ANYONE daunted by the prospect of Christmas could console themselves by reading Richard Coles’s seasonal novella Murder under the Mistletoe, which reassembles the familiar cast from his popular clerical detective series. As if a vicarage Christmas wasn’t enough to contend with, the cook at the Big House is unexpectedly called away, and the patron and his family accept an invitation to join other mismatched guests for lunch at the rectory.
This, of course, is a challenge to which Canon Daniel Clements’s redoubtable mother, Audrey, rises with enthusiasm and a plan that would put to shame the most experienced military commander, admonishing in a “brightly menacing tone” anyone who dares to step out of line. But, in Champton, the best-laid plans tend to be those that lead to murder, and Christmas dinner is no exception.
After a teasing start, we are once again immersed in the 1980s and the author’s witty conjuring of over-thronged nativity plays, musical stand-offs between congregation and performers, clerical challenges (Daniel “caught between the rock of his punctiliousness and the hard place of wanting to look like he was empowering lay ministry”), and the perils of protracted grace before meals (“Bernard couldn’t keep his arm extended for a litany of the unfortunate, so he slowly retracted it in a way that he hoped would be unnoticeable”), and whether to make the sign of the cross afterwards (“There followed one of those distinctively Church of England moments of confusion when no one was sure what they were meant to do, and a little Mexican wave of uncertain movement passed round the table”).
If one of the clues to the murder is less subtle than the English social niceties and peculiarly Anglican quirks that Coles depicts so well, that is a small price to pay for the comfort to be had from reading about other people’s Yuletide seasonal affective disorders, and the author’s shrewd observation that “few things make more demands on goodwill than the season that so relentlessly proclaims it.”
Caroline Chartres is a contributing editor on the Church Times.
Murder under the Mistletoe: A Canon Clement Mystery
Richard Coles
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £12.99
(978-1-3996-2147-2)
Church Times Bookshop £10.99