The Religious Body

I had never heard of Catherine Aird until I joined a British Mysteries group on FB. Turns out this author has been writing for over 50 years and has been awarded lifetime achievement awards for her work, including the British Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger Award.  Aird is the pseudonym for Kinn Hamilton McIntosh and she wrote the first of two dozen "Calleshire (a stand in for the county of Kent, where she lives) Chronicles" in 1966. This is that book. Before I start on the plot, I will share some of the accolades I found on the Crime Reads website: The New Yorker considered her “the very best in British mystery;’ The Times of London called her “never less than elegant and mischievously sharp;” the Washington Post said, “Aird’s intelligence shines through every sentence.”

Inspector C.D. Sloan of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire Constabulary is called to a suspicious death, along with D. C. William Crosby, in the village of Cullingoak. Inspector Sloane had never been inside a convent, but the local doctor who was called by the Mother Superior, astutely determined that this was not an accidental fall down the stairs as it initially appeared. It's clear that the woman's head had been bashed in, the body concealed, and later thrown down the stairs to try and cover up the murder. Trying to collect information inside a convent, where the nuns are encouraged to keep their eyes ("custody of the eyes") and ears on their own business, presents real challenges. The two nuns who sat on either side of the deceased Sister Anne say she was at the evening service, but the post-mortem reveals she would have been dead a couple of hours by then. Two days later, the inspector gets a call to investigate the Guy Fawkes bonfire at the nearby agricultural institute which abuts the convent's grounds. The "guy" that was being burned turns out to be wearing an old habit stolen from the convent and the eyeglasses of the deceased nun. the Principal of the institute, Mr. Ranby, is more than happy to identify the culprits but interviewing the 3 young men leads the police no closer to identifying the killer. And then one of the 3 students who stole the habit from the convent is found murdered. Sloan keeps gathering information, even seemingly irrelevant facts, and finally formulates a theory. The inspector, with the cooperation of the Mother Superior and the priest who looks after the nuns, sets a trap that nabs their killer and I never saw it coming.

The book is filled with details about life in a convent and a small village and the details of a police investigation, constrained, as so often happens, by the micromanagement of their superior. Several reviewers have noted that Aird brings in elements of both English cozies and police procedurals. The article about Aird and her body of work at Crime Reads is a masterful overview and will entice you to read her books better than anything I can say. Sloan's wife does not appear in this book but apparently becomes a worthy character in her own right in later installments. And it appears that D.C. Crosby never gets any smarter nor does Superintendent Leeyes get any less annoying. And several other characters get more fully developed as well. Lots to look forward to! Moving on to the next in the series, Henrietta Who? (1968).