This Thursday marks the 166th birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in literary history, Sherlock Holmes. Edgar Allen Poe more or less invented the modern genre in English in 1841 with his “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” featuring the eccentric sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, but most of us think of Sherlock when gumshoes come to mind. Unless you’re an enthusiast, that is, of the niche genre of the crime-solving priest.
It’s a thing, and has been ever since G. K. Chesterton published his first “Father Brown” tale in 1910. It continued in popular magazines throughout the 20th century—there’s even a book about it, Thou Shalt Not Kill: Father Brown, Father Dowling and Other Ecclesiastical Sleuths, a collection of priest-detective stories by 10 different authors drawn from the pages of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. And in 2023, America contributor Rachel Lu wrote on three 20th-century writers of “holy whodunits,” Chesterton, Ralph McInerny and Agatha Christie.
It’s still going today: Just ask D. Ansgar Nyberg, the creator of a new Mighty Monk Mysteries series, in which “an aging Jesuit scholar matches wits with a variety of evildoers.” Nyberg, according to Boston College’s BC News portal, based his sleuth, Father Ignatius Lacroix, on Boston College’s emeritus professor of theology and a distinguished scholar of mysticism and the work of Karl Rahner: Harvey Egan, S.J. (Keep that in mind if you find Rahner to be an utter mystery.)
The story of how Nyberg and Egan met is its own fascinating tale. The former was convicted of murder in 1975, and didn’t make Father Egan’s acquaintance until 2008, when he had already been imprisoned for 33 years. “How Fr. Egan came to inspire the series is itself not a mystery, but rather a tale of grace, hope, mercy, and spiritual accompaniment,” wrote Patricia Delaney for BC News:
‘His attorney reached out to a website frequented by people interested in mystical theology, asking for help mentoring Ansgar in that area. I gladly responded,’ Fr. Egan said. Though their initial interactions centered on theological studies, Fr. Egan soon learned that Ansgar held degrees in law, history, and psychology, was a voracious reader, and was self-taught in several languages.
As the correspondents became better acquainted—at that time via snail mail, due to prison rules—‘the precision, clarity, and profundity of his writings deeply impressed me,’ Fr. Egan said. ‘His questions, his replies to mine, and the speed of his writing indicated to me that I was dealing with an extraordinary individual, both intellectually and spiritually.’
Ansgar, who was released from prison in 2019, had written a number of books over the years with Father Egan’s help, and the two remain friends. Though Father Egan (who really was Karl Rahner’s student back in the day) said the life of a detective “pales before the tumultuously enthralling life of a Jesuit theologian,” he thinks James Spader should play him if the series ever makes it to television.
While G. K. Chesterton’s syndicated column ran in America for many years (no link here, you’re better off not reading them, I promise you), the magazine was also fond of his literary potboilers. When The Innocence of Father Brown came out in 1911, an unnamed reviewer in America praised the collection of 12 stories for its clever storytelling but also its moral lessons: “One could pick flaws in the inductive methods of Sherlock Holmes, nor is Gaboriau’s chain of circumstances always infrangible, but it is difficult to find an alternative for the facts and links that Father Brown’s blinking eyes spy out with marvelous acuteness or disprove the inevitableness of his conclusions.” (Émile Gaboriau, by the way, was a famous French writer of detective stories.)
“But there is more in these stories, both in and under the surface, than the solving of criminal mysteries,” the reviewer continued. “Mr. Chesterton has a didactic or moral purpose in his plots as in his paradoxes, and deeming, probably, the paradox form stale, he essays to wile his readers along criminal paths, not to show them the end of an exciting chase, but to bring them within range of the lessons and preachments he has ready on the way.”
Another writer who was well-known for his scholarship but famous for his whodunits was Ralph McInerny, who taught philosophy and medieval studies at the University of Notre Dame from 1955 until 2009. “McInerny had generosity, wit, drive, joy, courtesy, toughness, a family life, a prayer life, loyalty and love,” said the LMU philosophy professor Christopher Kaczor in a 2015 interview with America. “He directed 47 dissertations, produced 55 non-fiction books of philosophy and theology, as well as 95 novels, including the Father Dowling Murder Mysteries.”
Like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, McInerny’s Father Dowling tales inspired a television series and a movie (though neither followed the plots of his stories all that much). Father Brown is depicted in print as an everyman, while McInerny’s novels have a darker tone. “These books have more than a dash of the noir, with seedy nightclubs, drug lords, corrupt cops and periodic cameos from a two-bit private eye with a severe drinking problem. The stories are marked by a constant sense of things failing or fading,” Lu wrote of McInerny’s mysteries. “This applies even to Dowling, who is by no means a superhero. Once a rising star in the seminary, he was derailed by alcoholism and ended up in a ‘moribund, lonely outpost of one of the most populous archdioceses in Christendom.’”
Like Egan and Chesterton, McInerny was also a contributor to America over the years, including a poem in 1958, “In a Wet Season”:
Infallibly found out by rain
Metal pings with pain
Pianissimo;
Sounds rush and go
Woods windily among
In susurra of song.
Lightyears before
Bass disrupts the score
Lightning staggers through
Gun-metal blue.
Pools purl with early
Catch later drops, are swirling
Cymbals clashing with their splash
Symbolically. Symbolically. Wash
Rain and wind the earth
To a green glad rebirth
Much as is a dearer dust
By water and the Holy Ghost.
Either that or is for sin
A teapost to tempest in.
Poems, detective novels, textbooks on Aquinas, studies of Jacques Maritain…and to give a further sense of McInerny’s incredibly broad range of interests and talents, one might enjoy this 2010 review by the Rev. Robert Imbelli of McInerny’s Dante and the Blessed Virgin.
McInerny noted in his 2006 autobiography, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You, that he was probably better known by the end of his career for his detective fiction than for his scholarship—but then Father Dowling also shared many of Ralph McInerny’s views on higher education, the church and contemporary society, so one might suspect the author was accomplishing two goals at once with his beloved priest-sleuth. What is it, in the end, that makes a priest or a religious such a compelling detective? Lu offered a good explanation in her 2023 essay for America:
Sadly, sin is part of everyone’s day at the office, though we may not always confront it as we should. A holy whodunit offers readers hope and reassurance, reminding us that grace is always available to us and that forgiveness is real. But it should also cause some discomfort, as readers turn the magnifying glass inward and consider how often they too have yielded to temptation.
A good sleuth takes up the weapon of truth in order to deliver us from evil.
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Our poetry selection for this week is the 2025 winner of America’s Foley Poetry Prize, “Catalog of Cures in Ordinary Time,” by Aileen Cassinetto. To read more about the selection process for this year’s prize, click here. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:
Riley Hughes, an unsung literary jack of all trades
The history (and future) of covering conclaves
Remembering Peru’s literary master, Mario Vargas Llosa
A century later, how do we see F. Scott Fitzgerald?
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
