Clara’s Verdict
Cosy crime is a genre I approach with mild but well-founded suspicion. Too much of it substitutes atmosphere for plot and charm for craft, relying on the pleasantness of its settings and the eccentricity of its characters to paper over the absence of genuine narrative rigour. Richard Coles’s Murder Before Evensong, the first in the Canon Clement Mysteries series, is a different kind of cosy crime — one that takes its setting with genuine seriousness, uses the murder mystery as a vehicle for something much closer to Trollope or Barbara Pym than to Christie, and trusts its readers to enjoy a novel that would rather be good than merely efficient. It is not for everyone, and Coles knows it. But for its intended audience, it is exactly right. Rated 3.8 stars from 18 Audible listeners, a Sunday Times No.1 paperback bestseller in March 2023, and now a major TV series — this is a debut that has found its readership with satisfying enthusiasm.
About the audiobook
Canon Daniel Clement is the Rector of Champton, a village of the kind that still exists in a dwindling number of English counties: medieval church, resident patron, a community in which decades-old grudges simmer beneath a surface of apparent tranquillity. Daniel lives with his widowed mother Audrey — « opinionated, fearless, ever-so-slightly annoying » — and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda. When he announces a plan to install a lavatory in the church — a practical necessity, in his view; an outrage, in the view of a significant portion of his parish — the village finds itself unexpectedly divided. Lines are drawn; old secrets begin to surface; and then Anthony Bowness, cousin to Bernard de Floures, patron of Champton, is found dead at the back of the church.
Book 1 in the Canon Clement Mystery series, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and released in audio in June 2022, this novel makes its priorities clear early: it is primarily interested in the texture of English village life and the Church of England’s institutional culture, and secondarily interested in the murder mystery. The crime is real, the mystery is resolved, and the resolution is satisfying — but Coles, who is himself a Church of England priest as well as a former pop star and Radio 4 regular, is primarily engaged by what a death reveals about a community: the secrets it had been keeping, the allegiances it has formed, the specific anxieties that village life produces in its inhabitants. The theological and institutional detail of Anglican parish life is rendered with the accuracy of someone who has lived it, and without the condescension that often characterises secular portrayals of religious communities. The series has now reached three volumes, and the TV adaptation will bring new readers to the beginning.
The narration
The audiobook is narrated as Canon Clement — in a voice that lends the proceedings the clerical register and measured interiority that Coles writes. The narration suits the material precisely: deliberate, precise, occasionally rueful, with genuine warmth for Champton’s cast of eccentrics and an ear for the specific rhythms of Coles’s prose. The pace is unhurried — this is emphatically not a thriller, and the narration respects that — and the spoken delivery adds particular value to the dialogue scenes, especially the exchanges involving Audrey, whose pronouncements land best when heard rather than read.
What readers say
The 3.8-star average reflects the divide that Coles courts quite deliberately. Enthusiasts are emphatic: one UK listener described « excellent writing — good plot, quirky characters, and a particularly intriguing denouement. So thoroughly did I enjoy this book that I immediately bought the sequel. » Another wrote of being « very pleasantly surprised — the writing was excellent, the characters good, and the details regarding the Church’s hierarchical set-up informative. » A more measured reviewer offered what is probably the most accurate description of the experience: « Trollope with added murder. » A critical reader noted that « the murder plot feels almost secondary, unfolding amid parish politics, eccentric locals, and the vicar protagonist’s introspection » — which, depending entirely on what you came for, is either a complaint or an advertisement. One reviewer confessed: « It did make me google words that I haven’t seen before, » which Coles would likely take as a compliment.
Who should listen?
This is the audiobook for listeners who love the texture of English village life, who find the Church of England and its internal politics genuinely interesting rather than bewildering, and who enjoy mysteries that trust their readers to be patient through a long establishment before the action arrives. Fans of Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie series, Jan Karon’s Mitford novels, or Anthony Trollope’s Barchester chronicles will feel immediately at home in Champton. If you require propulsive plotting and a tightly wound mystery structure, Coles is doing something quite different and will frustrate you. For readers prepared to give it the patience it asks for — and the patience it rewards — the Canon Clement series is a quietly distinctive addition to British crime fiction. Three books in, it shows no signs of losing its particular combination of warmth, wit, and genuine darkness.
Listen to Murder Before Evensong on Audible UK — the first in Richard Coles’s charming and surprisingly sharp Canon Clement Mystery series.
