HURRAH for the fifth coming of Canon Daniel Clement, and the murder and mystery that follow in his wake: “It’s like having Hercule Poirot as the rector.” This time, the familiar cast of patron and parishioners — not forgetting the “dauntless” and wonderfully drawn rector’s mother — is augmented by the actual cast of a film being shot at the Big House.
The fictional plot is soon overtaken by a real one, and Daniel — his emotional equilibrium and his friendship with the local detective sergeant restored — is once again called upon to exercise his intuition, his local knowledge, and his willingness “to face, not flinch from, the worst of us” in identifying a murderer.
Part of the pleasure of the series is the author’s wry but affectionate depiction of the Church of England. Daniel puts on a stole “in the worn green of the long season of nothing much happening” in order to toll the bell — “another Church of England tradition of people getting indignant about what is done in the church they don’t go to” — accompanied by his dachshund, who “would follow the long-hallowed Church of England tradition of responding to the call to worship by falling asleep”.
But this is the 1980s, and times change, even in Champton, where dealing in illicit substances traverses the customary social barriers; and there are plenty of dogs and drugs, if as yet no rock ’n’ roll. Once again, the revelation of unexpected facets of familiar characters and the disentangling of threads from their past casts a long shadow over the present, and offers the hope of further instalments — although the population of Champton is shrinking almost as rapidly as that of Midsomer.
And some things, reassuringly, don’t change: Daniel cherishes the Anglican bias towards a middle way, but is clear-sighted about it: “Sometimes a via media could be found, sometimes only a barely credible compromise, designed to keep both parties just happy enough until something else came along that they wanted to fall out about more.” Thank God it’s fiction.
Caroline Chartres is a contributing editor to the Church Times.
A Death on Location
Richard Coles
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £22
(978-1-3996-2141-0)
Church Times Bookshop special offer £17.60