A Dead Man Out of Mind, revisited

I can vividly recall the exact moment that I decided to write this book: it was a November day in 1992, and I had been watching the live television coverage of the historic General Synod vote on the ordination of women as priests. When they announced that the measure had passed in all three houses, I burst into tears of joy, and Rachel Nightingale came into being as I suddenly grasped the ramifications of this momentous and somewhat unexpected decision. The Church of England, I realized in that moment, would never be the same again. And I wanted to write about that.

The writing took place over subsequent months, while the shock waves were still reverberating, and the book was actually published just a few weeks after the first ordinations, in the spring of 1994, addressing the consequences of women’s ordination both for the Church and for individuals. Because of this historical context, A Dead Man Out of Mind is in some ways the most dated of my books. It is tied to a specific point in time, when women could be deacons but not yet priests (let alone bishops!), and the IRA still disrupted London transport. Yet in spite of that it remains one of my own firm favourites among my books.

I’ve been trying to analyse why that is the case. It’s partially, I suspect, because women’s ordination is one of the issues which has passionately interested me over the years, and was by no means settled by the vote on that November afternoon. Also, I think that the book is inhabited by a number of strong and interesting characters, including two of my very favourites: Rachel Nightingale and Ruth Kingsley.

On rereading, A Dead Man Out of Mind stands up very well as an exemplar of the traditional detective story. It has a dead body at the very beginning with more to follow, a pair of amateur sleuths reluctantly investigating a crime that the police aren’t interested in, a bunch of suspects with varying motives, a colourful setting, a great number of plausible red herrings and an equal number of clues displayed in plain sight yet invisible to all but the cleverest reader.

The primary theme of the novel is the potential cost of love, weighed against its rewards. Is it possible to love too much? Is it worth the risk? These are questions which ultimately confront David and Lucy: questions without easy answers, and ones with which they must grapple as their relationship enters its next phase.

Kate Charles