With the appearance of Grantchester on PBS Masterpiece Mystery, we can enjoy once again a detective series featuring a member of the clergy.
Some people may find it strange to believe a priest, rabbi or minister could be involved in solving crimes, but upon further thought, this should not puzzle readers. Clergy, after all, routinely listen to people as they share their deepest fears and hopes and as they confess their darkest sins.
Perhaps those who are not part of a religious community are those most likely to see clergy as living in a holier world, bleached of temptation and sin. But any clergy person knows that her or his life is quite often the opposite.
One of the earliest mystery series to feature a clergy person is G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. In these short stories, a Catholic priest, who appears at times to have wool instead of brains in his head, is able to solve complex crimes because he is able to enter the dark minds of the perpetrators. Chesterton has fun with the stereotype of priests by describing Father Brown as having the face of an addled child, which leads to him being regularly overlooked by the police in the stories.
Other writers have also featured clergy as detectives, such as Andrew Greeley’s Father Blackie, Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small, Edith Maxwell’s Quaker Midwife Rose Carroll, James Runcie’s Canon Sidney Chambers (Grantchester), and Tony Hillerman’s Jim Chee. I am happy to have joined such a club, with my Christopher Worthy/Father Nicholas Fortis series.
Of course, fictional clergy detectives are as different from one another as are other types of sleuths. Father Brown’s special gift is his extraordinary use of reason. Father Brown may be a man of faith, he may know the darkness of the human heart, but he usually solves bizarre murders by seeing the logical connection between A, B and C.
Tony Hillerman’s Jim Chee seems to be a standard policeman, but he is also a Navajo shaman in training, which creates a spiritual problem when he comes upon a corpse. Jame Runcie’s Sidney Chambers, more apparently in the TV version than the books, is a priest whose career seems always on the verge of imploding under the weight of alcohol and forbidden love.
My own Father Nicholas Fortis has his own problems. Many writers will say that they “met” their characters, rather than invented them, and I suspect that Chesterton, Runcie and Maxwell felt that about their sleuths, even as I feel the same about Father Nick. In many ways, I don’t tell Father Fortis what he should say or do; he seems to tell me.
Father Nick is as overweight as a Sumo wrestler and tends to talk too much, at least in his abbot’s eyes. Yes, he may be quite gregarious, but he also hears what people are trying to say beneath their words. And while Father Nick knows that a homicide investigation is over for the police when the killer is caught, he also believes that the end of such a horror comes only when the killer has a chance to confess.
That’s one of the characteristics of Father Nick that I respect most — he never loses sight of the humanity of the killer.
I look forward with glee to a Muslim imam, a Buddhist monk and a Sikh Gianni appearing in detective mysteries. You see, all of us who write detective fiction starring clergy are playing a trick on readers. Readers of mysteries are eager to determine who the killer is and why the killer committed that crime. But when the detectives are clergy, the reader has the rich experience of being with rabbis, monks, priests, elders and ministers on that journey.
Yes, the killer is usually caught, but so is the reader, who is caught by new insights into the life of faith.
Franklin resident David Carlson is a professor of philosophy and religion. Send comments to
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