If any television genre could be made with generative AI, it must surely be cosy crime. These gentle and escapist detective dramas are so formulaic that ChatGPT could probably knock up a six-part series in seconds. Just enter the keywords “close-knit rural village”, “amateur sleuth” and “any decade between 1950 and 1990” and hey presto!
Fortunately, there’s enough original authorial voice behind Murder Before Evensong to elevate it above the merely generic. That voice belongs to the Rev Richard Coles, whose 2022 novel featuring Canon Daniel Clement has now been adapted for TV.
An openly gay pop star at a time when contemporaries like George Michael and Freddie Mercury were obscuring their sexuality, Coles then became that most unfashionable of beings – a Church of England vicar. Both his faith and his sexual orientation inform Murder Before Evensong.
Amit Shah as DS Neil Vanloo, who asks Daniel to help out with his investigations (Photo: Acorn Media Enterprises LLC/AMC Film Holdings LLC)Set in the fictional West Midlands village of Champton in 1988, Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter films) plays our sleuthing clergyman. Daniel is first glimpsed struggling to write a sermon while a television is blaring out Opportunity Knocks for the benefit of Daniel’s formidable widowed mother and a disruptive house guest, Audrey (Amanda Redman).
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As you’d expect, the titular murder takes place in the church, with Daniel discovering the body. The victim is a local history buff and the ne’er-do-well younger brother of the village squire (played by Adam James), on whom the murdered sibling seems to have some blackmailable intel.
As the local police inspector, DS Neil Vanloo (Amit Shah), points out, however, the killing could have been a case of mistaken identity. Was Daniel really the intended victim? The vicar then shows Vanloo the threatening poison-pen letters he’s been receiving after visiting patients with AIDS. Vanloo tells Daniel that his local knowledge could prove invaluable to the murder investigation. “You’re a way in,” as he puts it.
Daniel is not the most dynamic of sleuths, one of his parishioners describing him as “a good listener”. But then, you could say the same about Miss Marple. Fortunately, we have his mother to provide some bite and enough amusing one-liners to stop the dialogue from flatlining. When Daniel shows her a headline from the local rag – “Champton vicar visits victims of gay plague” – Audrey asks: “What were you thinking?” before pointing to the accompanying photograph. “Wearing pale socks with dark trousers?”
Alexander Delamain’s intriguing character Alexander De Floures is a performance artist (Photo: Acorn Media Enterprises LLC/AMC Film Holdings LLC)Another promising character is the squire’s son, Alex (Alexander Delamain), whose dire performance art would probably win a Turner Prize nomination these days, but back in 1988, Champton, it only earns the uncomprehending derision of the villagers. Alex, it transpires, is having a fling with the local farm boy – this in the same year that Margaret Thatcher’s Government passed its controversial Section 28 law amidst a generally hostile era for the gay community.
There’s a Vicar of Dibley-esque eye cast over the parochial concerns of his congregation, presumably derived from Coles’ time as a vicar (he retired from parish duties in 2022 because of what he perceived as the fundamentalist direction of the Church of England). These squabbles include a fierce battle over whether the flower room should make way for a lavatory. “What about the noises?” objects one parishioner, not unreasonably.
It’s an odd dichotomy that while CoE church attendances collapse, a taste for ecclesiastical crime is burgeoning – Murder Before Evensong joins the ranks of Father Brown, Sister Boniface Mysteries and Grantchester. Unlike its bedfellows, however, this series is not purely escapist and Coles has used the generic framework of cosy crime for his own, more personal purposes.
Without Amanda Redman’s Audrey, however, it would be as dry as a Communion wafer.
‘Murder Before Evensong’ continues next Tuesday at 9pm on 5
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