant for Chelsea buns; likes jazz;
enjoys beer and backgammon with his friend Inspector Geordie
Keating; cycles everywhere; and acquires a labrador called
Dickens.
He lets Leonard, his curate,
get on with the job, and allows him to preach on Kantian and
Utilitarian philosophy, provided that he is nice to the
housekeeper, Mrs Maguire, and tolerant of those of his flock who
lack the benefits of a Cambridge education.
BISHOP Chartres had
suggested to him that Chambers was not devious enough. "My editor
at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle, sometimes says he's too grumpy
and too reflective. We did take out some depression, which might
just be more me than him."
Clergy are always
performing, he says, having always to be cheerful and upfront. "I'm
interested in what effort that sometimes is. You come back, and the
house is the green room to the stage of your life. Without sounding
ludicrously generalist, it is more common for clergy to be
depressed than is commonly thought; and, that impression of keeping
it up, keeping the show on the road, that relentless
geniality."
The books contain some
"quite serious in-jokes that only clergy will get, and if you were
trained at Cuddesdon, you will definitely get them", he says. It is
Cuddesdon, too, that will provide the inspiration for a singing
teacher whom Runcie has waiting in the wings.
He is keen to explore this,
"because my father had the most terrible singing voice. He was an
absolutely atrocious musician. And it was awful, because we used to
laugh; my mother [a concert pianist] used to laugh, even during
services.
"I think I'm missing a
trick, because I can't decide whether Sidney can sing or not. I
think he could be quite bad, and that could be funny. But the
problem with humour is that you do have a tendency to make it silly
- and you mustn't be silly, only seriously funny." He likes the
idea of a line that can be simultaneously tragic and funny.
"I was giving a talk on
this, and a woman told me that at her mother's funeral, as the
coffin was disappearing, her father said: 'I've been waiting all my
life for this.' The same line can be taken as absolutely poignant
tragedy, or throwaway comedy. . . I'm a sucker for accidental
profundity, and the fact that banality can sometimes contain
amazing truth, and truth can be banal."
RUNCIE is interested in
loss: of faith, culture, empire, and certainty. And there is an
elegiac feel, for a departed time and place, in the books. "They
are elegies for two really important values: decency and
discretion. Sidney tries to be decent and compassionate, and live a
life that is more collective and less individual than in today's
society."
He describes writing about
Chambers as a kind of home, a world he can control, a way of
connecting him with his parents. His mother, Rosalind, died a year
ago. "It's partly a way of rooting identity, and it is an
alternative life. I hope it's not Freudian. I hope it's Proustian
or Wordsworthian. It's all to do with reconfabulating memory in
some way. I feel very at home in it, and incredibly twitchy if I
haven't written anything for a few days."
His new job as Head of
Literature and the Spoken Word at the Southbank Centre - he is also
artistic director of the Bath Literature Festival - means dividing
his time between London and Edinburgh, where he lives with his
wife, Marilyn, a radio producer. She is responsible for the
Rumpole series on BBC Radio 4, and he is "pretty certain"
that the idea of a return- ing character came originally from
her.
With four novels already
under his belt, and before embarking on The
Grantchester Mysteries, he says, "I'm very excited to have
discovered all this. The trick is not to make it self-indulgent.
I've stopped trying to impress people, but I'd still plead guilty
to some showing off. It's just meant to be entertaining, with a bit
of afterthought, rather than trying to be the great British
novel."
He is not a great crime
reader, although Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night is a book
that he really admires. At the Edinburgh Festival, someone asked
him who his favourite crime writer was, and he said quickly,
Dostoevsky. "It was so, so pretentious. But it's true. Crime
and Punishment is the great crime novel, and The Brothers
Karamazov, and The Idiot."
What would his father have
thought of The Grantchester Mysteries? "He wouldn't have
believed it, actually. I hope he'd have been proud of it. He did
know about my first ever novel, and both he and my mother said the
same thing: 'Are they paying you any money for it?'"
A decade has passed since
his father died. Lord Runcie, "at ease with death", planned his own
funeral, which his son has described as "a tribute to life and an
affirmation of faith. I felt we were travelling to the heart of
Christianity."
People outside the Church of
England do not immediately make the family connection when they
meet him for the first time. "I suppose I'm asking for it now," he
says.
Sidney Chambers and the
Shadow of Death by James Runcie is published by Bloomsbury at
£14.99 (Church Times Bookshop special offer £10);
978-1-408-82595-2.
The Bloxham Festival of
Faith and Literature takes place 15-17 February 2013 at Bloxham
School, near Banbury, Oxfordshire. For details, visit www.bloxhamfaithandliterature.co.uk.