‘Twelve Drummers Drumming’ by C.C. Benison

Reviewed by Steven Benstead

As Father Tom Christmas, the wise and unassuming hero of C.C. Benison’s new novel, gropes his way to the solution of the crime by dint of circumstance and his need to tend to his parishioners, we are treated to a classic whodunit, à la Agatha Christie, in which all the pieces finally fall into place and we see the whole for what it is. We are also treated to a profound exploration of the nature of evil and what it means to be human, à la P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.

Don’t be fooled into thinking Twelve Drummers Drumming is a simple Christmas mystery. Really it’s a story of springtime and renewal. The novel opens as the May Fayre is getting under way in the village of Thornford Regis. Located in the picturesque Devon countryside (this is indeed Agatha Christie territory) the whole village is bustling around the preparations for the grand annual event when the body of nineteen-year-old Sybella Parry is found stuffed into a Japanese o-daiko drum. “‘Bloody hell!’ She (Julia) looked his way. ‘Tom,’ she called, ‘come and look at this. Someone has gone and slashed the drum. Whatever possesses people to do things like this.’” Annoyance, however, quickly gives way to horror. Fear grips the village, and it is up to Father Tom Christmas to lead his parishioners out of the wilderness. And like the American mystery writer, Elizabeth George, Benison does it in so thoroughly an English way — the tone of the narrative and the cadence of the characters, the use of English-isms (an ice-cream cone is a “cornet,” for example) — that he never misses a beat.

C.C. Benison is the nom de plume of Winnipeg writer Doug Whiteway. Readers with a long enough memory know that Twelve Drummers Drumming is not the first C.C. Benison to grace the shelves of bookstores around the world. Starting with Death At Buckingham Palace (1996), Mr. Whiteway wrote three bestselling C.C. Benison mystery novels in the 1990s featuring Jane Bee, a housemaid to Her Majesty the Queen, for Bantam Books. And then nothing until 2005, when Winnipeg’s Signature Editions released C.C. Bension’s Death in Cold Type featuring a Winnipeg newspaper reporter named Leo Fabian.

The release of Twelve Drummers Drumming simultaneously in Canada, the United States, and England last fall is no mean feat, however. Nor should the fact be overlooked that this is the first C.C. Benison to come out in hardcover. In the book trade, hardcover titles are the high-flying performers of any publishing season and they are a publisher’s top priority. Doug Whiteway’s Canadian publisher, Doubleday Canada, understands they have a talent on their hands, and they have signed him up for the long term. Twelve Drummers Drumming is the first in a planned twelve book series featuring Father Tom Christmas. The next, Eleven Pipers Piping, is scheduled to be released at the end of October this year and Mr. Whiteway is hard at work on the third, Ten Lords a-Leaping.

His publisher’s expectations are not misplaced. Apart from the intricate plotting, the freshness of the writing — “…and then, as imagination will, (it) sent him tripping down neural pathways, synapses firing like Roman candles.” — what makes the book work, and what will make the series work, is Father Tom Christmas himself. He is a man with a generous, inclusive spirit, a man you can trust, a man who keeps faith with his parishioners, with his God, and with himself. This point is brought home with force when Sybella Parry’s killer admits his crimes to Tom during the formal rite of confession. Tom is “martyred to the seal of the confessional” and cannot take this information to the police. The reader may well urge Tom to make an exception — how can he let a killer go free? — but to do so would diminish him both as a man and a priest. But Tom is no saint — he is prey to rancour, bitterness, impatience, envy, lust — and he knows it.

A former professional magician, Tom now works a different kind of magic. He works the magic of faith. Yet there remains the suggestion that he dons his priestly garb knowing the value of illusion. He understands how a sleight of hand can convince onlookers that the magic is real in the same way a minister must convince his or her parishioners that their faith is real. Though we never doubt Tom’s faith, Whiteway offers an intriguing counterpoint to the character he presents on the page, one that gives a certain distance to the Tom we come to know and trust, a distance that gives him room to breathe, gives his faith a fragility that Tom refuses to admit, and makes him all the more real to us.

The other great religion in which we put our faith, the medical establishment and the magic it seems to wield so convincingly, resides at a distance in the urban confines of Torquay, and its sole representative in the village is a thin rag of a man.

As for the police, their magic is muddied by the incompetence of the two detectives, ironically named Bliss and Blessing, who make a great show of rushing around the village conducting interviews, when in fact they don’t have a clue.

The real “clue” belongs to Tom’s young daughter, Miranda, an amateur sleuth in her own right.

My simple advice? Curl up with Twelve Drummers Drumming and enjoy a delicious read. You won’t be able to put it down.

Doubleday Canada | 384 pages |  $25. | cloth | ISBN #978-0385670135