The spring of 1971 brings
returning Anglican clergyman and part-time sleuth Sidney Chambers a new
challenge. Whilst out walking in the bluebell woods with his daughter Anna and
pet dog, they stumble upon the body of a dead man. Let the sleuthing begin.
The book comprises six
episodes of roughly equal length at about fifty pages each and they cover a
time frame of five years. The first episode is encircled by lyrical descriptions
of English country flowers - I did not know there were so many flowers in the
catalogue of horticulture - and it speaks of a time when these riches abounded in
the fields and hedgerows and were known to country dwellers. Anna has that old
Victorian favourite, a flower press, which is not something many modern
children would be familiar with. The story revolves around love taken to its
ultimate extreme and I thought this might foreshadow the ‘persistence of love’
in other forms but it is a difficult metaphor to sustain.
Another story
concerns the theft of a valuable book – perhaps a reflection of love in its many
forms – for people, for objects, for history. One character loves a painting,
but for itself or for its monetary worth? And there is a story of a lost youth
and the complications of love mixed with frustration, anger and relief when he
is found.
Other chapters are
less clear: an examination of the unsatisfactory laws concerning rape in the
early 1970s and the machinations of art dealers with complex motives. These are
not crime stories but exposés of ambivalence.
There is an
unexpected final chapter and it seems clear throughout the book that the author
is more concerned with Sidney Chambers and his personality and dilemmas than
with the crimes he is called upon to investigate. In fact I found it necessary
to maintain a suspension of disbelief in accepting that a man with a serious
career moving through the hierarchy of the Church of England should also be a
regular accredited crime solver and that this was accepted by his clerical
colleagues as a known side line to his ‘day job’.
The writing is a pleasure
to read and the situations described leap off the page. The setting in its
period is impeccable and completely convincing. As a contemporary of Anna I
found the references to political events, social mores, pop songs, clothes and the
food of the time resonated on every level and it acted as a reminder of my own
childhood at that time.
The passages of
conversation are refreshingly clear as they are not cluttered with endless ‘he
said, she said’s and, provided you have the right interlocutor from the start,
it is possible to follow pages of alternate speakers without checking which
person is speaking. It is a debt we owe to punctuation that this can give such
life to the conversations as they flow as swiftly and clearly as they would in
reality.
There are also some
impassioned passages of description such as the flowers in “The Bluebell Wood”
and of Brighton in “The Long-Hot Summer”. In the latter Sidney goes to Brighton
and there are seven pages of almost stream of consciousness description of
student, anti-establishment sights of the town which I found 'unputdownable'. Each
sentence rang more strongly than the last and the whole made for a breathless and
impressive ride through the period.
It is not possible in
the length of these individual stories to host a crowd of suspects or develop
peripheral characters, but instead they pose interesting questions. In the
canon of hard hearted cops, twisted criminals and dark settings this is a
delightful and more thought provoking antidote which I am sure is destined to
run on long beyond this sixth volume.
