Ruth Dudley Edwards - Murder in a CathedralHarpercollins - £14.99
Dudley Edwards specialises in crime novels which cock a satirical snook at Establishment targets. Each book uses a different setting - Clubland, Oxbridge (the wonderful _Matricide at St Martha's_), the House of Lords. Her methods are slightly subtler than a Punch and Judy show but have a similar vitality.
Here she turns her attention to the Church of England. The High-Church canons of Westonbury Cathedral are shocked and fearful when a new dean is appointed - the Very Reverend Norm Cooper, a clap-happy Evangelist who could have given lessons in iconoclasm to a regiment of Cromwellian stormtroopers. Caught in the crossfire is David Elworthy, the gentle new bishop. Totally incapable of coping with the ferocious feuding of his clergy, Elworthy sends an SOS to his old friend and old flame, Baroness "Jack" Troutbeck, a woman of strong personality and Rabelaisian appetites. Troutbeck responds by despatching her protege Robert Amiss and her cat Plutarch (the feline equivalent of Attila the Hun) to the Bishop's Palace. The cathedral close is soon enjoying a crime wave of inner-city proportions.
This is a memorable and extremely funny novel, which bears approximately the same relationship to reality as Tom Sharpe's. The High Church faction is gay to a man. The average Evangelical is liable at any moment to seize a guitar and break into a song about being a twinkle in God's eye. Dudley Edwards deals in passing with other forms of religion - a brutal self-appointed shaman and his harem moves into the close; there's a sympathetic portrait of a woman priest; lesbians ullulate in the Lady Chapel; and in the Rev Bev there are glimpses of an even weirder evangelism than that practised by Dean Norm.
It is not easy to write good comic crime but Dudley Edwards is emerging as one of the stars of the sub-genre. In this novel, the plot takes second place. A minor irritation is the wealth of characters, many of whom have appeared in earlier books of the series but don't do much in this one. But these are quibbles when weighed against the book's virtues. Dudley Edwards' prose is literate and witty. And anything may be forgiven of a novel that makes you laugh out loud.
(Andrew Taylor)
