Villainy at Vespers, Cornish crime

Villainy at Vespers by Joan Cockin

published 1949

A mass of careless black hair and a pert dark-complexioned face. A white satin blouse, red slacks...

 

A lot of people have been reading this lately – some of  my fellow-blogger friends featured it in their bookgroup, and eventually I gave up resisting and got hold of it. It’s a most enjoyable book, very well-written, with a complex plot and a memorable setting in a Cornish fishing village not long after the Second World War. The aftermath of the war is still very much in evidence: small boats, influx of US soldiers, GI brides, general turmoil – along with features that have been part of Cornish life for centuries: pirates, smuggling, witchcraft, general turmoil.

The book opens with a naked corpse discovered on the altar of the village church. A visiting policeman, Inspector Cam, is supposed to be relaxing on holiday but gets pulled into the investigation. He is a lazy soandso, who enjoys staying in bed till all hours, then calling for breakfast in bed. This is refreshing, as in books there is so often a direct relation between getting up early and virtue: I think I have never read of a respectable policeman who is quite as chaotic as Inspector Cam. There is a Mrs Cam and three children, who are off to the beach and playing and picnicking and really not featuring at all in the first half of the book, and only in a limited way later. Not clear what Mrs Cam makes of her husband chatting up women, taking their arms, walking them to different places. All in the cause of sleuthing of course, and it feels sexless, though as someone says:  ‘these young gels… all skirt an flirt’. Though, rather sweetly, Inspector Cam looks at a brass memorial tablet in the church featuring a long-dead lordly couple and reflects:

The pair were hand-in-hand, and despite the fact that their faces bore an expression of rather smug placidity Cam saw in them for a moment the reflection of all those moments of matrimonial comfort which he himself had enjoyed.

Brass rubbing, and the inlaid memorial tablet, play a big part in the plot - see my recent flurry of posts on this, particularly this one on brass rubbing, and this one on general monuments.

The murders follow on from robberies in Cathedrals, and there is a most unexpected reference to one of the blog’s favourite characters:

Look at all the trouble they’ve been having about the Cathedral Robberies case. Archbishops issuing statements ... Questions in the House ... Newspapers playing it up until you would think every church in the country had been sacked and Thomas Cromwell on the tramp again. And now I’ve got to have a church murder!”

[See a lot of posts on the Wolf Hall trilogy, including  my obituary for Hilary Mantel when she died last year – here, at the i newspaper with paywall/ limited article access]

Her dress was long and almost ostentatiously simple, even the buttons were plain

Small parishes, dwindling congregations, too few priests: all this (it seems so modern) was current then. I suppose we all notice different things in books, but to me the biggest mystery in the book was the following explanation of how they cover the services. I kept coming back to it trying to work out how the rota works, but I consider it ambiguous.

“I can’t afford a curate, heaven knows, but this living serves two hamlets as well as Trevelley—Powey and Poltherow—so I had to get someone. We spread our ministrations rather thin as it is. I give two morning services out of three here, and one every six weeks at Poltherow and at Powey. Allen takes one morning service at each church every three weeks. Yesterday was his morning at Poltherow, his evening at Powey. We have the same rotation for evening services. It means that one Sunday out of three they have either no morning or no evening service at Powey and Poltherow.”

My friend Jim at Invisible Event says in his review

Cockin …. struggles to describe action in a way that makes what’s happening clear (the final few paragraphs of chapter VIII, for one, are astonishingly hard to follow), 

And I completely agree (the entire two last pages of that chapter defeated me) – it is clear that she need a good editor or a critical reader.

There was this:

The match flickered on a hint of gold thread caught in the hinge. It was a gold thread.

This reads like a child’s school composition.

Jim also says the book is too long and has too much painful dialect and he is (of course!) right about that.

I was baffled by this snatch of dialogue: “Boys like Colly don’t drink strong ale like that. Even when they’ve got th’ siller.” Only resolved much later in the book: siller is silver, and it turns up again in terms of stolen church plate… It can’t be just Jim and me who find this kind of thing incredibly annoying.

I also didn’t understand the ferry timetable, but that seems to have been deliberate, and I was delighted when Cam rejected the obstreperous ferryman and got into a suspect’s boat –

“Want a lift?” he shouted. “Going my way?”

 “Any way you want,” shouted Cam, and marched back triumphant to the ferry-slip.

“Blackleg!” muttered the ferryman without venom. “Don’t you pay him nothing. It’s agin the Law if money changes ’ands.”

 

And she does splendid holiday hotel conversations like this one (again, with the same suspect):

“Tea!” exclaimed Briarley, leaping to his feet. For a moment Cam struggled with professional conscience. He knew there were several things he should ask. But then the holiday passion for another meal seized him. “I wonder what sort of jam today?” he said, getting to his feet.

“Strawberry, I think. The chambermaid told me.”

“I hope they’ve got to the end of that chocolate cake. It tasted like soap.”

“Yes, but lovely with jam on it.”

“Then you don’t have enough jam for the bread-and-butter. I’d rather have a good piece of pound cake myself.”

“Or what about saffron cake? That’s the local speciality.”

“Or Devonshire cream on scones.”

“I once had a tea in St. Austell ...” And so, talking like sensible people about important things, they passed out of the lounge.

And I very much enjoyed the description of the witches sabbath, interrupted by the police.

 

The children were all picnicking on the beach... there was a driftwood fire burning strenuously

There is a huge cast of characters, but it is very easy to keep them clear in your head.

There were definite comparisons with Margaret Kennedy’s The Feast, which I looked at briefly last year (Cornish hotel in wartime), and the belfry in the church had hints of Dorothy L Sayers’ The Nine Tailors.

Then, I was big into Dorothy Bowers books last year (and right up to a Shedunnit podcast in January), and there is some comparison with Cockin – they weren’t exactly contemporaries, but both produced a handful of very good, interesting books. I would say Cockin has a lighter touch, and has more concern with her male characters. Both could definitely do with a revival…

I enjoyed Villainy at Vespers very much - Cockin seems to have written only two other crime books, but I will certainly try to read them.

For the pictures I found a wonderful website, CornwallLive.com featuring photos of Cornwall in the 1950s. That is later  than the date of the book, of course, but I couldn’t resist them, and they were very much in the spirit of the book.