‘Murder At Canterbury Cathedral’ by Jim Eldridge

Published by Allison & Busby,
18 June 2026.
ISBN: 978-0-74903291-3 (HB)

This is the second novel in Eldridge’s ‘Cathedral Mysteries Series’. Set during World War II, it features the same detective pairing (the aristocratic Detective Chief Inspector Edgar Saxe-Coburg and Sergeant Ted Lampson) as those I have previously reviewed in the author’s ‘London Underground Station Mysteries Series’. 

It is May 1941. London and the south east are taking a hammering from German bombing raids. In Canterbury a canon of the cathedral, Walter de la Coeur, is found battered to death on the spot where Thomas Becket had been murdered almost 800 years previously. The influence of the Archbishop and his vicar general (the latter went to school with Coburg) ensures that Coburg is dragged reluctantly into leading the investigation. In Canterbury Coburg and Lampson come across a network of mostly unappealing characters. Henry Duckworth, a young man with a history of pilfering from his employers, has been found a job at the cathedral by his uncle, a canon like de la Coeur, in an attempt to curb his tendencies. It is a failure. Duckworth becomes associated with Percy Abernathy, an apparently dodgy solicitor who seems well acquainted with the local low life, including two potentially violent young tearaways. Abernathy is also related by marriage to Gerald Evans who has managed to extract money from the cathedral after he accused de la Coeur of molesting his son. Duckworth’s widowed mother is found to be carrying on with a married local shopkeeper. The scope for blackmail and extortion is everywhere. 

Becket and his history hangs over the whole investigation. Some people have a genuine interest in the saint and being close to where he died. Others see his martyrdom as a path to making money and are not too concerned how they do it (‘Becket is big business’ is one comment). Scams including pilgrimages, indulgences and the provenance of relics are central to this. Working out exactly who is behind criminal activity is just one of the problems facing Coburg whilst he tries to identify de la Coeur’s murderer. Another is that there are three further deaths which wipe out one or two suspects in the process. 

There is an ultimately heart-warming subplot. Lampson’s young son, Terry, is very badly injured when a previously unexploded bomb goes off in London. This brings Coburg’s brother, the Earl of Dawlish, into the story. His influence (via Churchill, a friendship we know from earlier novels) leads to Terry being treated by Sir Harold Gillies, a ground-breaking plastic surgeon (he is another person who actually existed that Eldridge brings into his fiction). Coburg is married to Rosa Weeks, a well-known jazz singer who works as an ambulance driver and who we have also met in previous stories. She and her friends provide a positive ending to the novel. 

As always with Eldridge, this is an intricately plotted, convincing and fast paced mystery. The wartime setting is thoroughly researched (a conscientious objector in the police force provides an added dimension, for example) as are the medieval connections, and the author gives us plenty of background, something he further develops in his acknowledgements at the end. I don’t imagine any reader will be disappointed.
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Reviewer: David Whittle

Jim Eldridge was born in the Kings Cross/Euston area of north London in November 1944. He left school at 16 and did a variety of jobs, before training as a teacher. He taught during the 1970s in disadvantaged areas of Luton, while at the same time writing. He became a full-time writer in 1978. He has had 80 books published which have sold over two million copies. He has had over 250 TV and 250 radio scripts broadcast in the UK and across the world. He lives with his wife in Cumbria; and is an associate lecturer at the University of Cumbria.

http://www.jimeldridge.com/

 

David Whittle is firstly a musician (he is an organist and was Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School for over 30 years) but has always enjoyed crime fiction. This led him to write a biography of the composer Bruce Montgomery who is better known to lovers of crime fiction as Edmund Crispin, about whom he gives talks now and then.