A Death in the Parish - Richard Coles *****

In reviewing the first of Richard Coles' murder mysteries, Murder before Evensong, I remarked 'I just hope that with practice Coles can make the detective aspect more engaging'. He doesn't. In fact, although a murder is a thread running through this book, it's almost incidental - yet I didn't care because the murder mystery aspect is not really the point.

A Death in the Parish gives us two things that Coles does brilliantly: exploring the nature of British village life in the 1980s, when the country was going through a significant culture change as the old respect for authority was dying out, and giving us a novel with a realistic vicar as a central character, as opposed to the clumsy stereotypes we usually seen in fiction.

I don't know if this was Coles' conscious intent, but the 'cosy murder' part feels like little more than a way to get more readers, because there is far less of a market for a novel about the realities of village life and the Church of England. And as my personal fictional matter is largely limited to police procedurals, science fiction and fantasy, I would be unlikely to pick up such a book. But I'm so glad I did.

I've lived in a village off and on through my life, and Coles really gets into the spirit of such a place with both its petty playing off of characters against each other and its unmatched sense of community and continuity, however faded it might be. I'm also very familiar with the Church of England (Anglican/Episcopalian for those who haven't come across it), an institution that may be dying, but that is so central to the English cultural heritage.

As a retired vicar, Coles is ideally placed to understand the niceties of church politics - particularly when he pits his traditionalist, Anglo-catholic central character against a colleague whose ideas are far too evangelical and Bible-literalist for his liking.

You don't expect cosy murder mysteries to be un-put-downable, but I rushed through this book, soaking up the atmosphere and revelling in Coles' understanding of the sense of place and the impact on institutions of culture change. The cover quote saying 'Best of the new cosy crime writers' totally misses the point. It's very average crime writing, but it's an excellent novel.

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