A retired West Devon priest has launched a new chapter in his life with the publication of his first novel.

The Venerable Nick Shutt has joined the ranks of the small band of published clerics with his whodunnit Marjorie’s Memoirs.

The Ven Shutt’s stories are purely fictional, but clearly based on settings and characters most familiar to him.

He lives in a small village near a pub – echoing his novel’s setting – while his former role as an archdeacon and parish priest clearly gave him plenty of inspiration.

The Ven Shutt joins other pulpit publishers, most recently the Rev Richard Coles, of Murder Before Evensong fame, in mining their communities for material.

The fledgling novelist's genre is comparable with Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club – so-called cosy crime which relate clever plots involving small communities, amateur detectives and unexpected violence.

He said: “One of the victims in my book is that of the title, Marjorie, otherwise known as a nosy neighbour. She writes down salacious details of her neighbours in notebooks, purely to deliberately cause trouble among her village community.

“This behaviour inevitably gets her bumped off for her troubles. I think lots of people reach a certain age when they don’t care what they say about or to people, maybe this is a salutary lesson to be learned.”

“Other victims include a headteacher and someone who is very sadly driven to suicide.”

The former solicitor turned CofE priest said: “Whilst I draw on my life experience, I must stress everyone is fictionalised. During my careers as a solicitor and longer as a parish priest and archdeacon, I have come across the usual cross section of real-life characters who fall out over the strangest things – but none in real life have led to murder!”

The main protagonists are a disgraced copper who resents working a rural beat and a rural police officer, in contrast, who loves her work. Both soon find that uncovering the village’s darkest secrets proves to be more difficult than they had first imagined.