The Daily Novel

It is highly unlikely that I would ever have read The Flower Arranger at All Saints had it not been for the fact that this murder mystery was written by Lis Howell, who is a colleague of mine in the journalism department at City University. I prefer my flowers to be left in the garden. And I am not in the least bit interested in those ladies who spend hours cutting them up and creating floral displays to lighten the gloom of Britain’s Gothic churches.

The All Saints church I knew as a boy which stood at the end of All Saints Road, Wolverhampton, was even gloomier than the nineteenth century terraced house in which my grandparents lived and in which my father grew up. I was taken there occasionally by the women folk in the family. Reluctantly because my Gods resided at Molineux. And I worshiped them on Saturdays, when my grandfather and I made regular pilgrimages of a few hundred yards to the terrace behind the goal facing the cow shed end.

Reading the first few chapters reminded me of the feelings of being dragged off to the Church of England services of my youth whose dominant characteristic was boring, boring, boring. Each of the short chapters is headed by a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer, which still stands on my bookshelves, though it has not been opened for at least forty years. As I read them I felt I was being preached at. And by the time I got to Chapter 35 and read:

Be ye sure that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves.

I knew where I stood. My own conviction is that man did indeed invent God.

But by Chapter 35 I was hooked. And reading on with mounting excitement to discover who had murdered the flower arranger. And whether it was to do with the bitter dispute between the new young happy clappy vicar of All Saints and his older parishioners or to do with the hidden passions and betrayals in the love lives of the villagers from Tarnfield in Northumberland, where many of the parishioners were related to each other. Most of them rarely went any further afield than Newcastle.

The book is written from the point of view of Suzy Spencer, who is a television producer (like the author) and who is stranded in Tarnfield with two young children. Because her husband has run off with his younger personal assistant, which happens all the time in the real world of television. Suzy frequently explodes at the boring old farts she finds in the village.

But the story which unfolds is not at all boring. And it is not just a cracking good whodunit, because there are several interwoven themes. The villagers are not at all the stereotyped figures you think when you first meet them. And Suzy Spencer changes during the course of the book. She sees the villagers and church through the spectacles of journalistic scepticism but she is also attracted by the certainties of belief. So the reader is turning the pages ever more rapidly to discover what will happen in her life. Will she turn her back on the boring old farts and move back to town? Or will she find happiness in Tarnfield?

To write more would spoil it for you.

The Flower Arranger at All Saints is published by Constable. Price £18.99.