Reverend Richard Coles: Author of Murder Before Evensong

This week Sarah is joined by Reverend Richard Coles. Richard is co-presenter of BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live and is regularly seen as a guest panelist on shows such as Would I Lie to You, Have I Got News for You, and QI.

He first came to the public's attention in the mid-1980s as part of the pop duo The Communards. After deciding to study theology in the early 90s, the Reverend embarked on a new life as a priest. He retired from the priesthood in 2022. Richard's latest book, Murder Before Evensong, came out in paperback on the 2nd of March.
 

Purchase Murder Before Evensong


(0:26) Introduction to Richard Coles
(4:47) Richard and writing
(9:25) Children's book recommendation
(14:33) Reading habits
(22:25) Richard's recent read
(28:19) The book that changed his life
(30:35) Murder Before Evensong

Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, a weekly podcast by the independent award-winning bookshop, Mostly Books. Nestled in the Oxfordshire town of Abingdon-on-Thames, Mostly Books has been spreading the joy of reading for fifteen years. Whether it’s a book, gift, or card you need the Mostly Books team is always on hand to help. Visit our website.

The podcast is produced and presented by Jack Wrighton and the team at Mostly Books. It is edited by Story Ninety-Four. Find us on Twitter @mostlyreading & Instagram @mostlybooks_shop.

Meet the host:
Jack Wrighton is a bookseller and social media manager at Mostly Books. His hobbies include photography and buying books at a quicker rate than he can read them.
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Murder Before Evensong is published in the UK by Wiedenfeld & Nicolson


Books mentioned in this episode include:
The Madness of Grief by Richard Coles - ISBN: 9781474619622
The Viking Sage by Henry Treese - ISBN: 9780141368658
The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle - ISBN: 9780099529934
Show Me the Bodies by Peter Apps - ISBN: 9780861546152

To find more titles, visit our website

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Mostly Books

Award-winning indie bookshop in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

What is Mostly Books Meets...?

Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, a podcast by the independent bookshop, Mostly Books. Booksellers from an award-winning indie bookshop chatting books and how they have shaped people's lives, with a whole bunch of people from the world of publishing - authors, poets, journalists and many more. Join us for the journey.

Jack Wrighton
Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, the weekly podcast for the incurably bookish. We will be talking to authors and creatives from across the world of publishing and discussing the books they have loved. Looking for a recommendation? Then look no further. Head to your favourite cosy spot and let us pick out your next favourite book.

Sarah Dennis
Welcome to Mostly Books Meets. I'm Sarah, the owner of Mostly Books, and I'll be stepping in for Jack for this week's episode. Our guest today is the Reverend Richard Coles. Richard is co-presenter of BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live and is regularly seen as a guest panelist on shows such as Would I Lie to You, Have I Got News for You, and QI. He first came to the public's attention in the mid-1980s as part of the pop duo The Communards. After deciding to study theology in the early 90s, the Reverend embarked on a new life as a priest. He retired from the priesthood in 2022. Richard's latest book, Murder Before Evensong, came out in paperback on the 2nd of March. Reverend Richard Coles, welcome to Mostly Books Meets.

Richard Coles
Hello.

Sarah Dennis
Hi, it's absolutely lovely to have you with us today. It's very exciting. We love your book and we just think it's a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to kind of diving into it a bit with you.

Richard Coles
Sure. Where's your dog by the way, Sarah?

Sarah Dennis
My dog is at home today. So for the listeners, Richard popped into the shop when the book was first published in hardback and we bonded over the love of dogs. In fact, you told me a great story, Richard. I don't know if you remember this, but you told me a brilliant story about when you got your first dog and a visit to Harrods, was it?

Richard Coles
Yeah.

Sarah Dennis
To go and pick up some of the essential items.

Richard Coles
Yes, Daisy was the gift of an eccentric millionaire and he did, he sent his car and his chauffeur to go and fetch the dog and then we all met at Pet Kingdom at Harrods and he bought her, all her kit, at a vast expense. It was a very, I'd met him once, it was the most unusual and actually brilliant present I've ever been given but it was quite a life-changing one.

Sarah Dennis
Yeah, absolutely. I remember after we'd had that chat going home and being like, yeah, you know, it was the same as how I got my dog. It was, yeah, oh no, wait a minute, not at all the same. And I hadn't appreciated you only met this guy once when he, when he brought you your dog. That's, that's so cool. And obviously now you've got your, your two dogs, haven't you? I've forgotten their names. I wrote them down. I've got their names.

Richard Coles
Oh, it's Daisy and Pongo.

Sarah Dennis
Daisy and Pongo. And how are they doing?

Richard Coles
Well, Daisy is very old now. She's 14 and she's creaky and she's struggling a little bit. Pongo, who is 12, is actually still full of beans and I keep thinking I walk further and further every day with him and the expectation that he'll get tired but he just keeps on going.

Sarah Dennis
That sounds like Alfie, my dog. He never stops. You think you've worn him out and then he comes home and starts bouncing off the walls again. Right, let's talk about your book. So as I mentioned in the introduction, you are well known and well loved across the UK and you've successfully tackled a variety of different, really very different career paths. You've written several books but your first fiction book, Murder Before Evensong, was published in June last year and has just recently come out in paperback. For those people that haven't come across the book yet, how would you describe the book?

Richard Coles
Well, it's set in the late 1980s in a little village in a little shire in the middle of England where there's the rector of of the parish, a man called Daniel Clement, who lives in the rectory with a lovely church next door, with his mother Audrey and his two dachshunds, go figure. And next to that is a grand estate, lived in by an aristocratic family, who've been there for a long time. Classic English scene. And then one day, the vicar gets up, the rector rather, gets up in the pulpit and announces to his parish that they're going to install a new lavatory. And that sets in chain a series of events which leads to murder and mayhem before he fixes it all out and makes it all right again.

Sarah Dennis
I love the fact that the installation of a new toilet could have such a traumatic effect on the community.

Richard Coles
Well, anyone who knows the life of the Church of England will recognise that that's a very plausible scenario indeed.

Sarah Dennis
Things can't change, they can't change.

Richard Coles
Even when you want them.

Sarah Dennis
Even when you need the toilet. The toilet will be useful in the church but we can't possibly put it in. So the book is what we as booksellers would define as "cozy crime" so it's the kind of book that makes you want to curl up in front of a fire with a cup of tea and and just be able to dig into it and enjoy. When you first started putting pen to paper with with this book did you know that's the route you wanted to go down or did it just kind of happen?

Richard Coles
Well I don't know about cozy crime, it's an interesting one isn't it because there's nothing cozy about murder but the murder is not the cozy bit the cozy bit is the setting I think and I think what people I know is what I like from from crime fiction very often is a familiar world that all of a sudden is overwhelmed by a sort of volcanic splurge of anxiety that's been there quietly all along, but it explodes. And everything is turned upside down and then somebody comes along and puts it all back together again. So I think it's a way of addressing our anxieties and also settling them. And that's reassuring perhaps. So I think you see that in lots of English crime fiction, certainly in the golden age of crime. And I'm just seeing a lot of it now too. and I just wonder if at the heart of it, there's this sense of, you know, so much was written in the late 1930s when the storm clouds were gathering across Europe, and I think it's perhaps not fanciful to think that we live in a fairly dark and anxiety-inducing time now, so maybe this literature answers a need in us somehow. Also, I wanted to write about the late 1980s, and also I wanted to write about how, about vicars, because vicars make natural detectives, which is obvious to anyone who's ever been one, and I thought it might be quite fun to have a vicar detective.

Sarah Dennis
Yeah, I love it. I mean, given your background, it was probably, I was going to say, an obvious choice, that's probably not the right way of putting it, but it was a natural choice, I guess, to base your book around the church community. Some of the funniest parts of the book, I think, the observations about church life and community. How much did you enjoy writing those and coming up with those storylines?

Richard Coles
Well, I enjoyed that enormously, really, because I think why churches are very promising in terms of comedy is that we take what we think are our best and better selves there. But what we discover is the reality of ourselves, and it's the gap between what we aspire to be and what we actually are, is the comedy and the tragedy, perhaps, of trying to be a church person. The other thing, of course, is that, another thing that belongs in churches, they have this kind of cosy appearance of, you know, tea and the vicar and church bazaars and that sort of thing. But actually, it's about life and death and the important stuff. And I just find that very interesting that you get the two things side by side, this rather benign, everyday prose, and then this really deep, tragic poetry simultaneously.

Sarah Dennis
Absolutely, and in fact, that brings me on really nicely, 'cause I was gonna speak to you about one of your other books as well, 'cause as I mentioned in the introduction, you've written other books, just this was your first fiction book. But you've had a number of non-fiction books published, including the brilliantly moving, "The Madness of Grief," which is your memoir, documenting your experience of losing your partner, David, who died unexpectedly in 2019. I mean, the book's fantastic. It's a really raw look at the grieving process. How was it for you writing that book?

Richard Coles
I don't remember, funnily enough. I wrote the whole thing in a sort of trance, I think. I was talking to Michael Rosen the other day, and who's also written about the loss of his son, Eddie. And we both said that we needed to write about it, because I think if you're a writer, that's what you do. I think there's also something about trying to preserve as much of the person who'd gone as we could. and also I think just trying to set it down what happened. Not because I want to, I think I've got an insight into it that others don't have, but simply it was necessary for me to set it down. But the actual writing itself, I have no recollection of at all, funnily enough.

Sarah Dennis
I can believe that because I think the term, the madness of grief, I think is a very valid one, isn't it? Because you do go through a lot of very strange stages during the grieving process. I lost my dad nearly 10 years ago now, and I remember when it happened, knowing immediately who had lost somebody close to them and who hadn't, because of the way people responded and spoke to us. And that wasn't any disregard to the people that hadn't, but it was very noticeable that the people that had kind of knew the right things to say and understood that these strange behaviours that probably I was exhibiting, you know, you're talking about the same sort of thing in terms of not being able to remember writing a book, you know, so it's, I think it's just fantastic and I highly recommend that book to anyone who has experienced grief at any time.

Richard Coles
Thank you.

Sarah Dennis
We'll come back to your books again before the end of the podcast but as you know I'm a member of the team at Mostly Books which is an independent bookshop in Abingdon and we are booksellers and that's what we do and so I thought I'd try you out as a bookseller today and see how you get on. One of the things you know obviously we have to keep up to date with new books but a big thing about what we do is we recommend books to people that we personally love that we would we want everyone in the world to read. So let's imagine you're going to do that today, let's imagine you're a bookseller. So the first question is, is I've walked into the shop, let's imagine I've walked into the shop and I've asked you to recommend me a children's book, a book that you remember reading as a child that you absolutely loved. What book would you recommend and why?

Richard Coles
Oh it would be the Viking books of Henry Treese. Well there's a sequence of three, Viking Dawn, The Road to Miklagaard and Viking Sunset and there's another standalone one called Horned helmet. He also wrote historical fiction which have a lot about the Viking period, a lot about the Romans in Britain, these interesting sort of transitional periods. But it had such a huge impact on me when I read them that I did want to be a Viking quite badly. Now I would quite like to have Viking friends because I'd make a very poor Viking myself. But I think it was the thing that it took me into a historical period in a way that was so vivid and exciting. And I love the way, I think it was my It's my first experience of fiction. I must have read them when I was about, I don't know, eight or nine or 10. It's my first experience of fiction, opening up an imaginative world that was completely new to me. Also, I got rather a thing for Vikings, which endured into adulthood in rather a different way, but that's probably not the subject for this podcast.

Sarah Dennis
Just leave it there, shall we?

Richard Coles
Yeah.

Sarah Dennis
I love that. It's amazing how certain things could just resonate,

Richard Coles
Oh yeah. I have to say, I was in Iceland once, and my godson at the time, he was very into Vikings, and he was at school, and I sent him a postcard. He was only young, I sent him a postcard with a picture of the Viking on the front saying, "Hey Luke, I know you like Vikings, I like Vikings too, "although perhaps in a rather different way." And apparently he'd read it out in class without understanding the resonance of the last sentence. So anyway, sorry about that, Luke.

Sarah Dennis
Oh, that was fantastic, which we love a lot. Yeah, it's actually like a genre. It's kind of disappeared for a while. I mean, obviously it didn't completely, as it's always been in schools, but in terms of the books that we see on the shelves, I wasn't seeing so many of them. We've had a resurgence of some of that kind of historical fiction, but also historical fact books for kids around Vikings. It's nice to see this kind of coming a full circle. I haven't come across those particular books.

Richard Coles
You haven't? I mean, I think they were probably dropped in the hand. They were the sort of books that boys read at prep school if you were living that kind of life, which indeed I was when I was eight, nine, and 10. And I think Henry Treese was a wonderful writer actually, wrote loads and loads of books. But he did have that special gift, I think, for imagining these distant worlds that weren't so distant. So, you know, the Viking world is not so distant to look at a place name in a country like Lincolnshire or Yorkshire or something. And the Roman world too, not so distant in some ways. And I think I was just becoming alert to the idea that I was just the present tenant of a space and time that others had tenanted before. And that was interesting.

Sarah Dennis
Interesting. So you went to a prep school?

Richard Coles
Yeah, afraid so.

Sarah Dennis
Yeah, how was it? How was school for you?

Richard Coles
Well, I mean, I'd like to say that it was a deeply traumatic experience from which I'm still recovering after many years of therapy, but actually had quite a nice time, really. Puberty when it came along was a bit of a shocker, but that would have happened anywhere, I think. but prep school I rather enjoyed. It was rather old fashioned in a sort of Jennings and Derbyshire sort of way. But you got to spend a lot of time with all your friends. And I had lots of opportunities to do music, which I really, really loved. I had great teachers who put literature into my hands or pictures in front of me that otherwise wouldn't have happened. The food was shocking. The worst thing was the food. I still have nightmares about the food. The Vikings had a better diet than we did, but that was the 1970s for you.

Sarah Dennis
And before we move on, I just have to ask you, because you just mentioned that you're working with a Viking specialist, and I need to understand that. Why are you working with a Viking specialist, and what on?

Richard Coles
Well, there's an archaeologist called Kat Jarman, and her specialism is, is Viking, she's read a very, well, a number of very good books about it. And she digs up Viking artefacts, including ship burials, and bog bodies and things like that. - I've been working on a site in Northamptonshire, near where I used to live, on the estate that belongs to somebody else, who we both know. That's Charles Spencer, Earl Spencer at Allthorpe House, and he and Kat and I do a podcast, which is just about to start, in which we talk about history. Charles is a narrative historian, Kat's an archeologist, and I'm just rent-a-gob. But we talk about just stuff that interests us, like the history of tweezers, the history of the necktie, the history of dahlias, all sorts of things. So it's been really good fun working with Kat and seeing how she, how her mind and her experience brings to light stuff that's buried.

Sarah Dennis
Yeah, I want to hear the one about the history of tweezers, obsessed.

Richard Coles
She's very good at tweezers. More, far more interesting thing, she did paper clips as well that was fascinating.

Sarah Dennis
That's brilliant. So you, whilst you were at school, you mentioned that you had access to music and books and art and a number of different things. So, have books always been a big part of your life?

Richard Coles
Yeah, a huge part of my life. I mean, I was very bookish, which will surprise nobody. I was a very nerdy and bookish child. Before I knew that I was engaging with literature, I was engaging with literature. So, books were put in my hands. I had just read very, very voraciously in the way that you do when you're young, I think. And there were a couple of key, I remember when I was seven, my grandfather gave me the complete Sherlock Holmes short stories. And that was the first proper book I think I had and it just lit me up. And perhaps that's part of the reason why I write crime fiction now is because of that. I just became intrigued by this mysterious enigmatic figure on the edge of things who was somehow slightly sinister and yet deeply kind of committed to truth and the pursuit of justice. And all that stuff kind of resonated for me. And then I had some brilliant, there was a young Australian English master who gave me Patrick White to read when I was very young. So I was reading literary fiction quite early, I guess. And another one who gave me poetry to read that was quite surprising and showed us the pictures of Kandinsky. So we were kind of thinking and engaging with abstract painting when we were still, we should have been doing Latin, I think, we did a lot of that as well. But in those days, there were sort of rather charismatic masters there who didn't feel under any particular pressure to stick to a syllabus. And I think education was a more exciting and perhaps a more rounded experience than it is today. And how do you feed young inquiring minds? Well, you just give them a good diet, I think. And I was just very lucky to get that.

Sarah Dennis
And of course, books have continued all the way through your life as being important. And bookshops, indeed, are important. We talk about pivotal moments in our lives. I understand that you actually met Jimmy Somerville, the other half of the communion arts in Gays the Word, the bookshop in Blainsbury, is that correct?

Richard Coles
Yeah, when I first was a gay runaway. Well I was a gay runaway to London in 1980, so was Jimmy, I was from Kettering, him from Glasgow. Where would two people like us with this sole shared thing meet? Well we met actually in a bookshop, it was Gays the Word, still there in Marchmont Street, which was London's first and certainly most venerable bookshop for LGBT people, and there's a little coffee shop at the back and we met there and that's where we became friends and we became friends surrounded by books that told of a world which we'd sort of imagined and dreamed of and hoped to be part of ourselves and all of a sudden we were, it was a wonderful thing.

Sarah Dennis
That is amazing and it is an absolutely fantastic bookshop and continues to be today. And just to think, if you hadn't been in that bookshop the day you met, you know, that part of your life wouldn't have panned out, may not have panned out in the same way, so it's strange, isn't it? how these things happen.

Richard Coles
So strange. So the haphazard nature of the encounters we make and what they do to our lives, yeah.

Sarah Dennis
So you were in the commune arts during the 80s, as I said, and after you left the band, you pursued a career in the church. But whilst working as a priest, you've also done a lot of TV and radio work, including, as I mentioned in the introduction, the regular slots that you do on BBC Radio 4. That's a lot to juggle, there's a lot of different things. How do you manage to juggle it all?

Richard Coles
I think by not doing anything very well at disappointing people is the main way I do it. I've tried to manage it a bit more now.

Sarah Dennis
That's true.

Richard Coles
Well, I'm sort of deducting things from my life that make it impossibly crowded and there are things I would rather spend a bit more time on, I think. But I don't know, I think it's what they call FOMO, isn't it, fear of missing out. I think that's always been a thing for me. I've always massively curious and well, nosy about things and people and I want to engage and get stuck in and explore them. And I feel like an endless appetite for that, I suppose. But I would quite like to concentrate a bit more on fewer things. Like I'm only going to have to because I'm 60 now and I can't really keep up with that sort of rate of work.

Sarah Dennis
It's amazing how those milestone birthdays make you take stock a bit, isn't it?

Richard Coles
I had a lovely 60th.

Sarah Dennis
Did you, what did you do for it?

Richard Coles
Well, I was very fortunate. I had some friends of mine did me a weekend. So we gathered my clan, my family and my friends, and we had a weekend of it. We had a lovely, lovely time with Scottish country dancing and clay pigeon shooting and running around and eating and drinking and it was great.

Sarah Dennis
I was like, everyone should celebrate their birthdays. These days you're living in Sussex, is that right?

Richard Coles
Yeah.

Sarah Dennis
Sussex countryside. Yes, and as I mentioned, you recently retired as a vicar, one goes far to say how's retirement because as I've already said, you still do lots of things. But how have things changed for you since you stepped away from kind of day-to-day vicar duties?

Richard Coles
Well, I'm not the vicar anymore. That's the main thing. And I didn't realise until I stopped, I mean, I didn't realise until I stopped doing it just how much you are defined by that role. And where I live now, there's a perfectly good vicar here who does an excellent job. And I have to remember not to walk around smiling at strangers, 'cause it looks a bit weird if you're not the vicar, if you see what I mean. So, getting used to not being a vicar is quite a big thing. But I'm also living among friends, so now I spend my life with people I've known all my life, and we're a very close-knit group of people, and we have a lovely time together. And it's just lovely to have a friend staying at the moment, we celebrated his 70th birthday yesterday, we're gonna have a dinner, had a great time. We've been to Eastbourne Tip this morning, which is always good.

Sarah Dennis
Living the dream?

Richard Coles
Yeah, and then we went to W.H. Smith's and bought some crayons.

Sarah Dennis
I like it, I like it, why not? Do you find time in your life to read regularly, or is it something you or someone that does it when you're on holiday or you're not working, or is it an active part of your life?

Richard Coles
Yeah, I mean I do try and read as much as possible, like lots of people, chunks of my reading time are now taken up with looking at a screen rather than a page, so I have to be careful about that. And I try to have a fiction and a non-fiction on the go at any given moment. It doesn't always work out that way. Well, I find it takes me longer to read things now because I've learned to read slower because I think there's a time when I was reading an awful lot because I had to for work. And I started to get into the habits of reading too quickly. And so I'm trying to read less quickly or slower, you need now. And also I've heard people send me this thing about if you're in the trade, as you'll know very well, people send you books all the time. And I quite like that because if I was just picking the things I was interested in, I'd only read the things I was interested in and I'd miss all the things I don't yet know I'm interested in. So I get lots of interesting stuff that comes and I read that and I think, oh, I've no idea about that. That's fun.

Sarah Dennis
Yeah, do you know, it's funny to say that 'cause I have a couple of bookshops and I share my time across the two, but because of that I have managers in both of the shops and who are amazing and do brilliant jobs. But this week my manager of mostly books isn't here, so I've been in the shop all week, which has been really lovely. And I was watching somebody earlier in the week just wandering around and browsing. And just thinking, goodness, it's been quite a long time since I've done that properly, because obviously, you're in the trade, you see the other side of it. And I do remember having clear memories of looking for those particular books that you say that I was interested in. But what happens now is because of the nature of what we have to do for work, it's often the books that I don't think I would have picked up as a browser in a bookshop that I get the most out of these days. It's funny, isn't it, how that happened. I'm gonna ask you to be a bookseller again. That's okay.

Richard Coles
Okay.

Sarah Dennis
If I came and asked you what book have you read recently that you would recommend to me? So something that's fairly new-ish, and why would you recommend it?

Richard Coles
I think the book that's made the biggest impression on me is non-fiction, it's called "Show Me the Bodies," and it's by Peter Apps. Peter is a journalist who works at Inside Housing, which is the trade paper for the housing sector. I should say I'm on the board of a housing association and I've been for some years now, so it's my sector. And Peter just wrote the most brilliant, devastating, unsparing and rigorous book about the Grenfell disaster. Looking at it with a sort of forensic concentration of detail, but also a very wide and detailed knowledge of how things can go so spectacularly wrong. And it's an absolute tour de force, partly because he does lay out very clearly and without drama, this kind of strange, awful sequence and concatenation of events which led to 72 people meeting their deaths in such an appalling and avoidable way. But he also tells the story of some of those people. It's a really important way of doing it because I think the people who were making the decisions which led to the lapses, which led to their deaths, that's a story of them being detached, I think, from the realities that were a consequence of their action and inaction, but he restores the voices of the people who lived there, and especially the people who suffered there, and it's just an amazing book. It actually made me, reduced me to tears several times, and it's not very often non-fiction does that. It's harrowing, but it's also, I think it's a really important book, because it's not just the housing sector in which you see that a kind of long process of reckless deregulation of making it easier for people to make money at the expense of the welfare and safety of the people who live in their houses or consume their products whenever they might be. And a reminder that there are still people in our world and in our society who we consider so insignificant, so remote, so far beyond the margins of our concerns, that appalling things happen to them and the people who do it seem to get away with it. So that's the book that's had a huge effect on me. Just lately I highly recommend it, it's an excellent book.

Sarah Dennis
It sounds amazing. I think when you're looking at something like that from so many different angles, particularly the stories of the people that were in the building were in the building, I think it really brings that human element to it. I think it's very easy. I think people compartmentalise quite a lot they see something quite so tragic happening and almost kind of block out the fact that there are individuals in there, there are human beings, seventy people that you know had family, had friends and that's such a vast number to actually think about if you think about them all being lined up in front of you. So I think books like that are really important. I feel the same about books on you know the wars and things that are going on in Syria and Afghanistan I think they're so important for people to gain an understanding in a way that's maybe not just sitting and listening to the news. So it sounds fantastic. I'll definitely...

Richard Coles
It's a very... and I think also it's one of the hardest, hardest lessons from it is it was avoidable. Everybody knew that this was going to happen at some point and nobody cared enough or felt urgently enough about it to mitigate the risks and the effects which was terrible. I still think that those images of the morning after and the blocks smoking and smouldering away on an London skyline. Just a terrible indictment of a sort of savage nonchalance about the way we do things now.

Sarah Dennis
It must be very interesting for you working on the board of Housing Association because it's a different, again it's another string to your bow, it's a different angle looking at different things. How do you find doing that work alongside your other work?

Richard Coles
Well, I mean, it came out of my other job really because I realised that the housing was a huge issue in my parish and in lots of other people's parishes. And so I've preached a hundred sermons about homelessness and I thought, why not try and do something about it? So I got involved with the Housing Association that builds houses for people on low incomes. And we've had a quite satisfactory degree of success with that, including building 50 houses in my own parish. So that was really good. But I also got to learn that the way decisions get made, the way projects are funded, the way oversight is exercised across those projects is very complex. And that's to do with deregulation. So you used to have one or two people with sufficient authority and oversight to sign off work and to make sure that it was compliant and that all the materials you used were safe to use and so on. And that system has just become lost in a fog of complexity now. and trying to make sure that the buildings you build are not only economically viable, but sound and safe is a really tough job actually.

Sarah Dennis
Yeah, I bet. And again, it's one of those things, if you're not involved with it, you don't necessarily realise how many layers, how much complexity there isn't involved in something like that. So it must be very interesting.

Richard Coles
think also the kind of obvious narrative is to look for goodies and baddies, and there are indeed goodies and baddies, but actually, the idea that you could just point the finger at say a conservative administration of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, it's just more complex than that, that the errors that were made go back much further and are far more deeply embedded in all sorts of different interests. So it's a very, I think, responsible book in that sense. It knows where the fault lies and it's not afraid of saying so, but it does put that within a context, which is, I think, powerful for being persuasive that this is someone who knows and understands the complexity.

Sarah Dennis
That's great. Just looking for another book recommendation now, I'm just gonna keep pulling books out of you, if that's okay.

Richard Coles
Sure.

Sarah Dennis
You've talked about the childhood book that you loved and then you talked about a book you've read recently that you've enjoyed and got a lot out of, when I say enjoyed, appreciated, I guess, is probably a better word. Is there a book that, or have there been any books that have had a really major impact on you at some point in your life? what, one of your all-time favourite books.

Richard Coles
Gosh.

Sarah Dennis
What would you recommend if I asked you?

Richard Coles
Well, I have so many, but there's one I've been thinking of a lot lately, and that's Evelyn Moore's Decline and Fall. His first novel, first published novel, I think it was 1928, and often held up as a sort of brilliant debut by a bright young thing, and it is certainly a brilliant debut by a bright young thing, but it is just such a funny, funny, clever, beautifully plotted book, so well made and so brilliant. so crystalline in its clarity and its edge. And it just makes me laugh out loud. And also it's one of the reasons why I made one of my closest friends because he just mentioned one day an item from a fruit bowl, an orange in a conversation. And I just knew that the orange he had in mind was the orange in Evelyn Moore's Decline and Fall. And I looked at him and he looked at me and there was a click of recognition and affinity. And one of the things I love about books is that when you share a book with somebody, it's an index to their inner life and an index to yours too. And you can, it's a great way of working out where your friendships are going to form, I think.

Sarah Dennis
That's brilliant. The instant connection over the orange in the fruit bowl.

Richard Coles
Yeah.

Sarah Dennis
And I do think you're absolutely right. I think you can have people from all walks of life that if they've read the same book and appreciated the same book, it's like if you've travelled to the same country, you made the effort to get there. You've both made the effort to do it, therefore you've immediately got something in common, even if nothing else about your lives relate to each other, and I think that's such a powerful thing.

Richard Coles
And I think the thing that was so lovely about this was that it is not something that is foreground, it's a background thing to the book, but it's just beautifully judged, and he got it and I got it, we didn't need to say anything more to each other, and we're friends now.

Sarah Dennis
I'd say the rest is history. I just want to come back to your book again. Let's go full circle and talk about your cast of characters in your book. There's really quite a cast and they've all got pretty distinctive characteristics.

Richard Coles
I hope so.

Sarah Dennis
Are they all completely made up or did you use any inspiration from anybody you knew to come up with some of those characters?

Richard Coles
They're all, none of them are based on anybody real apart from one, which is the vicar's mother, Audrey, who anyone who knows my own mother might just detect one or two items of similarity between the two of them. So, in a way, it's a sort of son's love letter to his mother, in a way. Not an uncritical one, but what love letter worth getting is not. So, there's her. The rest of them are... People always... when you write a book like that, of course, my former parishioners fell on it to see if they were in it. I wouldn't do that, actually. I mean, I certainly was parishioners. They're not devices for my narrative needs, which would have been their people, and they have their own lives, and they have their entitlement to privacy and dignity and all that, so I don't do that. I sometimes, obviously events, I reuse, use and reuse. There was one character whose appearance is based on a former parishioner of mine, and I rather rashly mentioned this in conversation with him when I was writing the book, but then as the book went on, I realised that the outcome of this character was not going to be quite so great actually. So I had to sort of backpedal.

Sarah Dennis
Definitely nothing to do with you.

Richard Coles
Definitely not you at all, well not you at all. So it's mostly, it's sort of settings I think. And also the kind of stuff that everyday comedy, usually quite, can be quite dark comedy that comes with the vicar's job.

Sarah Dennis
Yeah, I'm guessing to be a vicar, You have to have, having a sense of humour is such an important part of it, isn't it?

Richard Coles
Yeah, I think because like, you know, we spend a lot of our time with funeral directors, quite a lot of our time with medics, quite a lot of our time with police, and you'll find everyone has a sort of necessary banter about real life, sometimes the horrors of what you see, 'cause it's necessary to do that, to get yourself through the day. And also the other thing is, if you put two bickers in a room together, And normally within about 20 seconds, we're talking about funerals, funeral disasters. Because, you know, things go wrong always. And they go wrong at funerals too. And that seems particularly crunchy when it does. So we often talk about, I had a great one the other day, a friend of mine, she was doing a funeral. And they decided at the moment of burial that they were going to release a dove to symbolise the soul of the departed rising up to heaven. There was a sort of rather lugubrious speech about this. And then the funeral director released the dove, which flew up into the air and was immediately taken by a sparrow hawk, which spat at the mourners with blood and feathers.

Sarah Dennis
Oh no.

Richard Coles
Yeah. Really bad.

Sarah Dennis
Oh my goodness. I mean, brilliant, brilliant story, but those poor people.

Richard Coles
Yeah.

Sarah Dennis
I hope that they saw the funny side of it.

Richard Coles
I don't know if they did, but you know.

Sarah Dennis
Now, they do at some point. (laughs) Oh goodness. So your book is the first of, is it a three book series?

Richard Coles
103.

Sarah Dennis
103, that's amazing, wow. And how many have you written?

Richard Coles
Well, it's a three-book series. Book two is finished, that's coming in June. And I'm well into book three, so I hope there'll be some more after that too. But it's a bit that weird thing, it's like being a film star promoting your movie when you've made two movies since that one was finished. Sometimes I'm talking about the book and I have to really remind myself which book is it that I'm talking about. So what's happened? It's the same characters with one or two new characters, but it's the same place, same people, bit further on and I had a new murder.

Sarah Dennis
Excellent. One of these places where you probably don't want to end up living 'cause it's a small parish and then suddenly all these people can start going, start dying all over the place.

Richard Coles
If I were the coroner for "Champlain St. Mary" I'd have some questions I'd want answering about rather than unfortunately high rate of death, violent death.

Sarah Dennis
So before we finish, I'd love it if you wouldn't mind reading a short extract from your book. I think it's always nice to hear from the author themselves. So could you share something with us from your book?

Richard Coles
Yeah, this is just really the very beginning of it, if you like. Canon Daniel Clement, AKC, rector of Champs and St. Mary's, stood in his pulpit looking down on his parishioners. His text was taken from the book of Numbers, the story of the Israelites turning against Moses for leading them not into the promised land, but into a wilderness, a resonant story, not only for him, but he felt sure, for all 58 of his predecessors, for flocks then and now, were apt to turn. Moses averts mutiny by striking a rock, and a cataract of water miraculously pours forth, so his thirsty and restive people may drink, a resourceful tactic that suited Daniel's purposes too. Like Moses and the footsore of Israel he preached, we too must learn to live in hope, to look to the future, and to find in our present circumstances the resources to meet its challenge. As Moses struck the rock of Meribah and lo, a crystal stream poured forth, we too must allow new waters to flow, or rather to flush, my dear people. we need to install a lavatory.

Sarah Dennis
And then chaos.

Richard Coles
Chaos. I should say, Sarah, that happened because I actually did stand in my pulpit one day and announced to the parishioners that we were going to install a new lavatory. And it went down in a very unexpected way indeed. There weren't any murders or not yet, but it was a real education in how something that you think you offer and present as an unarguable good, might not always be experienced the same way by other people.

Sarah Dennis
Have they got over it now? Have they got their new loo?

Richard Coles
Well, it's not my problem anymore. Everything was in place for it to proceed. So I'm hoping they do, but I don't have to worry about that anymore.

Sarah Dennis
Wash your hands. Excellent, well, I think that's a perfect place to leave it. The paperback of Murder Before Even song is out now in paperback. Reverend Richard Coles, thank you so much for joining us on Mostly Books Meets.

Richard Coles
Thank you Sarah, nice to talk to you.

Jack Wrighton
Mostly Books Meets is presented and produced by the bookselling team at Mostly Books, an award-winning bookshop located in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. All of the titles mentioned in this episode are available through our shop or your preferred local independent. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our previous guests, which includes some of the most exciting voices in the world of books. Thanks for listening and happy reading.