Cosy crime flourishes in the pick of the summer’s thrillers

Cosy crime was once the literary world’s guilty secret, a refuge for any reader seeking entirely unchallenging entertainment – like an Escoffier chef with a private penchant for Mars Bars. It has always proved a great getaway in tough times, which helps explain the extravagant success of Richard Osman’s novels. Murder Before Evensong by the Reverend Richard Coles (Orion, £16.99) follows on Osman’s heels, with the advantage of it being both a more interesting story and a better writer telling it.

It begins with an array of clichés, a feature of the cosy genre. Daniel Clement is a man of the cloth, tending the rural flock of a small village whose church’s living is in the hands of the local estate’s predictably irascible squire. Set in 1988, the novel has the advantage of taking place in an era familiar to all but young readers, yet distant enough not to highlight the essential unreality of the book (realism has never been this genre’s strong suit).

The story begins with a furore over a proposal to add lavatories to the church, and then escalates when the estate’s archivist is found murdered, stabbed with a pair of secateurs. Having discovered the corpse, Daniel becomes immersed in the case, working alongside the police sergeant assigned it.

The usual archaeology is at work, with much digging into the past, bringing new mysteries and a slew of minor characters. But instead of sticking to stereotypes, Cole provides some attractively quirky characters. The Reverend’s mother is ageing but pugnacious, and sharp about her son’s unworldliness: ‘He can write a shopping list in Hebrew but he can’t wire a plug.’ She has another son as well, a television actor famous for his role in a popular soap. He turns up with a flash car, an entirely secular set of tastes and an annoying unwillingness to stay out of his brother’s hair.

The truth is eventually unearthed (though not before a second murder) and the unravelling of the plot is neither easy to follow nor particularly rewarding. The answer to ‘who done it?’ is hard to remember even a few hours after finishing the book. But the enjoyment on offer derives not from the murder mystery tradition the book invokes, but in the freshness of its (mostly) humorous prose, the appealing account of village life, and the unfashionable but heartfelt description of a clergyman’s vocation. It’s a promising start to what is planned as a series, which will doubtless displace Grantchester on television in due course.

Unless you think tension is an emotion, conventional thrillers are usually very bad at depicting feelings, as though they were something that a fast-paced plot should not indulge in. At its best, however, cosy crime can do this very well. Nicola Upson certainly succeeds in Dear Little Corpses (Faber, £14.99), the latest in a series featuring the real-life mystery writer Josephine Tey.

When war is declared in 1939, the mass evacuation of urban children ensues, including some sent from London to the small Suffolk village where Tey lives with her partner Marta, an actress. When a local girl goes missing, panic strikes the village, already deeply unsettled by the arrival of the London refugees. Archie Penrose, the regular detective involved in these mysteries, appears on the scene, and together he and Tey help hunt for the missing child, with some assistance from the great figure of detective fiction’s Golden Age, Margery Allingham.

By setting the tale in 1939, the author allows a vivid depiction of the anxiety caused by the prospect of war without the story getting overwhelmed by the conflict itself. And the more we learn about the village’s inhabitants, the darker the tale becomes. The writing is often powerfully nuanced: a mother’s heartbreak as she dispatches her little girl to stay with strangers is especially well portrayed, capturing feelings – the mother’s fearful uncertainty as to whether her daughter will be safer after all; the girl’s baffled hurt that the mother who loves her is sending her away – without any of the verbal billboards used by lesser writers. There do appear to be an awful lot of depraved weirdos for one small village, and the many twists towards the end start to seem relentless, but the writing is first-rate, the historical background resonant but not intrusive, and as Upson heads for the next title in her Tey series, her imagination and prose show no signs of flagging.

Sadly, this is not the case with To Kill a Troubador (Quercus, £20), the 15th volume in Martin Walker’s Dordogne-set series featuring his French chief of police Bruno Courrèges. As always, the author lovingly depicts daily life in the fictional village of St Denis; he has made the Dordogne as much his own as Peter Mayle did Provence. The novel’s plot is refreshingly straightforward. A Catalan group, pro-independence, is scheduled to give an outdoor concert when a specialist sniper’s bullet is discovered. An assassination seems planned and the Spanish government suggests that right-wing extremists may be plotting to kill the singer in the group. Naturally, Bruno is called in, along with a host of special forces and counter-terrorist officials, including his old love Isabelle Perrault, now relocated in Paris.

Throughout, we learn about many of the meals Bruno prepares and the ingredients he favours – for gazpacho and for the dry rub for roasting lamb. Then there is the breakfast for the Special Forces (eggs, paté, tomato salad) and a most un-French Coronation Chicken. The food is all there but the actual relish for it is not. There are also long disquisitions on Occitan culture and history which badly slow the story without generating much compensatory interest.

When some action finally takes place, it is well described, even gripping, but there is far too little of it and comes much too late. Newcomers to the series would benefit from starting with the earlier books. This latest is not perfunctory so much as mechanical: the elements are mainly there, but one senses a flagging authorial enthusiasm. Enough so to think it might be good for Walker to take a break and perhaps write a cookbook next – but the acknowledgements page has got there first: ‘A composite volume of the Bruno cookbook is to be published in English in 2022.’

If your saccharine tolerance gets saturated by these ventures into cosy crime, antidotes are available, and among recent thrillers, Stephanie Merritt’s Storm stands out (HarperCollins, £14.99). A charismatic, ultimately demonic young woman named Storm infiltrates a reunion of friends on holiday in France. She is bent on revenge for historical, deeply buried wrongs. The interplay among the old friends – their attachments, their resentments – is distinctive and nicely set against the disruptive newcomer. The pace is beautifully varied, despite the book’s 400 pages. A first-rate read by a very skilled writer.

Much more unusual – indeed unlike anything you will have read – is A Certain Hunger (Faber, £8.99), the debut of Chelsea G. Summers. It’s the fictional ‘memoir’ of a homicidal female psychopath, told in the first person, and will be distasteful to many, being chock-full of highly explicit sex and extreme violence. The story is recounted jauntily by Dorothy Daniels, who details the savagery that has landed her in prison for life. A food writer of some renown, unsurprising given the relish with which she butchers and occasionally even eats her male victims, Daniels makes Moll Flanders seem like Alice Liddell. But her voice is consummately honed – articulate, sarcastic and often very funny – and the writing throughout is stunningly good. Though the novel’s grotesquerie will deter many and unsettle even those who persevere, if you value prose over probity, this one is for you.