Leonard Holton

• Born: April 9, 1915
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: November 23, 1983
• Place of death: Santa Monica, California

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: Father Joseph Bredder, 1959-1977

Contribution

Despite the fame of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown short stories, few full-length novels featuring clerical sleuths had appeared before 1959, the year of publication of Leonard Holton’s first Father Bredder mystery. Since then, other series have made clergyman-detectives an important part of the mystery scene. Holton’s series is well plotted, and the interplay between Lieutenant Minardi with his procedural approach and Father Bredder with his moral and deductive approach lends plausibility, interest, and humor to the tales. The large number of recurring characters adds much to the series as the reader becomes familiar with Father Bredder’s world.

Biography

Leonard Holton, a pen name for Leonard Wibberley, was born in Dublin, Ireland, on April 9, 1915. He was educated at various Irish and English schools. Holton was a journalist throughout his life, beginning in London, between 1931 and 1936, and then in Trinidad, where he was also an oil-field worker and a member of the Trinidad Artillery Volunteers. In 1943 he began work as an editor for the Associated Press in New York, and the following year he became New York chief for the London Evening News. In 1947 he began work in California, where he worked as an editor, a reporter, and a columnist for various papers for the rest of his life. In 1948 he married Katherine Hazel Holton, whose surname he adopted as a pen name. They had two daughters and four sons.

Holton wrote more books for children than for adults. His wide-ranging interests are reflected in his fiction. Many of his children’s books, for example, have to do with car racing, history, and sailing; the last two areas are also important for his mystery series. His most famous single work is his entertaining novel The Mouse That Roared (1955), with its somewhat less successful sequels, including The Mouse on the Moon (1962). The Mouse That Roared became the famous film of 1959 starring Peter Sellers; The Mouse on the Moon, starring Margaret Rutherford, was made in 1963.

Holton died on November 22, 1983. His manuscripts are housed at the University of Southern California.

Analysis

Leonard Holton’s eleven crime novels star Father Joseph Bredder, a saintly Franciscan who humanely and humorously attends to his clerical duties for a convent with its attached church and school while solving crimes involving those he knows or with whom he comes into contact during the course of his duties or hobbies. Father Bredder’s faith and character are vital to the series. His commitment to God is frequently emphasized by references to the founder of his order and to Saint Paul; both are emblematic of Father Bredder’s compassion, love, and understanding. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is mirrored in Father Bredder’s own sudden conversion when, as a marine sergeant, he witnessed Japanese soldiers dying in flames, an incident referred to throughout the series. His faith leads him to solve crimes for much the same reason that motivates G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown: a vocation to tend to the spiritual needs of the criminal. Nevertheless, only in this way and in his use of religion-based information—what Father Bredder calls “spiritual fingerprints”—does he much resemble Father Brown. Holton’s disclaimer of any further influence, made in his 1978 essay, “Father Bredder,” is no doubt accurate.

Whereas Chesterton stressed Father Brown’s ordinariness, Holton presents Bredder as extraordinary. The reader’s prejudices are assaulted by the focus on a marine, in a job known for violence, as a priest, even though violence is precisely the reason for his conversion. To emphasize this unusual personality, Holton makes his character a successful prizefighter as well, one whose ability is highlighted in Flowers by Request (1964) when the bishop gives him permission to fight an exhibition match that will raise money for repairs to the church organ. Depicted throughout the series are Father Bredder’s friendships with members of the seedier elements of the Los Angeles streets: the hotel keeper, Mrs. Cha; a fence known as “the Senator”; a broken-down boxer, Cagey Williams; and others who aid Father Bredder and, because of their aid, vindicate his faith in humanity.

These street figures are aspects of a major strength of the novels. Far more than many authors of detective series, Holton creates an elaborate society around his detective and so can draw on the people in the convent and its church and school, the inner-city people from Father Bredder’s earlier assignment, his former marine friends, and the police. The police play a key role in the series, in the person of Lieutenant Minardi, Father Bredder’s closest friend. (Even in the one novel not set in Los Angeles, Deliver Us from Wolves, 1963, which is set in Portugal, Minardi appears at the opening and conclusion and, by mail, solves the main part of the police work.) The lieutenant always solves the cases on a police level, while Father Bredder probes the underlying spiritual puzzles. Unlike Father Brown and some other sleuths of crime fiction, Father Bredder has no objection to civil penalties for crime and is therefore fully willing to help and be helped by his friend. Another police officer who often appears in the novels is Minardi’s superior, Captain “Normal” Redmond, whose WASP blandness is humorously compared with Minardi’s emotionalism and Bredder’s spirituality, the captain by temperament understanding nothing of the priest. The final novel of the series, A Corner of Paradise (1977), introduces another delightful character, the Jewish Sergeant Rosenman, who complements the Italian Minardi and the WASP Redmond. These police officers—primarily Minardi—provide much of the stories’ plausibility. In their routines, their ability to collect information, and their respect for law, they assist Father Bredder as he makes sense of what he considers the more important aspects of the cases.

Characters from the convent make up another group in Father Bredder’s world. The personality of the Reverend Mother Therese forms a contrast to that of Father Bredder, for she is remote, reserved, and conservative, or she seems so to him, although she frequently assists him in surprising ways. His housekeeper is Mrs. Winters, another church conservative, whose name in A Corner of Paradise is inexplicably changed to Mrs. Wentworth, the name of the murdered wife in A Pact with Satan (1960). His assistant priest is the scholarly Englishman Father Armstrong, who makes Father Bredder feel intellectually inferior. Attending the convent school is Lieutenant Minardi’s daughter, Barbara, who is twelve years old in A Pact with Satan and ages to twenty by 1977, in A Corner of Paradise.

Barbara generally plays a role in events that run parallel to the main mysteries, although she nearly is a victim herself in The Saint Maker (1959) and is not mentioned in The Devil to Play (1974). Her marriage to a black playwright occasions one of the cases of prejudice in A Corner of Paradise, and she is briefly a suspect herself when her roommate at a college summer session is murdered in The Mirror of Hell (1972).

Other series characters come from the street life of Los Angeles, friends from Father Bredder’s previous inner-city ministry. Most often used is Mis-Cha, the Shintoist proprietor of the Melrose Hotel who somehow becomes Mrs. Askuzi of the Tokyo Hotel and in most of the novels appears as Mrs. Cha, a Buddhist, of the Western Hotel. Such inconsistencies are frequent in the series. For example, Jimmy Hughes, “the Senator,” a diamond expert and fence, is shot and killed as he talks to Father Bredder in Flowers by Request, but he is alive and running his business in The Devil to Play, published nine years later. Cagey Williams, the punch-drunk former boxer, is also in most of the series as he moves from street bum to boxing instructor and then, without explanation, to manager of the boxing gymnasium. Other inner-city characters include Soldier Sam and his café, former oil millionaire Texas Mary, and Tino Soldano, an amusing former juvenile delinquent who makes more money as a speaker on crime than he could from crime itself. This motley crew appears in full array in Flowers by Request: Father Bredder enlists them as singers for the Grüber Mass with which the book ends.

Out of the Depths and A Touch of Jonah

Holton’s plots are all of the puzzle variety, with fair play the general rule. The spiritual fingerprints are generally not difficult for the reader to pick up, despite Lieutenant Minardi’s constant puzzlement. A misuse of music and books in Out of the Depths (1966), for example, provides Father Bredder with spiritual clues. As the music and books show no patterns of selection, the music being in mixed keys, he deduces that they are used as ciphers. A similar type of clue is employed in A Touch of Jonah (1968), where a wrong screw shows Father Bredder (though no one else) that a murderer has been at work. Such misuse of material objects is a recurring theme in the Holton series, combining theology with the needs of the detective story. Several other plot devices recur in the novels. As what could be called variants on the plot of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), A Corner of Paradise, Deliver Us from Wolves, and Secret of the Doubting Saint (1961) all feature crimes having to do with fabulous jewels. At the end of each of these novels, Father Bredder finds the jewels and surprises those around him. A variant on this pattern has him find a large heroin stash in The Devil to Play and a film of scientific equations in Out of the Depths—both things of great monetary value, like the jewels, that have led to murder.

Also characteristic of Holton’s plotting are the double (or apparently double) plots involving seemingly unrelated deaths. In some novels Father Bredder remembers ancient crimes that he believes shed light on the modern ones: Deliver Us from Wolves has a sixteenth century death by illness of a nobleman, A Pact with Satan cites eighteenth century deaths from spontaneous combustion, and Flowers by Request recalls the death in 1100 of William the Conqueror’s son, William Rufus. The ancient crime most tightly woven into a modern crime is in Deliver Us from Wolves, for the two involve the same family and motive (the ruby). Other novels mention apparently unrelated modern crimes or accidents that only Father Bredder perceives as relevant: A Problem in Angels (1970) and Out of the Depths are especially clear examples. Although Father Bredder frequently claims that he is using spiritual fingerprints to guide him, the clues are often concrete: for example, an old book in Flowers by Request and a journal in Deliver Us from Wolves.

Religion and Detection

Religious themes, images, and allusions form an important undercurrent in the Father Bredder novels, though they are handled with subtlety, never clumsily. The title of Out of the Depths is a reference to the biblical psalm often called De profundis. Father Bredder opens the story by pulling a corpse out of the water; Father Bredder himself is almost murdered twice by drowning, and diving scenes and divers permeate the novel. The most specifically theological plot is that of The Saint Maker, in which the guilty character, the murderer of her husband and niece and would-be murderer of her niece’s baby and of Barbara Minardi, has the dementedly virtuous motive of making saints by killing people she has judged to be in a state of grace. The title of Secret of the Doubting Saint makes reference to the skepticism of the Apostle Thomas, but the motive, the gigantic diamond, and the method of its detection, which is doubt, do not depend on theology per se. Other themes in the series are linked to theology, although rarely in any technical way. Father Bredder often sees the hand of the devil in events, notably in A Pact with Satan, in which a wife’s virtue so disturbs a not-so-virtuous husband that, in guilt, he murders her so that he can continue his evil unreproached. This story is a good example of Lieutenant Minardi’s solving a case but not understanding it; it is Father Bredder who shows him the Satan connection. Holton steers clear of technical theological explanations; nevertheless, religion informs all Father Bredder’s activities and thoughts and adds depth and interest to the series.

In his essay on Father Bredder, Holton mentions the trouble he had in finding a publisher for the series and leads the reader to believe that he was probably disappointed in sales, even though the series was reprinted in paperback and picked up by book clubs. There was even a brief television series, Sarge, based on Father Bredder’s Vietnam experiences. In terms of sales, however, clerical mysteries only came into their own in the 1970’s and 1980’s, especially with the Rabbi Small and Father Koesler mysteries by Harry Kemelman and William X. Kienzle, respectively. Holton and mystery writer Jack Webb, with his Father Shanley-Sammy Golden series, had been among the few writers of clerical-sleuth tales in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the 1970’s, when the final Father Bredder stories were appearing, Charles Merrill Smith began his Reverend Randollph series (1974), Ralph McInerny his Father Dowling series (1977), and Kienzle his Father Koesler series (1979). In the 1980’s further clerical series began, two with nuns, authored by McInerny and Sister Carol Anne O’Marie, beginning in 1986 and 1984, respectively.

The appeal of these clerical sleuths draws attention to the nature of popular fiction. Readers of popular fiction demand a high degree of predictability; this is especially true of the mystery genre. Fiction written according to formula is both reassuring and undemanding. At the same time, to avert boredom, a degree of innovation is required, though always within the bounds of the formula. In short, mystery writers are always looking for a new gimmick. In creating Father Bredder, Leonard Holton made use of two gimmicks: the incongruity of a detective-priest (especially in the heyday of Mickey Spillane) and the reverse twist that this priest just happens to be a former marine sergeant and boxer. Father Bredder is indeed a perfect example of one type of hero in popular fiction.

Principal Series Characters:

• Father Joseph Bredder , the chaplain for the Los Angeles Convent of the Holy Innocents and a former marine sergeant and boxer, solves cases based on his analysis of spiritual clues. He has a number of friends and associates who appear in the series and assist him.
• Lieutenant Minardi of the Los Angeles police, a widower, and his daughter, Barbara Minardi, whose development from childhood through marriage is detailed throughout the books, are the most important of Bredder’s associates.

Bibliography

Breen, Jon L., and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Synod of Sleuths: Essays on Judeo-Christian Detective Fiction. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990. Discusses important Jewish and Christian religious figures in detective fiction; sheds light on Holton’s writings.

Erb, Peter C. Murder, Manners, and Mystery: Reflections on Faith in Contemporary Detective Fiction—The John Albert Hall Lectures, 2004. London: SCM Press, 2007. Collected lectures on the role and representation of religion in detective fiction; provides perspective on Holton’s work.

Kerr, Peter. “Leonard Wibberley, Sixty-eight, Dies: Wrote Mouse that Roared.” New York Times, November 25, 1983, p. D21. Obituary of Holton (under his real name) describes his history and career.

Penzler, Otto, ed. The Great Detectives. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Argues for the place of Father Bredder in the pantheon of great literary detectives.

Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler, eds. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Useful entry on Holton and his characters, delving into the innovative nature of his work.