Chesterton's Brown and Greeley's Blackie: two very different detectives.

Monsignor John Blackwood Ryan (formerly Father Blackie, and recently elevated to Bishop Blackie) is a priest-detective created by the Reverend Andrew Greeley and featured in at least nine of his novels. In seven instances Greeley compares Father Blackie to Father Brown, the priest-detective created by G.K. Chesterton. The pains that Greeley has taken to link the two-priest detectives invite serious investigation, an invitation we intend to pursue here. In fact, the two manifest important contrasts in the way they engage a case, in their methods of solving a crime, and in their ultimate goals and objectives. A close scrutiny of the comparison actually reveals more differences than similarities between Father Brown and Father Blackie, and most important: Father Brown and Father Blackie, though both are Roman Catholic priests, embrace divergent sacramentalities.

We begin with what is a central plotting problem for the writer of a mystery story: How does the "detective" get involved in a particular case? Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is a private investigator and Charles Dickens's Inspector Bucket is a police functionary. Solving crimes is simply part of their jobs. And that is the modus operandi of the "private-eye" detective story, as well. But what motive can there possibly be for a parish priest or a monsignor to involve himself in police matters?

Father Brown enters the world of crime and detection seemingly at random and sometimes he simply stumbles onto the scene of the crime. In "The Queer Feet," he has been summoned to an exclusive club, the target of an elaborate robbery, to hear the confession of a waiter in extremis. Here Brown's appearance is intimately connected with his office. In "The Flying Stars," Father Brown has been invited to a Christmas masquerade - target of another robbery - given by a parishioner, an ordinary enough circumstance. Although he believes in freedom, Father Brown does not believe in chance. In the "Blue Cross," he attracts the attention of the master-criminal Flambeau by dangling a jeweled cross as bait. Four stories later, Flambeau repents of his career of crime and becomes a detective, and from this point on in the series, Flambeau is apt to bring Father Brown into a case. In "The Invisible Man," which has special relevance to Greeley's Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice (Father Blackie explicitly points to the parallel between his situation and Brown's), the murder site is abandoned except for the victim. Here Father Brown is consulted by Flambeau, the detective. In "The Innocence of Father Brown," Chesterton discusses the method of Valentin, another of his detectives. But the description applies equally to Father Brown:

Where he could not follow the train of the reasonable, he

coldly and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable.

Instead of going to the right places - banks, police

stations, rendezvous - he systematically went to the

wrong places; knocked at every empty house, turned down

every cul de sac, went up every lane blocked with rubbish,

went round every crescent that led him uselessly

out of the way. He defended this crazy course quite logically.

He said that if a man had a clue, this was the worst

way, but if one had no clue at all, it was the best, because

there was just the chance that any oddity that caught the

eye of the pursuer might be the same that had caught the

eye of the pursued.

Father Brown's motive in taking up a case, invariably, is a desire to move the criminal to panitence and reconciliation. Father Blackie, on the other hand, always comes into a case at the behest of relative, a friend, or a client of the family; he enters as part of an elaborate web of kinship or power involving patronage and obligation. Blackie makes his first significant appearance in Virgin and Martyr (Greeley's earlier novels are published by Warner Books). when his cousin Mary Kate asks him to investigate the "death" of another (mutual) cousin, Catherine Collins. In St. Valentine's Night, Cornelius O'Connor, who was the high school sweetheart of Catherine Collins, consults Blakie Ryan in trying to solve the murder of the husband of Collin's lover. In Rite of spring, Brendan, who once dated Blackie's sister, Eileen Ryan, seeks the priest's help. The pattern of patronage, although not of family involvement, continues in Happy Are the Meek, in which Blackie agrees to investigate the life and death of a possible Satan-worshipper in order to bring the man's her new lover back to the church (specially, back to Blackie's parish).

This extended family is a good example of the Irish-American "nation," about which Frank McConnell has written ("Boiling the Irish Catholic Pot," Commonweal, June 4, 1984): "The attractiveness of the [Irish-American romance] for America at the present time may be than merely a nostalgia for a lost culture of shared values, it may be more seriously and destressingly a nostalgia for a simplified world of easy solutions and unexamined bromides that was false to begin with. This, at any rate, is the impression one gets of the culture of Irish-american Catholicism from Greeley's [novels]...."

Blackie Ryan knows the answer because of who he is, and who he is is the Druid of a politically powerful tribe. Whereas Chesterton's Father Brown, virtually without political power, enters a case either through a personal connection with a former sinner or by apparent, but illusory, change, Father Blackie, as a kind of chaplain to one powerful Chicago clan, comes into the picture when this is threatened.

The apparent impossibility of detecting a criminal is another convention of detective fiction; the detective's task is to find the opening in a seamless world. Thus, in Chesterton's "The invisible Man," the victim was quite alone at the time of the murder, being guarded by a watchman above suspicion. Brown's response to the seamless world is to make minute changes in it in order to ascertain its structure. In "The Blue Cross" he switches the contents of a saltcellar and sugar shaker in order to observe his companion's response: "A man generally makes small scene if he finds salt in his coffee; if he doesn't, he has some reason for keeping quiet."

Father Brown set things in disorder to measure the energy or real state of affairs in a case. He drops his parcels on the ground in order to pick them up again. He reserves signs for peaches and Brazil nuts, confuses anthropological categories of "outside the house" and "inside the house" by pitching soup onto a wall (acceptable behavior on the street but not in a restaurant). He reveals what should be kept secret (that he is carrying a valuable object, a cross set with sapphires). He alters his check in a restaurant, but in order to overpay! And then, instead of accepting a refund, he breaks a window to even up the account, thus changing the world slightly to allow lesser (but still inductive) minds to follow his trail.

This species of experiment is necessary, in Brown's world, because the culprit can take any appearance. the thief Flambeau for example, has the power of disguising himself to look like almost anybody: an apple-woman, a grenadier, a duchess, even a priest. No group, or individual, is exempt from the corruption of evil.

In Blackie's world, however, true crimes are committed only by the truly evil, those damned by their very nature. Fortunately, they can usually be identified by their appearance: they are almost always repulsive old men - though they may have attractive handmaidens. In Virgin and Martyr, Catherine Collins is sexually attacked by a drunken old priest. her novice-mistress blames the attack on Cathy. Later, when Cathy is serving as a lay missionary in "Costaguana," she is sold by a sandal-wearing, New Age-talking, people's priest, Father Tuohy, to a monstrous police official who turns her over to his men for torture and rape. In Happy Are Those Thirsty for Justice the murder turns out to be Vinney Nelligan, a "dirty, kinky old man," although for a time Blackie suspects a Vatican hit man who dresses in the traditional ("very heavy") habit of the Franciscans. Happy Are the Meek features a Satanic priest, Father Armande, who has "breath like a sewer," and his doppelganger, Wolfe Tone Quilan, a drooling, sadistic, incestuous drunk.

Blackie knows who the truly evil are, of course, but they have to be connected to a specific crime in order to be punished. His method consist primarily of interviewing all family members and business partners, especially with a view to establishing a motive, a searching for incriminating statements (such more important than the physical clues which may only prove what Blackie already knows). thus, Father Brown, who knows that the potential for evil lurks in every human heart, must work much harder than Father Blackie, who needs only to figure out which dirty, kinky old man is to blame and then to place him in the chain of causality.

Nowhere is the difference between Father Brown and father Blackie more dramatic than in the climactic scenes in which the culprits are revealed. Compare these two excerpts.

"Stand still," [the thief] said in a hacking whispers. |I don't want to threaten you, but....'

"|I do want to threaten you,' said Father Brown in a voice like a rolling drum. |I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the first that is not quenched'" (from "The Innocence of Father Brown").

In Contrast:

"|Don't think about it, Vinney.' I jumped up, whipped the Berretta into position with both my hands, and jammed it across my desk into his forehead. |Don't even think about it.'

"Mike Casey and the three cops in my bedroom had no trouble putting the cuffs on him and taking away his gun, a mirror image of mine" (Father Blackie in Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice).

Father Brown abhors violence. His object is not bring anyone to the gallows but rather to bring criminals to confession and reconciliation. Thus, in "The Blue Cross," Flambeau, in the criminal phase of his life, is arrested, but he will eventually repent of his life and join the police force. "the invisible Man" ends with a detection but not an arrest: "Father Brown walked those snow-covered hills under the stars for many hours with a murderer, and what the said to each other will never be known." In some of Chesterton's stories, the penitent murdered decides to turn himself in as part of his gesture of reconciliation; this kind of surrender occurs in "The Wrong Shape" and in "The Hammer of God." Sometimes the murderer is simply allowed to escape as in "The Sins of Prince Saradine." Father Brown's attitude is neatly up in snatch of dialogue from "the Eye of Apollo": "|Shall I stop him?' asked Flambeau, bounding towards the exit, for Kalon had already thrown the door wide open. |No, let him pass,' said Father Brown with a strange deep sigh that seemed to come from the center of the universe. |Let Cain pass by, for he belongs to God.'"

The contrast to Father Blackie, who acts as a kind of auxiliary to the police in Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice, could not be more striking. Of course, Blackie's gun is just a toy, but in recapitulating the scene later, he accentuates the violence of his act: "[If] he had moved a millimeter closer to the gun he was in fact carrying, I would have bashed him, weak old man not, on the skull."

And, though father Blackie's captive is not sent to the electric chair, neither is he led to repentance: "Vinney was in a psychiatric institution where he would spend his few remaining days... Prognosis: hopeless." Father Brown is content to trust a sinner's conscience and God's mercy; father Blackie insists on swifter retribution.

It could be argued that with the confines of the narrative it is not Father Blackie who makes Vinney insane and confines him to an institution, any more than it is Blackie who burns Sister Hilaire alive, or who tortures Catherine Collins. Blackie is merely an observer to these horrors, is he not? But what of the creator - the storyteller? Nowhere does the person of the author reveal himself or herself more clearly than in the telling of the story and its prevailing mythopoeic values. In fact, Greeley embraces his vocation as a storyteller as both sacred and sacramental. But what is revealed as being truly sacred and as having meaning?

George Lukacs defines the problems of the author and his characters this way: "the objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality... and the characteristic structure of its matter is discreteness, the separation between interiority and adventure" (The Theory of the Novel. MIT Pres).

An author is the form-giver to the characters' inner struggles and their adventures. By this definition, Chesterton and Greeley could hardly be further apart. At the heart of Father Brown's universe we find the discourse of the confession: a dialectical process aimed at discovering a sinner's true position before God. Brown reveals his humanity over and over in his interactions with other sinners who, like himself, are in need of compassion. It is out of his shared humanity that he interacts vigorously and salvifically with the criminal. Father Brown voices a classic expression of that sensibility in "the Hammer of God": "I am a man... and therefore have all devils in my heart. Listen to me."

Father Blackie is more the dramatic hero who, following Lukacs's definition, lacks interiority. His adventures exist outside of him. He judges and brings other to justice, but is not himself vulnerable. In Blackie's universe the demons are all in others: priest - who are satanic, drunken, sandal-wearing. misguided, unfaithful, or otherwise irredeemable - or reprehensible dirty old men, usually Irish.

Greeley's characters are the products of his own imagination. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest (Pocket Books, 1986), he says that all of his "novels are about God's love." Careful analysis offers a more complex reading.

Father Brown is clearly modeled on a real priest. Father John O'Connor, a Yorkshire pastor, who was an important figure in Chesterton's life and intellectual development. At the same time. Chesterton endows Father Brown with external qualities unlike his model. He began writing the Father Brown mysteries in 1910 and only later (1922) converted to Roman Catholicism "to get rid of my sins." The discourse of "confession" in Chesterton's life is very much like Brown's modus operandi.

Like Father Blackie, Brown is surrounded with evils - generally murders - but the adventures to which Chesterton subjects his character are devoid of the same of violence or torture. This reflects one of Chesterton's own aphorisms, "There is even a Christian way to teach the alphabet; that is not to look down on one who doesn't know it." Brown is the incarnation of his understanding that there is even a Christian way to catch a criminal.

As a convert, Chesterton relished the freedom of the Christian message and its sacraments. It is the power of the sacraments and the sacramentality of human error and repentance that captivates Father Brown. He follows clues with the sense of personal power conferred by simple lived truth and the shared human struggle. In contrast, Greeley's priests relish political power and are privy to CIA operatives and highly placed Vatican contacts.

Greeley defines sacrament in the broadest terms as "whatever discloses grace to us, especially water, fire, food, drink, and sex." Chesterton might agree. Unlike might agree Father Brown however, Blackie is not the central character of the mystery series, but is the element that "holds the stories together" and coexists with power, money, and sex - other essential elements. Greeley laments at length in his autobiography that few critics understand his juxtaposing money, sex, and celibate priest, and concludes emphatically that "sex is edifying and religious and important." In other places Greeley emphasizes the significance of "the sacramental imagination" that must say in word or picture that human passion is a hint of divine passion: "if God is love then surely S/He is present in sexual love."

When it comes to sex, father Brown and Father Blackie exist in different worlds. In his autobiography Chesterton reveals how significant he found the informed, wise counsel of Father O'Connor: "To prevent me from falling into a mare's nest, he told me certain facts he knew about perverted practices." Chesterton found the celibate priest wiser than two Cambridge dons about real evil. And in explaining his entry into Roman Catholicism, Chesterton observed, "that the Catholic church knew more about good then I did was easy to believe. That she knew more about evil than I did seemed incredible."

In this regard Greeley's intent is much the same as Chesterton's message. And certainly Greeley's desire to show as the church and the priesthood as instruments of God's love is explicit. the divergence of the two authors is based not on sacrament or intent but on different ideas about the role of authorship in mythmaking.

Whereas Chesterton took his taletelling lightly, Greeley claims mythmaking as a privileged sacrament. He credit his awareness of its power to three people: anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who taught him that "religion is a set symbols that provide explanations of the ultimate problems of life and templates for responding to those problems"; and "story theologians" David Tracy and John Shea. Greeley is a celibate and is denied the sacrament that fascinates him most: not confession as is Chesterton's father Brown, but sex. With this, the circle closes. Just as sex is (or can be) a sacrament for Greeley, so the sacrament of mythmaking, of storytelling, becomes identified with sexuality. In a chapter of his autobiography entitled. "The Storyteller," Greeley explains that Blackie Ryan is a character who has lurked in his imagination for a long, long time and who "sometimes" speaks in the author's voice. He links Blackie with Anne Maria O'Brien Reilly (Angels of September), whom he identifies as one of his most mature heroines." a laywoman who has been savaged by the church through much of her life." Greeley accepts the interpretation of a colleague that "Blackie and Marie are Andy's vision of God" and goes on the elaborate: "The passionately loving and implacably seductive Maria {fully sexually active] and the ingenious, determined mystery-solving Blackie [celibate]...Only God is better, more lovely than Maria, more comic and resourceful than Blackie." Here we have linked the sacramentalities of sex and priesthood mediated by storytelling.

Though there is a compulsive, monotonous, and inexhaustible quality to his novels' sexual narratives, Greeley is absolutely correct when he defends them as not being "dirty." Indeed, his writing is not salacious or sexually stimulating; sex in Greeley's novels is steroetyped, repetitive, and symbolic, and in that sense unreal, part of the myth.

Moreover, the real distinction between Father Brown and Father Blackie, and between Chesterton and Greeley, is not in their understanding of the relationship of priests and the church to evil but rather where each locates access to divine power and salvation. Brown's power is quite simple: it derives from confession and reconciliation; mythmaking and the telling of the story stand quite apart from this sacramental reality. Blackie, on the other hand, exist in a word in which sex, power, money, and priestly status are all equated - all undifferentiated in God's eyes, all needing redemption, and all capable of being instruments of God's love. All the characters in Blackie's domain, heroes and villains alike, are rich, powerful, Irish Catholics. Authorship is likewise equated with power. For Greeley, the status of mythmaker confers authority - in all sense of the word: it includes the right to define the world. Greeley repeatedly and explicitly embraces the identity of "storyteller of God": "I think I know a little bit more about how it feels to be God. For like God, a storyteller creates people, sets them in motion, outlines a scenario for them, falls in love with them, and then is not able to control what they do."

Greeley argues in his autobiography and elsewhere (Publisher's Weekly, April 10, 1987) that he must be doing something right to be selling so many books and making so much money. We are not at all sure that Chesterton would agree with these criteria. father Brown would certainly not be impressed! But the body of Greeley's work is important, and provides a wealth of information about the church and the priesthood. The insights disclosed in these novels about the workings of the celibate mind are only compounded and enriched by the fact that the novelist is also a celibate priest.