There’s nothing wrong with this parish that a few well-timed funerals couldn’t cure.

So goes an old joke often attributed to Episcopalian clergy, although we suspect ministers in various other denominations have thought pretty much the same thing. Certainly, the victim in Who Killed the Curate? didn’t lack for enemies, though he wasn’t all bad, and his death no doubt was beneficial to any number of the parishioners. But it’s a new arrival, not a sudden departure, that truly improves life in St. Mark’s parish at Glanville on the eastern coast of Sussex.

That arrival is the lovely twenty-one-year-old Lady Lupin Lorrimer, the wondrously ditzy daughter of an earl, who marries the forty-three-year-old vicar of St. Mark’s, the Rev. Andrew Hastings. As scatterbrained as she is kindhearted, Loops, as her friends call her, is totally unprepared for the challenges presented by the various activities usually assigned to the wife of a vicar, including the Church of England Temperance Society, the Girl Guides, and the Mothers’ Union. Yet she soldiers on, gladly abandoning for the most part her previous life of parties and indolence to be with her soulmate.

Even though her friends affectionately think her often a fool, they all agree that she has a peculiar talent for getting at the truth, however circuitous a route she might take. This comes in handy as Lupin finds herself playing detective four times over the course of ten years. The passing years temper some of Lupin’s youthful enthusiasms but never her charms. Who Killed the Curate?, though published in 1944, is set at Christmas 1937, and The Mystery of Orchard House, published in 1946, is set a year after those events. The final two books in the series, Penelope Passes or Why Did She Die? (1946) and Dancing with Death (1947), are set just after World War II. The first and fourth are the more clearly identifiable as traditional detective stories, although all four fit comfortably in the genre. All were originally published by Hurst & Blackett, a relatively obscure and long-since defunct London publishing house, in what must have been fiendishly small print runs, as they are extraordinarily difficult to find on the used-book market. None was ever published in the United States.

Murder mysteries often have sported clerical sleuths or church settings, but Lupin may well be the first clergyman’s wife to take up crime-solving as a hobby. More recently Mollie Hardwick produced several books featuring English antiques dealer Dorian Fairweather, who married and then divorced an Anglican vicar over the course of seven novels. American Katherine Hall Page, an avid fan of Joan Coggin’s books, discovered them years after she launched her own series featuring caterer Faith Sibley Fairchild, who is married to an Episcopalian minister in a small Massachusetts town.

Both Hardwick’s and Page’s books often revolve around church politics and social life, although perhaps not to the extent that Coggin explores those themes in her first mystery, and their protagonists are nowhere near as clueless as Lupin is during her first encounters with Andrew’s parishioners. The amusing byplay between Lupin and her doting, mostly understanding and totally smitten spouse resembles in some small measure the interaction between the vicar and his flighty, flirtatious wife in Agatha Christie’s 1930 novel, Murder at the Vicarage, the first Jane Marple mystery.

Christie’s story is told from the vicar’s point of view, but life in that vicarage is a bit different from Glanville. As Charles Osborne remarks in The Life and Times of Agatha Christie: “The domestics in St. Mary Mead are a dim lot, and rather unsympathetically described by Mrs. Christie. This may be because she wishes her readers not to consider them as ‘real people’ and therefore potential suspects.” Servants are far more favorably treated in Coggin’s books—Lady Lupin sometimes wonders why they even  bother to consult her before making a domestic decision—and more than once come under suspicion. Despite her lineage, Lupin is a truly democratic soul who can be found gossiping with the servants and goes to great pains not to offend the working class, as in The Mystery of Orchard House, where she tries to conceal her blue blood from a garage mechanic who’s a Communist.

Lady Lupin’s generous nature is apparent in other ways. The murderers she encounters are often much more likable than their victims, and on several occasions Lady Lupin suggests that she’s willing to give the alleged culprit a head start before reporting in to the police, so long as a signed confession is left behind that clears the other suspects.

In addition to her four mysteries, Coggin, using the pseudonym Joanna Lloyd, wrote six girls’ books set at the imaginary Shaftesbury School and based on Coggin’s own school years at Wycombe Abbey. These stories are as charmingly told as Coggin’s mysteries, and indeed the young Catherine, who figures in several of these books, bears a remarkable resemblance to Lady Lupin. In Catherine, Head of House (1947), Catherine’s friends recall when she put her books in the laundry basket and took her linen bag to school. Catherine hopes that no one will run away from school during her tenure as head, since it’s unlikely that she’ll notice their absence. You can almost hear Lady Lupin in Catherine’s lament:

“I hope someone will notice. I remember one day when I was at home I brought some fish home but I forgot to give it to Mother. I was reading Endymion for the first time, so I just put in the drawer. It was some days before I remembered it. I don’t know if I would have remembered then, only there seemed to be something a little funny about the room, and Mummy said she thought the drains must have gone wrong, and Jack thought it was a dead rat. Anyhow, someone found the fish but it wasn’t fit to eat. It was rather a waste. I often wish I had a better memory.”

What makes this passage even more interesting is that misplaced—or spoiled—fish constitute a running joke in several of the Coggin mysteries. Although Catherine is absentminded and easily distracted, there’s no doubt that she has a first-class mind and, indeed, is set to head off for university to study to become a history don. Coggin herself, on the other hand, was said “not to be academically brilliant” although she “enjoyed her school days.” And Lupin’s mind certainly does not work in conventional ways. Over the course of the four books she manages to overcome most of her ignorance about church and religious life—quite an achievement when you consider she once had Jews confused with Jesuits—but she still happily butchers literary quotations and tends to go off on tangents (you can probably guess who misplaces the fish).  Coggin pokes more than a little fun at some of the parish activities Lupin is expected to embrace, such as leading the Girl Guides, an English version of the American Girl Scouts, which Coggin herself participated in as a “Guider,” or adult leader, for many years.

Born in Lemsford, Hertfordshire, in 1898, Coggin was the granddaughter on her mother’s side of Edward Lloyd, founder of Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, which no doubt is why she used Lloyd as a pseudonym for her schoolgirl books. Her mother died when Coggin was eight and the family moved to Eastbourne, one of the easternmost towns in Britain, where she was to make her home for the rest of her life.

Glanville is no doubt Eastbourne, somewhat reduced in size, and St. Mary’s church there is probably the model for the Rev. Hastings’ own St. Marks, also a Norman building. The original jacket art, reproduced on the cover of Who Killed the Curate?, shows Lady Lupin in a winding street near a church that greatly resembles the real St. Mary’s. Whether St. Mary’s “boasts” the same ugly stained glass windows of St. Marks is subject to examination. Glanville, like Eastbourne, was heavily bombed by the Germans during World War II.

After she was graduated from Wycombe Abbey in 1916 in the middle of World War I, Coggin worked as a nurse at an Eastbourne hospital. Although she suffered from a mild form of epilepsy, Coggin did not let it inhibit her lifestyle. After the war, she returned to those activities expected of a young woman of her class and upbringing—the social round of bridge, tennis, golf and books. She also worked with the blind.

In the 1930s, she turned to writing, producing her first girls’ book, Betty of Turner House, in 1935. With the exception of that book Coggin’s writing career was limited to a five-year period between 1944 and 1949, during which she produced nine books. For the last 30 years of her life she apparently did no more writing and died in 1980 at the age of 82.

Her contribution to crime fiction was slight but memorable. Who Killed the Curate? is arguably one of the funniest mysteries you’ll ever read, with a belly laugh on virtually every page. Lupin herself may remind readers of Gracie Allen of Burns and Allen (who, oddly enough, were perhaps among the first real-life celebrities to be featured in a detective novel—S.S. Van Dine’s 1938 The Gracie Allen Murder Case, which may also be the first detective novel deliberately written with an eye toward a movie sale). She’s certainly the spiritual godmother of the Pauline Collins character in the very funny BBC comedy series No, Honestly from a few years ago. The Collins character came many years later, of course, and although Coggin may well have been familiar with Gracie Allen’s routines, there is little doubt that Lady Lupin sprang full-blown from Coggin’s own imagination. She’s that rarity in cozy crime fiction—in spite of her many eccentricities she seems more real than most of the people we encounter in real life. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

Tom & Enid Schantz
December 2001