A Morbid Taste for Bones: The First Chronicle of Brother Cadfael

"This first Cadfael story is set in May 1137, when the ambitious prior of Benedictine Shrewsbury Abbey is looking for relics to increase the community’s prestige. His ultimate plan is to supplant the current mild-mannered abbot. Brother Cadfael, Welsh by birth, is sent to procure a relic, the remains of Saint Winfred, from their resting place near the village of Gwytherin. This plan is received with some opposition. When the main protester against the sale of the bones is shot dead with an arrow, Cadfael investigates. Finding the killer and the motive behind this murder is complicated. For me, it’s his acute power of observation and how he uses this skill to deduce who the killer might be and set a trap. Set against a backdrop of clerical ambition and deceit, Cadfael is the perfect protagonist. He is driven by his own moral compass and has great humanity and compassion, and will disregard orders if they don’t align. The main parallel is that, like Nora Breen, my former nun, Cadfael has his own demons. Both characters have also lived in the world prior to monastic life. I think this lends them greater complexity as amateur detectives in that their eyes are open to human behaviours of a more worldly nature, but they are still applying a degree of spiritual introspection. The major difference is that Nora has left her order and is going through a crisis of faith. There were several sources of inspiration for the character of Nora Breen. The idea of writing a former religious sister came from my childhood. I was brought up in a big, wild, London-Irish family and taught by a former nun. I was intrigued by her story, in terms of why she joined a religious order and then why she left it, but I was never brave enough to ask her about it. Many nuns, real and fictional, have crossed my path, and I’ve long had a fascination for people who live a monastic life. Nora has been propelled back into the world, after three decades in a monastery, by this mystery. The world has changed, and she sees everything anew. I wanted this defamiliarised point of view so that we can experience her attempts to adapt to this new life alongside her. In writing Nora, I wanted to explore how the traits that might not endear her to her mother superior might prove useful in her new role of amateur detective. She’s questioning, curious, wilful. But she has also learnt to live in community, so she brings patience, tenacity, compassion to bear in her investigations."