Today, I’d like to welcome Laura Jensen Walker, the first guest author of 2021. Laura Jensen Walker has loved mysteries ever since she read Trixie Belden in the fourth grade in her Danish-founded hometown of Racine, Wisconsin–America’s Kringle capital. A former journalist and the author of several novels and humorous non-fiction books, including Murder Most Sweet and Thanks for the Mammogram! Laura is grateful to be a longtime breast cancer survivor. She lives in California with her Renaissance-man husband and their canine-daughter Mellie.

Today, though, Walker would like to introduce her new book, Hope, Faith & a Corpse. Because it features a clergyperson, Laura’s post is about a fun subject, clergy in mysteries.

Women and Men of the Cloth – Favorite Clerical Sleuths

By Laura Jensen Walker

I love a good clerical mystery. I’ve read a couple of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, some Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters, James Runcie’s first Grantchester mystery, and almost every one of Julia Spencer-Fleming’s fabulous Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series, which I LOVE. (In fact, right now Hid From Our Eyes sits at the top of my TBR pile begging to be read. I’ve been a bit busy, however, with the launch of my first ecclesiastical cozy, Hope, Faith, & a Corpse – A Faith Chapel Mystery.)

Here’s the blurb: Hope Taylor arrives in Apple Springs to start her new life as the first female pastor of Faith Chapel Episcopal Church. But where is Father Christopher? The kindly old rector who hired Pastor Hope was supposed to meet her upon her arrival, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Hope goes looking for her boss but finds church elder Stanley King instead—his skull crushed by a fallen burial urn. The last time Hope had seen Stanley, he had shouted drunkenly that she would preach at Faith Chapel over his dead body. The new pastor is now the prime suspect in Stanley’s murder. With her black Lab Bogie’s four-footed assistance, Hope is determined to find the real killer and clear her name…even if it will require a bit of divine intervention.

I’m delighted to add my movie-loving Episcopalian priest Pastor Hope Taylor to the ranks of clerical sleuths—I just didn’t know there were so many. Apart from the aforementioned Julia Spencer-Fleming’s brilliant series with Episcopal priest and former Army helicopter pilot Clare Fergusson and her cop-husband Russ, my favorite clerical sleuths have been the ones I’ve seen on TV: Cadfael, the brilliant British mystery series from the 1990s starring Derek Jacobi as medieval monk detective Brother Cadfael; the delightful Father Brown with Mark Williams as the kind, witty Catholic priest solving mysteries in a 1950s Cotswolds village, and Grantchester.

Ah, Grantchester with the dishy James Norton as Sidney Chambers, the compassionate, jazz-loving bachelor vicar in postwar Cambridgeshire in love with a woman he can’t have and his Detective Inspector pal Geordie, played by the always excellent Robson Green. For three seasons, I loved and faithfully watched Grantchester every Sunday night on Masterpiece Theatre. And then . . . well, I don’t want to spoil it for those of you who haven’t seen it, but there were some major changes at the end of the third season that broke my heart. I hated the first couple episodes of the fourth season—they didn’t ring true to the character so many of us had known and loved, or to the relationship that we’d watched develop between Sidney and the woman he loved throughout the first three seasons. The first two episodes of Season Four felt contrived, rushed, and unbelievable, and for me, ruined what had come before.

Time to find a new favorite clerical sleuth, but this time between the pages of a book.

I think I’ll begin with G.M. Malliet’s Max Tudor mystery series. I saw the author on a panel at virtual Bouchercon 2020 and was delighted to learn of this new-to-me series featuring a former MI5 agent turned vicar in the small English country village of Nether Monkslip. As a rabid Anglophile, this sounds tailor-made for me.

Another series that sounds fascinating that I’ve been wanting to read for a while is Edith Maxwell’s Quaker Midwife series. Charity’s Burden, the fourth Quaker Midwife book, won the Agatha Award last year for Best Historical Novel.

Then there’s the famous 12-book Rabbi Small series by Harry Kemelman, starting with Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, a huge bestseller from the ‘60s. In their heyday, the Rabbi mysteries were some of the most popular novels in the genre. Any Rabbi fans out there?

Other clerical mysteries I’m eager to read include:

The Father Christmas series by C.C. Benison featuring widowed vicar Tom Christmas in the English village of Thornford Regis. (C.C. Benison is the pseudonym for Arthur Ellis award-winning author Doug Whiteway.)

The Sister Mary Helen mysteries by Carol Anne O’Marie featuring a retired, septuagenarian nun in San Francisco.

Ilene Schneider’s female rabbi series featuring Rabbi Aviva Cohen, a 50-something, divorced rabbi in New Jersey. I love the titles: Chanukah Guilt, Unleavened Dead, and Yom Killer.

The Sister Frevisse medieval mysteries by Margaret Frazer about a nun in Oxfordshire, England in the 1400s.

How about you? What’s your favorite ecclesiastical mystery series?

Bio

Laura Jensen Walker is the author of 19 books, including the Bookish Baker Mystery Series and the Faith Chapel Mystery Series. Murder Most Sweet, her first cozy mystery, has been called “fearlessly funny.” Her second cozy, Hope, Faith, & a Corpse, was selected by BookPage as one of its Top 10 books for January 2021 and has been called “the perfect cozy.” Laura is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Northern California where she drinks PG Tips and dreams of someday living in a stone cottage in the English countryside.

Laura Jensen Walker’s website is https://laurajensenwalker.com/

Hope, Faith, & a Corpse by Laura Jensen Walker. Crooked Lane Books, 2021. ISBN 9781643855042 (hardcover), 298p.