The Coffin Confessor, highly entertaining

Former Private Investigator Bill Edgar is now the "Coffin Confessor". Picture Glenn Hampson

“Say if you died right now ... say if you got up, crossed the street and got hit by a bus ... there would be a mess to clean up. Not right there on the street. Think about what’s in your home right now … love letters from an old flame, evidence of the affair you’ve been having? Everyone’s hiding something. When your grandmother told you to always make sure to wear clean underwear, she wasn’t speaking literally. When people call me, it’s about those secrets. It’s usually the most honest they’ve been with anyone their whole lives.”

These words come from a highly entertaining new book, The Coffin Confessor (Penguin Random House) by Bill Edgar. There’s an extract in The Weekend Australian Magazine today but I also wanted to let you know how it warmed my heart. For a $10,000 fee, Edgar, formerly an independent gumshoe and debt collector from Queensland, will turn up at your funeral and say whatever you want him to say. Or he will go to your house and clear out any evidence of the secrets you have been keeping before the relatives turn up. But he’s also on hand to let people know how much you loved them, when maybe you couldn’t say it yourself.

Edgar says he fell into the business by accident. He was working as a private investigator, being hired by people who thought their spouses might be cheating on them. He didn’t much like the work.

“If you’re so suspicious of your partner that you’re prepared to hire a PI, then I can guarantee your marriage has problems,” he says. “I’ll save you some cash by telling you what you already know: they are screwing around and you’d be better off not hiring me. Hire a marriage counsellor instead.”

The Coffin Confessor (Penguin Random House) by Bill Edgar

It takes some nerve to crash a funeral and Edgar agrees that he’s fearless, probably because he grew up in a troubled family. He spends some time in the book remembering how his mum was on a Housing Commission waiting list for a long time before the family was finally approved, just after he turned 11.

“The only way I could understand our good fortune was that we must have won the lottery,” he writes.

He ran through the rooms of the house “with the boards under my bare feet, out into an actual backyard. The first backyard I’d ever had.”

He hoped for stability and security in that house, but his mother was a gambler, and “she had it really bad. Any spare minute, any spare dollar, down to the pokies, and straight into the slot machines.” In her absence, he was abused by his grotesque grandfather, who used to make him sit in his junior Speedos in the front seat of his car on their way home from fishing so he could stroke his bare legs and squeeze his testicles and ask him if he liked it.

Edgar ran away from home at age 14 and started stealing to survive. He ended up in prison, where he learnt to read and write and spell (for a long time, he had believed that “cat” was spelled “Kat” because that’s what it said on the KitKat wrappers when he was a kid).

He also spent time in solitary, where he was bashed, and predictably enough grew into “the kind of bloke who does not give a f--k about what people think of him”.

And so, when a friend of a friend some years ago asked him to crash his funeral and confront his best mate about a terrible betrayal, he said: “Sure.” He wasn’t at all nervous. He felt like the dead man had a right to be aggrieved. He waited quietly in his pew until the best mate got up to give the eulogy, stood and asked for silence.

“I’m the Coffin Confessor and I’m here on behalf of the deceased,” he said.

He opened the envelope he had been given and read the letter, which basically told the best friend to b----r off. Some in the crowd applauded him.

“It got me thinking maybe this is something people need,” says Edgar.

He now crashes funerals for a living, and he’s written this book about his experience. It’s not a literary masterpiece but there are little nuggets of wisdom, like this one: “Speaking generally, when somebody lives on a boat, it means one of two things: their life is great, and they’ve got leisure craft. The other reason is they’ve f--ked up their life completely.”

Edgar is often asked to act in a hurry, such as the time an elderly gentleman called from the hospital, where he was dying, and asked him to please go into his locked back shed and clear it out before his son arrived to organise the funeral. What did he find? A lovely rubber sex swing. Edgar took it down and carried it out to his car in bedsheets.

Curiously, he also takes letters in sealed envelopes from people well in advance.

“They move on with life, having told somebody what they want people to know about them,” he says.

He says he never opens those envelopes until the client is dead. He won’t do the ones where somebody wants to admit to being a “kiddie fiddler creep”. He will do the ones where the love was for whatever reason forbidden.

The loveliest story in the book concerns an elderly woman, Christine, whose husband was “an absolute f--king mess at the thought of losing her”. Unlike many other clients, she didn’t have a grudge against anyone. There was no score to be settled.

Instead, she had a lifelong best friend, Carol, to whom she had something to say.

“If Christine and Carol were born today, things would probably be different,” Edgar writes. “But half a century ago, they had been two young women with a shared secret they could never even tell each other. People can be in love with two people at the same time, and never act on (one of those passions). It happened to Christine.”

He stood up at her funeral and said: “My name is Bill Edgar and I am the Coffin Confessor. I have a letter from Christine.”

He opened the envelope and began to read: “To my husband, Derek, I love you with all my heart. To my children and grandchildren, I love you too.”

Edgar cleared his throat and continued to read: To my closest and best friend, Carol. I love you … Please know that if life had been different, I believe we would have been more than just friends. Derek, put your tongue back in your mouth. Thank you all for being here.”

And do you know, Christine’s big secret turned out to be no surprise to anyone.

“Everyone who knew Christine knew about the special bond she’d shared with Carol,” Edgar says. “People were having a chuckle. She went out the way she lived ... with love.”