Evil Angels Among Them

Kate Charles, a past Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association and the Barbara Pym Society, is well known as a fictional chronicler of the Church of England and an expert in the field of clerical crime fiction. She is co-organizer of the annual St Hilda's Crime and Mystery Conference and a member of the prestigious Detection Club, as well as an occasional contributor to the
Church Times
. She has published twelve novels to date, including the popular Book of Psalms series, three standalone suspense novels and a series featuring curate Callie Anson.

Kate lives on the English side of the Welsh Marches with her husband and her Border terrier.

Also by Kate Charles

A Drink of Deadly Wine

The Snares of Death

Appointed to Die

A Dead Man Out of Mind

Unruly Passions

Strange Children

Cruel Habitations

Evil Intent

Secret Sins

Deep Waters

False Tongues

First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Headline Book Publishing

This edition published in 2015

Marylebone House

36 Causton Street

London SW1P 4ST

www.marylebonehousebooks.co.uk

Copyright © Kate Charles 1995, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Marylebone House does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, and are reproduced by permission of the Crown's Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

Psalm verses in chapter epigraphs are taken from The Book of Common Prayer, the rights in which are vested in the Crown, and are reproduced by permission of the Crown's Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978–1–910674–15–4

eBook ISBN 978–1–910674–16–1

Typeset and eBook by
Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

Manufacture managed by Jellyfish

Dedicated with love to the memory of

GARETH GRIFFITHS
28 March 1954 – 28 August 1994

For while he lived, he counted himself a happy man: and so long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak good of thee.

Psalm 49.18

The Book of Psalms mysteries: looking back, looking forward

It's difficult for me to believe, but it has been 25 years since I began writing
A Drink of Deadly Wine
, the first novel in what would become ‘the Book of Psalms mysteries'. Contrary to what readers may believe, in my experience writers of fiction don't very often reread their own books – they are too focused on the future to have time for the past, too concerned with what comes next to worry about what has been. So the republication of this series of novels, 25 years on, has provided me with a rare opportunity to revisit a world I once inhabited totally, the world of the Church of England in the early 1990s.

In so many ways, the early 1990s belong to a long-gone past. Young readers today might find that past laughable, if not totally incomprehensible. Those years provide the context of the books: my characters live in a world which is, first and foremost, uncontrolled by technology. There are no mobile phones, and certainly no smartphones; phones are mostly attached to walls. No one listens to music on anything other than a radio or a record player, unless they're very modern and have adopted CDs. Televisions are large and bulky things. Home computers are non-existent, as are Kindles and other e-readers – not to mention iPads. People carry address books and use telephone directories. If they need information, they go to a library, and if they want to travel to somewhere unfamiliar, they look at a map.

Other differences are cultural, reminding us of how many things have changed in our society. In those books, supermarkets closed their doors by 5 or 6 p.m., and were never open on a Sunday. Pub licensing hours were strictly regulated. People smoked in pubs, restaurants and workplaces. Fox hunting was pretty much unquestioned. Laura Ashley represented the height of fashion. And ‘British Rail tea' was unfailingly undrinkable.

And yet …

And yet, when moving into the sphere of the Church of England which these books so firmly inhabit, not so much has changed.

Yes, I can report with a joyous and thankful heart that women are now acceptable as priests in much if (sadly) not all of the Church, and by the time these new editions are published, women bishops will probably already be consecrated, or at least appointed.
Deo gratias
.

But so much remains the same, and not in a good way. Power struggles, judgemental attitudes, ‘them' and ‘us', gossip – it was true then, and I still see these things going on in parishes everywhere. It is the stuff of which mystery novels are made: the base human nature which puts self above others, and which manifests itself at its worst in the Church.

People often ask me why there are so many crime novels set in the Church, and this, I believe, is at the heart of it. The Church is the perfect setting for a crime novel precisely because human nature at its ugliest is most evident set against the ideal which the Church represents. And because church people are usually aware that a higher standard of behaviour is expected of them, when they are unable to live up to the ideal they have a better reason for concealment. Concealment leads to secrets, and secrets provide the perfect scenario for the crime novelist.

So when I embarked upon the series 25 years ago, I was but following in the steps of a long line of writers such as G. K. Chesterton, C. A. Alington, Victor L. Whitechurch, Ellis Peters and P. D. James, and writing in a tradition which would grow to include D. M. Greenwood, Phil Rickman, Andrew Taylor and James Runcie, among so many others.
*

Why, though, the ‘Book of Psalms'?

As a member of a parish choir for many years, I have had the weekly privilege of singing the psalms, and have found them a source of incomparable richness. Especially when sung to Anglican chant, in the BCP Coverdale translation, they are replete with every human emotion, from sublime joy to utmost despair. In spite of – or perhaps even because of – their archaic language, they have a timeless resonance which speaks to me on so many levels. I have come to love them more than practically anything else in the liturgy; this series aside, there are only two of my subsequent novels which don't also bear titles from the psalms.

When I began the first book, the title was a part of it from the beginning (Psalm 60.3), inextricably bound up with what I wanted to say about the characters, and about their relationships to each other and to the Church. I'm not sure why I set myself the task of finding an appropriate psalm verse as an epigraph for each chapter, but that became a challenge I enjoyed as the series progressed, and I now think it is one of the things about the series which has caused it to endure.

Another factor contributing to the longevity of these books is the fact that they are not in any way typical crime novels: yes, there are crimes in each of them, but the books are not
about
the crimes. The books are at heart about
people
, with the crimes providing a particularly potent way to set events in motion and put the characters under pressure, allowing me to explore their motivations and their actions. For this reason I find the American term ‘mystery', with its additional theological overtones, to be more appropriate than the preferred British usage of ‘crime novel'.

In my novels I have attempted to create and depict a consistent world, with characters who move in and out of story lines and sometimes reappear in unexpected places – much in the tradition of my favourite novelist, Barbara Pym. This presents a challenge for a writer who must also be concerned with plot: one of the unspoken rules for writing a series of crime novels is that they should be able to be read in any order, so that something in one novel does not give away the solution to a crime in another. This can be tricky with a cast of ongoing characters, but I do believe that people come to know and care about those characters.

For whatever reason, these books continue to be popular with readers. Scarcely a week passes when I don't receive at least one email from someone who has just discovered them, or has loved them for a very long time and is desperate for another. I'm hoping that these new editions will bring ‘the Book of Psalms mysteries' to a whole new, untapped, group of readers who will find something about them to enjoy.

_____________________

*
For further information on the history and tradition of clerical crime fiction, see my feature article/cover story ‘The Chief Suspect? Chesterton' in the
Church Times
, Issue 7588, 22 August 2008.

Evil Angels Among Them
, revisited

I approached rereading
Evil Angels Among Them
, the final instalment of the Book of Psalms series, with some anticipation. For whatever reason, I hadn't looked at this book for many years, and had only the sketchiest recollection of what it was about. When I was writing the book, in the mid 1990s, the Church Commissioners had just lost a great deal of money through unwise investments, there was talk of congregations withholding what is now called their Parish Share (Quota, in those days), and it seemed to me that the very survival of the parish system was at stake. That was the background, and that much I did remember as I opened the book.

In some ways, I found the re-encounter quite disturbing. The book, which takes place in an imaginary village in Norfolk, deals extensively with church politics, and not in a good way. Lack of charity is evident in many of the characters, sometimes accompanied by even less desirable traits. It's exactly the sort of thing that non-churchgoers point at when they justify keeping their distance from an institution which is full of hypocrites and sinners. I was beginning to think that perhaps I'd been unduly harsh in this book, possibly even unfair.

And then today a friend of mine, a clergy widow, confided in me about a deeply upsetting communication she'd recently received from an unexpected source, and I realized anew that this sort of behaviour is not solely in the realms of the novelist. Churches are full of imperfect human beings: that is a fact. It's also the stuff of fiction, and I shouldn't apologize for that.

Power. That's what it often comes down to, especially in this novel. People who lack power in other spheres of their lives often find that the Church provides the ideal place to exercise it. To that quest for power, add a few dark secrets, and you have a recipe for a crime novel.

Evil Angels Among Them
, in addition to its cast of rather unsavoury characters, has a plot so full of twists and turns that my amateur detectives, David and Lucy, are thoroughly confused! There is also a beautiful Perpendicular wool church, St Michael and All Angels, which I much enjoyed creating. Lucy discovers that most of the people who have written in the visitors' book have commented with the word ‘peaceful'. But David has the last word: ‘It shows how little they know about Walston if they think it's peaceful.'

It was never my intention to finish the Book of Psalms series with this book, but life circumstances and the realities of publishing made that decision for me. Had I known it was the end of the road, I might have written the conclusion differently, with some sort of closure for David and Lucy. Since it's turned out that way, I've had to write cameo scenes in subsequent books to hint a bit about what comes next for those two characters who are very dear to my heart. I can't promise that they live happily ever after, but …

Kate Charles