SISTER AGNES RETURNS by ALISON JOSEPH

Returning to a new Sister Agnes novel after a bit of a gap was like catching up with an old friend. With the relaunch of the backlist, with new jackets and new titles, this new one, A Poisoned Chalice, is the eighth in the new series - a ninth to follow next year. It's been great to write her again, after various departures into standalones and radio drama.

I started the Sister Agnes work very much in the tradition of a classic amateur detective story, and I think that still holds. She is the person side-by-side with the reader as the tale unfolds. And my concerns in my writing have remained constant – basically, how evil is love gone wrong. In this case, I decided to tackle wrongdoing at the heart of the church hierarchy, rather than as villainy outside the confines of the faithful – a timely subject, it turns out.

The question then was, how to write a novel that’s enjoyable, redemptive, sometimes funny (I hope), when Agnes is tracking down something that challenges everything she holds dear. My interests as a writer are usually in how an ordinary person might be drawn to kill, whereas here I was dealing with the self-serving actions of a very nasty person. I believe both Agnes and I were rather challenged by it. So I think this novel might be rather a strange one. But I trust I’ve still done my job as a crime writer, to provide a page-turning read, with the odd joke too, I hope.

I have always been a writer. As soon as I knew that you could put pen to paper (or probably, as I was about six, pencil to lined workbook) and make something up, that’s what I did. It happens to be not only a compulsion but also my job. I feel very lucky.

I love being a crime writer. I love having that very strong structure that means that the reader is guaranteed a proper story with a satisfying resolution. Sister Agnes errs on the Maigret side of things rather than the Sherlock Holmes one – she has no method and she often has no idea what’s happening other than a kind of feeling, a sense that a particular person is at the heart of things but she doesn’t know why. Also, unlike Holmes, she is working alongside very skilled, modern police officers who have access to all kinds of scientific methods. But as a police detective once said to me, when helping me with my research, ‘there’s always someone who knows more than we do’. Sister Agnes, with her work in the hostel for homeless young people, and with her standing as a nun, is often in the position to know more than the police.

A Poisoned Chalice is about a fictional medieval silver cup I called the Judas chalice. It is extraordinarily rare because it depicts the Judas kiss, when the disciple signals to the Roman soldiers the man they should arrest. It is a metaphor of betrayal between friends, which is what lies at the heart of this novel.

Sometimes I think, I might write a crime novel in which all the wrong things happen. My detective fails to see the clues. The villain gets away with it. Or perhaps, there isn’t a villain. There’s just real life. (My characters quite often have cause to say, ‘But this isn’t a story. This is just real life’ - because my characters have every right to believe that the life they’re leading is the real one, just as we readers do.)

In this non-crime story, perhaps someone dies, in mysterious circumstances. Nothing is proved. My detective faffs about for a while, being a nuisance. And then they get bored, life moves on, grieving relatives stand by a graveside, nothing is resolved.

And then I think, but I’m a crime writer. The whole point is that it isn’t real life. It’s a deal between me and my reader, with my detective in between us, to tell a story. To have a beginning, a middle and an end. And even if sometimes in my books someone gets away with something (because even someone who’s killed might have done it for a good reason) there is still a proper ending. The right things have happened.

I’m now working on the second of the new ones, due to be published in 2025. It’s great to be back with her.