FFB: Murder Before Matins

John Reeves was born in British Columbia in December 1926, but was raised and educated in England where he studied music at St John's College, Cambridge. Eventually, he found himself back in Canada as a music and documentary producer for the CBC, where he was responsible for several technical innovations and a wide variety of musical, religious, literary, and dramatic series. He also composed his own music, over thirty pieces of religious works and several opera librettos. 

Reeves didn't turn to writing literary works until later in his career and is primarily known for his inventive radio plays, noteworthy for their use of verse, prose, music and shifting points of view. One even won the Prix D'Italy for tbe world's best radio play in play in 1959. But he also tried his hand at writing books, choosing to pen mystery novels featuring Inspector Andrew Coggin and Sergeant Fred Sump of the Metro Toronto Police. From the author's background, it's not terribly surprising the first book in the series was titled Murder by Microphone, while the second is 1984's Murder Before Matins, which was a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award.

The story of Murder Before Matins is set in the cloistered world of Tathwell Abbey where the Prior is found murdered and suspicion falls on the entire order of Gilbertine nuns and monks who live in seclusion there. When Coggin, Sump and Constable Nancy Pringle are assigned to the case, they learn the victim was destined to be made Abbot and that even allegedly holy people are capable of dark ambition and violence.

In an interview from 1986 in Books in Canada, Reeves acknowledged that he lost his faith gradually, partly because of a "disillusionment with the institution of the Church." Even so, Murder Before Matins is a sympathetic portrayal of monastic life and includes a subplot of Constable Nancy Pringle's own struggles with her faith. Reeves added that, "Religion when I was a practising Christian was a very important part of my life, and the fact that I am no longer one has not reduced its emotional impact upon me. I think that to have a strong faith and then lose it leaves a particular hole in your life that cannot be replaced by anything else."

Reeves' mysteries are less about suspense typical of other police procedurals and more in the traditional puzzle-solving detective fiction (he even works in lists, diagrams, puns and one crossword puzzle in each novel). The Canadian Book Review Annual aptly noted that "Almost as entertaining as the detectives' unravelling of clues is Reeves' delightfully crisp yet cultivated prose style, and the frequency, in both the omniscient narration and the opinions of Coggin and Sump, of wry humour, dry wit, biting satire, and sometimes an outrageously amusing waspishnes."

Books in Canada wrote that "If Sherlock Holmas and Dr. Watson are respectively brilliant and dim, Andrew Coggin and Fred Sump shed light on crime about equally, less like a priest and acolyte than a happily married couple. Coggin is good at sifting details and making deductions; Sump is intuitive, disarming, a shrewd judge of character."

The follow-up Coggins/Sump novel, Murder With Muskets, was also a finalist for the 1986 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel, and there was one more book in the series in 1988, Death in Prague. There was supposed to be a fifth book, set in a Toronto track and field club, but it was either never finished or not published.