Ralph McInerny

• Born: February 24, 1929
• Birthplace: Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Died: January 29, 2010
• Place of death: Mishawaka, Indiana

Type of Plot: Private investigator

Principal Series: Father Dowling, 1977-; Sister Mary Teresa, 1981-; Andrew Broom, 1987-; University of Notre Dame, 1997-; Egidio Manfredi, 2000-

Contribution

Ralph McInerny brought to the mystery genre a theological and philosophical base, and his books look at events from an orthodox point of view. He scrutinizes the social and moral problems of the contemporary church; studies the relationships between a priest and his parishioners, a nun and her sisterhood, and a lawyer and his client; and examines crimes that grow out of a loss or failure of faith or a lapse into one or more of the seven deadly sins. His priest, Father Dowling, must wrestle with issues surrounding the sanctity of the confessional, the loyalties of the church hierarchy, and the confusions wrought by changes in the church itself; his nun, Sister Mary Teresa, must face the realities of a failing order, the confusions of lonely women trapped in a changing world, and the extremes of fanatics; his lawyer, Andrew Broom, in turn must confront the puzzles of life and death and seek meaning through action. McInerny is particularly interested in causal chains in which violence begets violence and a single act unleashes a series of interlocked events.

For his fiction, McInerny received the Mystery Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993 and the Crisis magazine P. G. Wodehouse Award in 1995.

Biography

Ralph Matthew McInerny was born on February 24, 1929, in Minneapolis, the son of Austin Clifford McInerny, a mechanical engineer, and Vivian Rush McInerny. He was heir to a midwestern directness and an Irish Catholic sense of wit and humor. He served in the United States Marine Corps from 1946 to 1947 and then returned to school to continue his education. He received a bachelor of arts degree from St. Paul Seminary in 1951, a master of arts degree from the University of Minnesota in 1952, and licentiate (1953) and doctoral (summa cum laude, 1954) degrees in philosophy from Laval University in Quebec, Canada.

As McInerny’s schooling suggests, his original goal was the priesthood, but he instead became a philosopher and, thereafter, a teacher. He was married to Constance Terrill Kunert on January 3, 1953, and they had six children: Cathleen, Mary Hosford, Anne Policinski, David, Elizabeth, and Daniel. He taught philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, during the school year 1954-1955. In 1955, he joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame, beginning as an instructor in philosophy. He moved up to assistant professor (1957-1963), to associate professor (1963-1969), and to full professor in 1969. In 1978, McInerny was named the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies and served as director of the Medieval Institute from 1978 to 1985. In 1979, he became director of the Jacques Maritain Center.

A respected academician, a renowned Thomas Aquinas scholar, a noted philosopher and leader in Catholic thought, McInerny received numerous honors. He conducted research on Fulbright grants in Belgium (1959-1960) and Argentina (1985-1986 and 1986-1987) and was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow (1977-1978), a National Endowment for the Arts fellow (1983), and a Pontifical Roman Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas fellow (1987). McInerny also frequently served as a visiting professor at such institutions as the Catholic University of America (1971), St. Mary’s College (1976), Senior Scholarship University of Scranton (1977-1978), Katholieke Universitet in Belgium (1982), Cornell University (1988), John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family (1988), Truman State University (1999), and Fu Jen University in Taiwan (2002). McInerny also received such accolades as the Thomas Aquinas Medal (1990 and 1993), the Maritain Medal (1994), and the Gerhart Niemeyer Award (2002), and collected more than six honorary doctorates.

McInerny was an extremely prolific—with more than one hundred books to his credit—and versatile author and editor of fiction, a translator and writer of nonfiction, poetry, and plays. His initial full-length published work was The Logic of Analogy: An Interpretation of St. Thomas (1961), the first of more than twenty-five nonfictional books that include such titles as Thomism in an Age of Renewal (1966), The Frozen Maid of Calpurnia (1982), Miracles: A Catholic View (1986), and What Went Wrong with Vatican II: The Catholic Crisis Explained (1998).

McInerny debuted as a fiction writer with Jolly Rogerson (1967), the first of more than a dozen nonseries novels. He began his long-running Father Dowling mystery series in 1977 with Her Death of Cold, and since then has introduced four other mystery series: Sister Mary Teresa (as Monica Quill, Not a Blessed Thing! 1981), Andrew Broom (Cause and Effect, 1987), University of Notre Dame (On This Rockne, 1997), and Egidio Manfredi (Still Life, 2000).

McInerny, in addition to his academic work and writing, acted as editor of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly and president of the American Maritain Association. McInerny died after a long illness on January 29, 2010. He was 80.

Analysis

Ralph McInerny’s titles all involve puns and allusions that grow out of the action. The title The Basket Case (1987), for example, carries the implication not only of psychological derangement but also of an infant abandoned in a basket, like Moses in the bulrushes. A Loss of Patients (1982) brings a loss of patience to all concerned, and those who rest in peace in Rest in Pieces (1985) have literally been blown to pieces. The Grass Widow (1983) focuses on two rejected women, one of whom smokes marijuana. The titles Nun of the Above (1985) and And Then There Was Nun (1984) clearly rely on linguistic play, while The Noonday Devil (1985) alludes to the medieval malaise accidie. Names of McInerny’s characters also reflect a certain gamesmanship, as with Geoffrey Chaser, the name of a pornographic novelist, clearly intended to conjure the ghost of Geoffrey Chaucer; Marie Murkin, suggestive of “merkin”; and Sister Mary Teresa’s nickname, Emtee, all too evocative of “empty.”

By virtue of the setting of the Father Dowling mysteries, the small Fox River community on the outskirts of Chicago, the novels partake of the ambience of both the small town and the booming metropolis. A portion of the wit and originality of the books, in fact, comes from this clash of big-city crime and sophistication with the values and culture of a midwestern small town. A Loss of Patients and The Basket Case, for example, center on local events, while Lying Three (1979) and Rest in Pieces bring the world of international politics and terrorism to Fox River. In Lying Three, a former anarchist confesses her past to Father Dowling, an assassin’s bullet narrowly misses the Israeli consul at Wrigley Field, an ardent Zionist is shot on the Fox River golf course, and the son of a local arms manufacturer with Arab connections is found drowned under suspicious circumstances. In Rest in Pieces, a Maryknoll priest, a liberation theologian who believes that the United States exploits Central America, brings with him international cocaine traffic and political assassination. In either locale, the crime itself most frequently involves the wealthy or the upper middle class.

Andrew Broom’s Wyler, Indiana, setting and Sister Mary Teresa’s Chicago setting involve some of the same mix in their portraits of established neighborhoods and the seamy inner city.

Furthermore, these worlds are a peculiar mix of Rome and the Midwest—the medieval and the modern. Dowling reads Dante and Saint Thomas Aquinas and interprets human behavior through their eyes. A swinging-singles bar, the scene of heavy drinking, sexual misbehavior, and social mayhem of various sorts, is known as the Gutter Ball; with its smoke-filled darkness, smoldering vocalist, and despairing laughter, it seems “some penitential place whose habitués were paying for their sins.” There the murderer meets his intended victims, and there, “no matter the smiles on their faces,” the patrons suffer the torments of Hell. Another bar, the Mangy Manger, is likened to a vision of Hell, with “the bestial beat” of its “dreadful music” and its clientele with “utterly joyless” expressions, such as “those of the doomed and damned.” In The Basket Case, one of the characters has created his own Dantesque hell, for he experiences on Earth the punishment merited by adultery (the child of his unholy union is born with spina bifida; the anguished father consents to euthanasia and bars himself from confession and Holy Communion; he dies without holy rites in his mistress’s arms). In Getting a Way with Murder (1984), Father Dowling imagines the villain, a man who has murdered at least five people to prevent the discovery of an insurance fraud involving millions, “up to his neck in ice in the lowest region of the inferno.” Sister Mary Teresa, in turn, finds twelfth century parallels and advocates old-fashioned hanging and flogging for modern sins. This medieval judgment of the modern is an inseparable element of McInerny’s worldview.

In a typical McInerny plot, the murderer is someone who cannot relate to others in a normal fashion, someone so obsessed with possessions or with family honor that for him or her people lack value and are expendable obstructions. Readers sometimes learn who the murderer is early in the game, so the pleasure comes from seeing how the mystery will be unraveled, the guilt fixed, and the charges made. At other times, the identity of the murderer is a total surprise, though his unveiling grows out of the amateur detective’s psychological analysis of events and people.

Murder begets murder, as the murderer tries to hide his guilt and as investigators seek the weak link in a chain of deaths. In most instances the solution depends on the unveiling of a lie or a series of lies, particularly about relationships. Police routine proves inadequate, and solutions depend instead on imaginative flair and intuitive leaps. Furthermore, witnesses fail to tell the police details vital to unraveling motives and acts, but sometimes let them slip to Father Dowling or Emtee or else go to them for confession or reassurance. In Getting a Way with Murder, for example, a young innocent brings Father Dowling a computerized list of insurance-policy beneficiaries that reveals an insurance scam of a scale sufficient to explain multiple murders. In like manner, confidences made to Andrew Broom in his capacity as lawyer give him an inside track on motives and possibilities.

Both Father Dowling and Emtee clearly respond to a higher law than humankind’s and consequently do not feel too uncomfortable about keeping information from the police or handling cases in their own way. Emtee sidesteps the police at every opportunity, obstructing the law in the name of justice, lying and encouraging her associates to lie when occasion requires, withholding evidence, and making accusations on the basis of incredibly flimsy evidence. Father Dowling is not above slipping a credit card between frame and door to make an illegal entry in a just cause, plying a fellow clergyman with drink to loosen his tongue about a parishioner, or visiting a woman involved in a murder in order to slip a key photograph into his pocket when he asks for a second cup of coffee. Nor does he worry about confronting a suspect head-on, spelling out his suspicions as fact, tête-á-tête, and awaiting the response. Sometimes, however, his openness brings him into uncomfortable proximity to violence.

The forensic details of the crimes in McInerny’s novels are not always convincing; for example, the police are not disturbed by a supposed suicide’s making no trial cuts on her wrists, only deep, professional incisions. The Sister Mary Teresa series in particular is weak on hard criminal evidence. McInerny is simply not interested in the realities of a police investigation. Instead, motive, manner, behavior, and human interaction are for him most significant. His characters are a mixture of good and bad, with one or more of the seven deadly sins luring them into trouble and their own self-justifications plunging them deeper into chaos and even murder. As a consequence of his peculiar perspective, McInerny’s endings sometimes leave situations somewhat unresolved when Dowling is satisfied with the spiritual state of all involved. Second Vespers (1980), for example, ends with police and priest entertaining dramatically different interpretations of the events of the plot, though it is understood that Dowling will intercede if an innocent is put at risk. A McInerny plot may turn into a circuitous labyrinth in which disparate motives and acts interlock in causal patterns whose key is the heart of humanity. In fact, it is in his exploration of ironic causal sequences that McInerny excels, with the interlocking five deaths in Cause and Effect causing effects with a vengeance. The Sister Mary Teresa plots, however, are more conventionally suspenseful, with Emtee bringing all the suspects together at the end in a traditional unraveling.

McInerny uses his mysteries to explore issues and values that are of concern to him. For example, Father Dowling’s discussions with his detective friend Phil Keegan and with his parishioners postulate and defend a conservative (what some have called reactionary) Roman Catholic worldview. Dowling misses the beauty and power of the Latin Mass, advocates daily Mass, confession, and penance, praises marriage and family, and has painful memories of his experiences on the church’s marriage court. He and Emtee both clearly disapprove of the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council and would prefer a return to the old ways of the church. Throughout the McInerny canon there are references to Catholics who feel rejected by the new church and who have left their faith, disillusioned by the growing laxness in Catholic moral theology. In The Noonday Devil the slackened values of Vatican II are blamed for an uprising among American bishops, who plan to replace an assassinated archbishop and maybe even the pope himself.

McInerny suggests that sex should be confined to marriage and should be for the sake of procreation rather than pleasure. In a number of the mysteries, sexual misalliances produce long-term conflicts that lead to murder and mayhem. The Sister Mary Teresa novels in particular often focus on “deviant” sexuality (pornography, dating clubs, singles bars) that precipitates murder.

A firm believer in the authority of the church, Dowling expresses disapproval of most Protestant ideas; he thinks, for example, that laypeople who become amateur biblical scholars are engaging in activities that are properly left to priests. Eccentric Protestant sects, television evangelists, and ignorant working-class Protestant converts are the subject of light ridicule throughout McInerny’s canon.

Humbled by his alcoholism and embarrassed by his earlier ambitions to achieve a position of importance within the church hierarchy, McInerny’s Father Dowling has found serenity in tending his flock. He derives aesthetic and spiritual satisfaction from the familiar words of the breviary and from psalms, hymns, and biblical passages. As McInerny puts it in Lying Three: “His parishioners were all the flock he needed; his life as a priest had moved onto a different and more solid stage. Something like peace returned when the anguish of insoluble marital tangles no longer tempted him to the oblivion of drink.” Father Dowling devotes himself to the riddles of sin and grace and the mystery of the human heart, wonders about “the apparent inconsequence of so many lives,” and believes that without faith there would be no adequate defense against the theory that life is futile. He befriends the lonely, feeds the hungry (Dowling’s housekeeper is noted for her wholesome, hearty meals), and seeks out murderers—to protect Christ’s flock and to offer them God’s grace. In fact, most of the Dowling novels end, after the victim has been ferreted out and his earthly punishment assured, with the priest’s attempts to make the murderer understand the degree of his guilt and the all-encompassing nature of God’s forgiveness.

McInerny tries to humanize Dowling by having him smoke a pipe, enjoy a game of golf, and chat about sports with friends. He occasionally lapses into diction that echoes the cadences of the King James Bible, just as Emtee tosses out medieval allusions and Latin phraseology. Overall, however, Father Dowling is put forth as a model of a good man and a good priest: someone who has given up worldly ambitions, is satisfied with his lot in life, devotes himself to his parishioners, and personifies the best of church values. Emtee, too, despite her old-fashioned habit, her dismissal of Sigmund Freud, and her contrary ways, is a measure by which the more modern figures are judged.

Throughout his works McInerny studies spiritual and psychological motivations. His argument is that departures from Christian values (for him, conservative Catholic practices) lead to selfishness, misery, and perhaps even murder. Father Roger Dowling, Sister Mary Teresa, and, to a lesser extent, Phil Keegan have achieved spiritual well-being despite setbacks in their professional and personal lives; their well-being is directly attributable to their obedience and restraint. However, this very concern with spirituality leads to some disturbing contradictions. For all of their kindly manners, Dowling and Emtee are willing to believe the worst of virtually anyone, and their concern for the next life results in a seeming tolerance for failures in this one. Both affirm the need for earthly punishment despite the possibility of heavenly mercy. They seem at times uncharitable and even arrogant as they pontificate on orthodoxy and use the law and its representatives to achieve their own ends. There is a censorious air of self-righteousness, an unctuous piety to their words and deeds.

Furthermore, McInerny’s Chicago, Fox River, and Wyler, for all of their midwestern charm and McInerny’s witty descriptions of them, are cold, cheerless places inhabited by superficially pleasant but unhappy people. Wives and husbands betray each other casually; a son kills a woman to get revenge on his mother; a daughter lies obsessively and acts with contempt for the lives of even those most dear; a religious fanatic kidnaps a small boy, and another strangles a series of women. Dante’s horrific visions are credible precisely because they are not set in the real world; McInerny’s seem, in a curious way, to reflect a private view of Hell, one that is a bit jarring when located in the American Midwest.

Heirs and Parents

In Heirs and Parents (2000), Helga Bjornsen, a beautiful blond college student who once interned at lawyer Andrew Broom’s practice, is found murdered, her throat slashed, in a car at a cemetery where she worked part-time in Wyler, Indiana. The crime features a wealth of hidden motives in conflict with one another and a plethora of potential suspects who move up or down the scale of probability as the police investigation intensifies and is just the opening salvo in a variety of criminal activities that plague the small town. The murder investigation intersects with a case Broom is working on: the probation of the will of local millionaire Stanley Waggoner, who shortly before his death apparently married a young nurse named Catherine, an action that raises the ire of other heirs. Heirs and Parents demonstrates many of author McInerny’s trademarks: a fondness for puns, a dry and sometimes caustic wit in observing society’s foibles through close examination of a closed community, strong moral sensibilities, well-drawn characters who interact in believable fashion, and plenty of unexpected twists and turns to keep the reader guessing until the last page.

Green Thumb

Green Thumb (2004), the eighth entry in the University of Notre Dame traditional mystery series (who knew that crime was so rampant at the storied Catholic institution?), opens with a man found dying on the putting green at a university golf course. Apparently the victim of a heart attack, the dead man—Mortimer Sadler, class of 1977—was actually done in with poison derived from the deadly nightshade plant. As usual, private detective Phil Knight, retired but on retainer to the university, is called on to investigate, in league with friend Jimmy Stewart of the South Bend Police Department. As usual, Phil enlists the aid of his brilliant, obese brother, professor of Catholic studies (and himself a licensed private detective) Roger Knight to help solve the crime. As usual, suspects abound. Is the murderer beautiful Maureen O’Kelly, valedictorian of the class of 1977, a noted gardener and a feminist who spurned the dead man when they were students? Is it one of Sadler’s former roommates, all in attendance for an alumni get-together? Is it the dead man’s brother, Samuel, or Samuel’s son Paul, currently a student at Notre Dame, who is growing marijuana and deadly nightshade in his dorm room? Or is it someone else? As always, McInerny provides an intricate, complex story complete with philosophical digressions, touches of humor, and intimate glimpses into the workings of the university where he has taught for more than fifty years.

Principal Series Characters:

• Father Roger Dowling is a tough, unsentimental suburban Chicago priest-detective, low-key but also witty, irascible, and old-fashioned. His experiences as a priest have taught him about sin, guilt, and expiation. He firmly believes that “anyone is capable of anything” and that danger can lurk in unexpected places: a park, a country club, or even a dentist’s chair.
• Phil Keegan is a chief of detectives who has known Dowling since they were boys, attended the preparatory seminary of the Chicago Archdiocese with him, and believes in the efficacy of routine. A good Catholic who at times regrets the inability to master the intricacies of Latin that kept him from the priesthood, Keegan is as eager to dispense justice as Dowling is to mediate mercy.
• Sister Mary Teresa “
• Emtee Dempsey ” is a no-nonsense, brusque woman, a medieval scholar specializing in the twelfth century, one of the three remaining nuns in the Order of Martha and Mary (“the M and M’s”), and the bane of the Chicago police force. In her late seventies but still acutely perceptive, this heavy-set old nun magisterially presides over a Frank Lloyd Wright house and the two other sisters. Of necessity she engages in the detection of crimes that impinge on her territory (often ones involving former students or old friends). Rarely leaving home, she sends the other nuns out to gather information. Then deriding police methods as slow and uninspired, she engages in imaginative guesswork that leads to unexpected solutions.
• Andrew Broom is a wealthy lawyer from Wyler, Indiana, whose interest in criminal cases inevitably involves personal twists and tangled conspiracies of clients and relatives that produce chains of ironic effects.
• Roger Knight , a three-hundred-pound man, is a professor of Catholic studies at the University of Notre Dame, and a licensed—though only part-time—private eye, who invariably becomes involved in mysterious doings at the institution. His brother Philip, a retired private detective and a fellow lifelong bachelor, assists Roger in untangling the cases.
• Egidio Manfredi , the world-weary captain of the police force of Fort Elbow, Ohio, who is nearing mandatory retirement age, has appeared in novels of a nonviolent but nonetheless puzzling nature.

Bibliography

DeAndrea, William L. Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television. New York: Prentice Hall, 1994. Contains brief entries on Ralph McInerny and two of his major fictional creations: Father Dowling and Sister Mary Teresa Dempsey.

Kirkus Reviews. Review of Still Life, by Ralph McInerny. 68, no. 18 (September 15, 2000): 1319. A review of a novel featuring Egidio Manfredi of the Fort Elbow, Ohio, police force, who investigates the disappearance of a poet and encounters a case of mistaken identity. The novel is praised for its interesting theological concept—how long should one be responsible for acts of the past—and for its world-weary protagonist, but the reviewer takes McInerny to task for his verbosity.

Levin, Martin. “Reader’s Report.” Review of Jolly Rogerson, by Ralph McInerny. The New York Times Book Review, November 26, 1967, p. 68. A review of Jolly Rogerson, in which the protagonist is an ordinary professor at an ordinary university who, dissatisfied with his lot in life, begins conceiving absurd research projects, writing poison-pen letters, and turning his lectures into surrealistic exercises.

Lukowsky, Wes. Review of Sub Rosa, by Ralph McInerny. Booklist 98, no. 4 (October 15, 2001): 386. A review of Sub Rosa, the second Egidio Manfredi novel, in which an unattractive romance novelist kidnaps men to have sex. Favorably recommended for its cozy nonviolence, its gently satirical tone, and its satisfying puzzle.

McInerny, Ralph. I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. McInerny’s autobiography describes the influences on his life and his career and his thoughts about writing and the works of other Catholic writers.

McInerny, Ralph. “Saints Preserve Us: The Catholic Mystery.” In The Fine Art of Murder: The Mystery Reader’s Indispensable Companion, edited by Ed Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg, and Larry Segriff with Jon L. Breen. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993. McInerny’s definition of what constitutes a Catholic novel: fiction that contains both the law enforcement concept of crime and punishment and the religious concept of sin and forgiveness. McInerny uses his own Father Dowling series to illustrate how the two concepts “overlap, interlock and play off against each other.”

Mort, John. “Christian Fiction.” Booklist 94, no. 17 (May 1, 1998): 1503. Brief reviews of eight novels dealing with religion, among them McInerny’s The Red Hat, which is called a “convoluted tale of intrigue within the Catholic Church.” McInerny’s novel earns a mixed review: positive marks for a bizarre plot involving a defrocked priest and the author’s witty erudition, but demerits for pacing—the story is considerably slowed by long, pedantic sections about church doctrine.

Needham, George. Review of Grave Undertaking, by Ralph McInerny. Booklist 96, no. 8 (December 15, 1999): 761. A review of the nineteenth Father Dowling mystery, Grave Undertaking, which is panned because of repetition, underdeveloped characters, and a time line that makes no sense.

Publishers Weekly. Review of Triple Pursuit, by Ralph McInerny. 248, no. 9 (February 26, 2001): 61. A mixed review of Triple Pursuit, the twentieth Father Dowling mystery: though comfortable, familiar, leisurely, and repetitive, and laced with the author’s dry wit, the novel is called a “predictable entry in a generally lackluster series.”