The Chorister at the Abbey by Lis Howell
published 2008
[excerpt] It was five o’clock on the Friday before Christmas when Tom
Firth left the carol service rehearsal. He stood on the Abbey steps in the
misty evening, trying to make up his mind what to do. Should he go for a drink
with some of the singers from the Abbey Chorus, or go back to Norbridge College
where he was a student?
Frantic brightness buzzed from the shopping mall, cutting
through the drizzle. Office parties spilt onto the pavement from the pub,
despite the damp. But, set back from the high street, the biscuit-brown Abbey
seemed dunked in the wintry evening. The only lights were those sprinkled like
sugar on the Christmas tree in the porch. Here, the unique hiatus of the
holiday had already descended. Soon the rest of the world would press the pause
button, and the special atmosphere of the Abbey would take over.
comments: And it's the Friday before Christmas today. These are the opening lines of the book, and – along with
the cover pictured here – are slightly misleading: I think anyone would be
expecting a real Christmas cozy mystery here. But that’s not what’s happening.
Lis Howell - who has a busy career as a broadcast
journalist – wrote a handful of murder mysteries set in a fictional town
in northern England, close to Carlisle and to the border with Scotland. They
have a good stab at describing small-town life, and have an unusually strong
church presence in them – with plots revolving round obscure church history,
and modern-day issues in the Church of England, and following the church
calendar. They make for enjoyable reading, although she appears to create a lot
of characters whom she actively dislikes, pouring scorn on their clothes,
décor, weight, life choices. Is it naïve to say it seems slightly unfair to
give people these attributes and then lay into them for exactly those features?…
but this is widespread among many people writing about British provincial life, with crime writers particularly guilty (and going back a long time, into the Golden Age. Ngaio Marsh, looking at you). I sometimes wonder - as I try to work out who is the murderer - why they have handicapped themselves by making it so very clear which of their characters they really like.
Anyway. The heroine, Suzy Spencer, and some of her friends, are
exempt from this, and it is fun reading about their lives.
The story runs at a leisurely pace from Christmas to
Easter, and concerns a fictional hymn writer and a lost psalter.
As with all her books – it makes for interesting reading.
Picture of choristers at Salisbuy Cathedral – misleading for content, but nicely seasonal…
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