The Judgement of Strangers by
Andrew Taylor
hbk out July 98
Published by HarperCollins
at £15.99
There is something of a sub-genre in crime fiction made up of books with clergyman heroes or, for variation's sake, with nuns or rabbis. But to encounter a book dyed deep with religion in its every manifestation is a rarity, more especially if that religion comes in the Anglican form. Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie have given us too many nice bumbling vicars and rectors - and later writers have added feuding canons and deans - for us to be able easily to accept what Andrew Taylor shows us is the heart of the Church of England, as it was in the 1970s and as, I am willing to believe, it still is now (though no doubt 2990s clergy don't smoke like so many laboratory dogs).
But here we have the Church, confronting the reality of evil. A good many of us in those days liked to convince ourselves that evil as such hardly exists. Yes, there are vicious criminals and there is wanton cruelty. But, we like to believe, now as then, they arise from social causes that, even if they cannot be dealt with at once, will be dealt with in the rosy future. We need to kid ourselves in this way, since if we can persuade ourselves that pure evil does not quite exist, then we are safe from becoming its victim. But Andrew Taylor will have none of that.
His book is permeated with looming evil right from its first sentence, 'We found the mutilated corpse of Lord Peter in the early evening of Tuesday the 13th August ...' And the fact that it is soon revealed that 'Lord Peter' is not a detective-story sleuth borrowed from Dorothy Sayers and swiftly done to death serves only to slide the sense of evil at us from an extra effective unexpected angle. The fact that Lord Peter is a harmless, necessary cat glides us, when we find its owner is one of those women whose whole lives revolve round their parish church, its jumble sales, its annual fete, its notice-boards and its whist drives, into discovering the Church of England as not only a combatant against evil but as a pattern of often trivial threads weaving through society. Andrew Taylor gives us the Church from weighty hidden roots to waving, breeze-fluttered twigs.
So you read the book, as it were, at your peril. It does leave a nasty taste. As it must. Evil tastes nasty. But the crime novel today is nothing if it cannot attempt to handle a theme as weighty as that which Andrew Taylor has chosen.
The Judgement of Strangers by
Andrew Taylor