Quick, easy read. A nun is found dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs in a convent. The police are called and realize she's been killed by a hit on the head and then pushed down the stairs. Inspector Sloan’s investigation is hampered by the cloistered setting of the nuns but learns that the dead nun came from a wealthy family. When a second murder occurs at a nearby school and the victim is a young man in dressed in nun’s habit the investigation takes a different turn. Interesting twist at the end with the murderer ( )

Enjoyable short murder mystery. Will look for the others in this series. ( )

This is the first book in the Calleshire Chronicles, which feature Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby. A nun is found dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs. It wasn't the fall that killed her; she'd been murdered. Sloan's investigation is complicated by the religious practices of the nuns, who aspire not to notice most of what's going on around them and to trample any signs of individuality. Interesting.

A competent, traditional mystery from the sixties. ( )

By the time I finished this book, I was enjoying myself and realised that I'd found another series to read (there are currently twenty-seven Inspector Sloan books, so that gives me plenty to add to my TBR).

But I didn't really relax into the book until the second half because I strongly disliked what I saw as the book's attitude towards the nuns at the centre of the story. I kept telling myself that the sneering, dismissive way the nuns were talked about by the police was just a reflection of the times (the book was published in 1966). Perhaps it's a result of being raised as a Catholic, but I couldn't reconcile the fact the I was supposed to see Inspector Sloan as an educated, sophisticated man, with a dry wit and yet he seemed to have no respect for a life of prayer and reflection and instead of seeing it as a valid choice driven by spiritual need, he tended to dismiss a nun's life as either unnatural or a waste.

This annoyed me so much that it took me a while to notice the changes in Sloan's attitudes and behaviour as he gained an understanding of the daily lives of the Sisters. By the end of the book, Sloan clearly has a lot of respect for the nun running the convent, even if he still struggles to understand why anyone would choose the religious life.

I think Catherine Aird did a good job of displaying the attitudes of the time without necessarily accepting them and that she portrayed the nuns themselves as a diverse set of people who, even when trying to live a life that subjugates the self, remained distinct personalities with their own approach to a life of prayer.

One of the things that helped me relax in the second half of the book was that the plot suddenly took off. There was a second body and a plethora of suspects and motives. The ending was surprising and clever and quite dynamic for a book that had felt a little static at times.

So, although this book showed its age and some of the humour felt more like aggression, I was impressed enough that I'd like to see how the series develops.
( )

Catherine Aird was the pen name used by Kinn Hamilton McIntosh to publish her twenty-eight-book Inspector Sloan series, a series comprised of twenty-seven novels and one short story compilation featuring the inspector. The Religious Body, published in 1966, was both Aird’s debut novel and the first book in the series. Aird, who is now 91 years old, last added to the series in 2019 with Inheritance Tracks.

Aird begins her story with the discovery of a literal “religious body” found inside the Convent of St. Anselm after it is learned early one morning that a nun’s small cell/bedroom is empty. Believing at first that the missing nun has made her way to the convent’s sick bay on her own, it is only later in the morning that the resident nuns begin to search for the missing Sister Anne. When they find her dead body at the base of the cellar stairs, the Reverend Mother knows that, as much as she wishes it were not so, she is going to have to call the police — and worse yet, she is going to have to let them inside the convent.

That’s where Inspector C.D. Sloan of the Calleshire CID learns that he has more than fifty potential suspects, and that most of those are nuns. That’s bad enough, but later when the all-boys agricultural school next door to the convent burns a guy dressed as a nun on Guy Fawkes night, Sloan and his team have to add another few dozen potential suspects to what is already proving to be an overwhelming list.

The Religious Body is a bit of a cross between a cozy and a police procedural, with the emphasis being on cozy. People do die, but they do so behind the curtain, and even after the bodies are discovered, the reader is largely sheltered from any detail about the murders themselves that would ever be considered offensive or shocking to modern-day readers. What I find most appealing about The Religious Body is the author’s rather subtle sense of humor — a style reflected both in the title of the book and in the little asides peppered throughout the narrative that Aird uses to add funny, but meaningful, insights into the make-up of key characters.

Bottom Line: If The Religious Body is any indication, fans of cozy mysteries are going to enjoy the Inspector Sloan series a lot. Keeping in mind that the series was produced over the course of five decades, it is, of course, possible that the tone of the books changed over time. Because I’m a fan of more realistic mysteries that don’t so obviously pull their punches, it is unlikely that I will explore the series any further but if you like a good cozy, this is definitely an author — and a series — you need to consider. ( )