A review of Who Killed The Curate? By Joan Coggin – 231210

Joan Coggin, who also went by the name of Joanna Lloyd, is a new crime writer to me. Who Killed The Curate?, sub-titled as a Christmas mystery and set at Christmas 1937, was originally published in 1944 and is now reissued by Galileo Publishers. It is the first of four novels to feature Lady Lupin, the improbable wife of the Vicar of Glanville. It is as much a social satire as it is a murder mystery and, indeed, if the comedic elements were stripped out we would be left with nothing but a slim novella. It is, though, great fun.

Lady Lupin turned her back on her gay social life in London to marry Andrew Hastings, an older man who is a man of the cloth. She is an archetypal airhead, totally socially unaware, lacking any modicum of common sense or concentration. She is apt to say the first thing that comes into her vacuous head. Nevertheless, she makes a determined effort to throw herself into the affairs of the parish, becoming involved with the Girl Guides and the Mothers’ Union with predictable disastrous results. She tries, but her efforts are exhausting and disrupt the previously peaceful rhythms of village life.

She is, though, blessed with the occasional apercu that makes sense out of chaos and is ideal for her to play the role of an amateur sleuth. Whether she realises it or not, her immersion into the affairs of the village means that she is full of information which in more competent hands can be useful. She also believes in being perfectly transparent, her character and lack of self-awareness precluding her from concealing anything, even from the police. In this book, Lady Lupin is the catalyst for investigation and the amateur sleuthing is more of a collaborative effort with her friends, Duds and Tommy Lethbridge, and Jack Scott, something in the British Secret Service.

On Christmas Eve the curate is murdered. Lady Lupin cannot believe that the prime suspect, Diana Lloyd, a writer of detective fiction and children’s stories, could have done it and sets out in her inimitable way to discover the truth. In her maddeningly eccentric and scatter-brained way, she turns out to be a repository of some useful information about the villagers and their psyches which both the police and Scott are able to use to good effect.

It emerges that there was a much darker side to the curate who fuelled his zeal to support the missionary movement with more than a little bit of blackmail. One this fact has been established, the culprit is relatively easy to spot.

The joy of this book, though, is not in the complexity of its plot or in the quality of the deduction. It is a social satire, a comedy of manners with a bit of a murder mystery thrown in, the sort of light entertainment that Channel 5 might air. There is more than a flick of the feather boa in the direction of E F Benson’s Mapp and Lucia. It is perfect for a festive evening and I shall look forward to reading the other Lady Lupin novel Galileo Publishers have reissued, Dancing with Death.