PRAISE the Lord! Canon Daniel Clement is back, which is good news indeed for all fans of Richard Coles’s clerical detective, though Clement is not — yet — back in his parish, which he has fled after the turbulent dénouement of the previous volume.
He has taken refuge in Ravenspurn, a Benedictine monastery and theological college in Yorkshire, where, as Brother Crispin, he had for three years been a novice, before having to choose between the world and the cloister. Perhaps mindful of the abbot’s observation that “it would be like having Rudolf Nureyev in the chorus line if you were to stay,” Clement had pursued his vocation as a country parson, but “had never entirely left, and he knew a part of him would be forever there”.
Coles’s eye for observation and period detail is as sharp as ever (“He tugged a handkerchief from his pocket, which brought with it a little shower of cherry menthol Tunes and a ChapStick”). He brilliantly depicts meagre monastic hospitality (“a tired brown towel with a tiny little bar of Lux placed on it, an inadequate flourish of indulgent comfort”), and the tensions in community living, at the same time — this is the 1980s — raising questions about backstories, and secrets, and collusion, and repentance; for there is trouble below decks, and Clement’s acute ear for the inauthentic convinces him that the death of one of the students is not an accident.
There are discursions into Zinzendorf and the Moravians (“Did you know, Father, the Wesleys attended the Moravian Church in London before Methodism became systematised?”), chicken-keeping, and vimpas. The familiar cast is resurrected. Audrey, Clement’s indomitable mother, is in her element staying at the Big House; there are disloyalties, transfers of affection (and that’s just the dogs) — and, of course, a murder to solve. But that’s the easy bit: will the path of true love finally run smooth? Roll on, volume four. . .
Caroline Chartres is a contributing editor to the Church Times.
Murder at the Monastery: A Canon Clement mystery
Richard Coles
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £22
(978-1-4746-1271-5)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80