Meet Lady Lupin Lorimer Hastings the young, lovely, scatterbrained and kind-hearted newlywed wife to Andrew, the vicar of St Marks parish in Glanville, Sussex. When it comes to matters clerical, she is rather at sea. Nevertheless, she is determined to make her husband proud of her…. or at least not to embarrass him too badly.
When, on Christmas Eve, Andrew’s unpopular, blackmailing curate gets himself murdered, things all get a bit (hilariously) overwhelming for poor out-of-her-depth Lady Lupin: “Who was in your sitting room during that interval? Say four-thirty on
Tuesday, and ten or eleven yesterday morning?” “If you had ever lived in a vicarage you wouldn’t ask questions like that;
people just walk in and out all day long. When Andrew asked me to marry him, he said he was afraid I should find it very quiet here, and what he meant I can’t imagine! If I wanted quiet I’d rather retire to the Tower of Babel with a saxophone.”
Lupin enlists old society pals Duds and Tommy Lethbridge, as well as Andrew’s nephew, a British secret service agent, to get at the truth. Lupin refuses to believe that Diana Lloyd, 38-year-old author of the children’s detective stories, could’ve done the deed and casts her net over the other parishioners. But all the suspects seem so nice – very much more so than the victim.
Who Killed the Curate was first published in 1944 and was the first of four murder mysteries penned by Joan Coggin (1898-1980). Dancing with Death (1947) was reissued most successfully by Galileo in 2022. Her works have very strong plots and are written in a stylish and humorous manner which delighted critics at the time, and will surely equally delight the growing audience for Golden Age Detective fiction.
“Detectives come in many shapes and sizes, but Lady Lupin Hastings (née Lorrimer) is one of the more improbable — and delightful. In this, the first of four novels, the deliciously daffy Lupin is discovered getting ready to go to a friend’s twenty-first birthday party at the Savoy hotel. Here, she meets the Rev Andrew Hastings, ‘the most attractive man she had ever seen’ and marries him, after a whirlwind courtship. The stage is then set for Lupin’s induction into the mysteries of being a vicar’s wife, in a small seaside parish — a role she performs with her customary haphazard charm. But her new-found life attending committee meetings and managing disputes between rival Girl Guide leaders (all hilariously described) takes a darker turn when the curate, Mr Young, is poisoned. Lupin is afraid at first that this might be due to the fish she has served him at a Christmas Eve supper, but later a more sinister explanation is revealed. Suspicion for the murder falls on a series of unlikely candidates, including a writer of children’s books, the wife of a churchwarden, and (of course) one of the Girl Guide leaders. Fortunately, Lupin’s oldest friends, Duds and Tommy, are on hand to help her solve the mystery — as is Andrew’s nephew, a Secret Service agent. A thoroughly engaging and enjoyable read. I’d read one of the Lady Lupin books before, but will read them all again now.” REVIEW BY CHRISTINA KONING Jan 2024