Ronald A. Knox

• Born: February 17, 1888
• Birthplace: Knibworth, Leicestershire, England
• Died: August 24, 1957
• Place of death: Mells, Somerset, England

Type of Plot: Private investigator

Principal Series: Miles Bredon, 1927-1937

Contribution

Ronald A. Knox is better known as a critic than as a writer of detective fiction. His essay “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” published in Essays in Satire (1928), has become a classic. This lighthearted inquiry into the series of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle(who himself found Knox’s essay amusing and instructive) is now regarded as the seminal work in the higher criticism of Holmes and largely responsible for the subsequent expansion of Holmesian scholarship. The success of this essay depressed Knox, who regretted that his one permanent achievement in the genre was to have started “a bad joke.” In another well-known essay Knox discussed the “ten commandments” of the detective story. According to some critics, these rules of fair play for detective writers represent his most important contribution to the form.

Knox wrote his six detective novels to support himself as chaplain at Oxford University. Despite their pragmatic origin, his stories were carefully plotted and seriously intended, and a fascinating dialectic between the law of humankind and the law of God underlies their composition. When his detective fiction was written, there was a vogue for elaborate puzzles such as he presented and then ingeniously solved. Fashions have changed, however, and modern audiences are often bewildered by his highly allusive style (he sprinkles Latin quotations and literary references throughout the Bredon corpus). Modern readers are more concerned with the passions of the criminal than with the intellectual games that Knox plays with his readers. On the other hand, Knox was always scrupulously fair in providing clues and creating interesting problems; he was also witty, clever, and logical in arriving at his solutions. Though the modern reader may find his stories too cerebral, his time may come again.

Biography

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was born in 1888, the youngest of a family of four sons and two daughters. He was descended from Anglican bishops through his mother as well as through his father, who himself would become bishop of Manchester in 1903. His mother died when he was four years old, and between the ages of five and eight, Knox spent most of his time in a country rectory under the care of his father’s mother, brother, and sisters, who impressed him with their strict Protestant piety. After a private school education during which his precociousness manifested itself in his skill in composing verses in English, Latin, and Greek, he won a scholarship to Eton College. There he participated in the catholicizing movement within the Church of England. At the age of seventeen, to be able to serve God without impediment, he vowed himself to celibacy. Yet he was not a dour, repressed youth; rather, his high spirits made him attractive to his fellows. This same playful spirit can be seen in his writings for the Eton College Chronicle.

In 1906, after a distinguished career at Eton, Knox went to Balliol College, Oxford University, where he was a brilliant student, winning several scholarships and prizes and acquiring the reputation of a nimble-witted debater and writer. In 1910 he was graduated with a first in “Greats” (studies in the Greek and Latin classics) and was elected a Fellow of Trinity College. Following his ordination as a priest in the Church of England in 1912, he was appointed chaplain of Trinity College. He believed that the Church of England was a branch of the Roman Catholic Church, and his introduction of Roman practices into his services brought him into conflict with some Anglican bishops. He responded by satirizing the liberal views of his opponents in parodies of Swiftian bite. Increasingly dissatisfied with his Anglicanism, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1917. He described the evolution of his beliefs in A Spiritual Aeneid (1918).

After theological studies at St. Edmund’s College, Knox was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1919. He never had a parish, but he had an active apostolate via his teaching and writing. He taught at St. Edmund’s until 1926, when he was appointed chaplain of the Catholic students at Oxford University, a post he held for thirteen years. In the summer of 1939, at the request of the English hierarchy, he withdrew from his chaplaincy to devote himself to a modern translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate. Though much criticized, his translation has an individuality and unity that no other possesses. He completed the New Testament in 1945 and the Old Testament in 1950. Prominent among his later works was Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (1950), which, like his translation of the Bible, represented a summation of his life. This study of religious leaders who assert that they have had a special revelation of God’s will was the product of thirty years of research.

In 1946 Knox moved to Mells, Somerset, where he resided for the rest of his life. In 1950, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1956 he was elected to the Pontifical Academy. In his last public appearance, he delivered the Romanes Lecture at Oxford in June, 1957. Many in the audience knew that he was dying of cancer, and the lecture was both a brilliant success and a poignant occasion. Knox died at Mells on August 24, 1957. Following a requiem mass in Westminster Cathedral, he was buried in the churchyard at Mells, with a small group of friends as witnesses.

Analysis

Ronald A. Knox was a Catholic apologist, and in all of his books, from theological treatises to detective stories, he tried to harmonize his literary efforts with his religious beliefs. He had deeply held principles, and he deduced things from them. He did not question his principles but explored ways in which human phenomena could be reconciled to them. For him, the world was a place of exile, of puzzles and probation. Home was the spiritual world, where these puzzles were resolved. These same themes occur in disguised forms throughout his detective stories, where crimes create tension and confusion but where their resolution brings peace and moral enlightenment.

Despite his deeply felt religious principles, Knox did not write his detective stories to illustrate and defend the faith. He wrote them to entertain, and no acquaintance with theology is necessary to enjoy these intricately plotted works. On one level Knox’s detective fiction is like an acrostic or a crossword puzzle (both of which he liked to solve). On another level, however, these stories can be read as medieval morality plays, in which good battles evil. This multiplicity of levels is a manifestation of the complexity of Knox, an urbane, exuberant, but ultimately serious man who could treat sacred themes lightly and profane themes profoundly. This man who refined his wit by studying the Greek and Roman classics became accessible to a wider public when he applied the methods of German Higher Criticism to the Sherlock Holmes stories.

“Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes”

Knox’s intention in “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” which first appeared in the magazine The Blue Book in 1912, was to satirize German biblical critics who had found all kinds of sources, authors, traditions, and forms to explain the various books of the Bible. He was aware of the inadequacies of these critical methods and wanted to expose the dangers of their exaggerated use in the study of Scripture. His tone of mock seriousness in this Holmes essay delighted his first readers, and it started a trend in scholarship that continues to the present, long after the specific satiric point of his essay has been forgotten.

One of the questions central to this essay is the existence of two Watsons. According to Knox, some scholars held that there was a proto-Watson, who wrote The Sign of the Four (1890), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902), and a deutero-Watson, who wrote A Study in Scarlet (1887), “The Gloria Scott,” and The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905). The theory of the two Watsons hinges on whether Sherlock Holmes really died in his tumble from the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. If “The Final Problem” was genuine, then the stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes were fabrications. Knox analyzes the evidence that Holmes’s character and methods changed in the later stories. He even performs an astute linguistic analysis: The Holmes of the classic stories never splits an infinitive, whereas the Holmes of the Return stories splits infinitives on several occasions. Knox himself does not support the theory of the two Watsons. He believes that, though Watson wrote all the stories, there were actually two cycles: one set of stories that happened and another set that Watson invented. Watson also illustrates one of Knox’s rules for detective writers, because his intelligence is below that of the average reader. Knox compares Watson to the chorus in a Greek play—ever in touch with the action but always several steps behind in discovering what is really going on. Knox’s essay also analyzes Sherlock Holmes biographically (Knox argues that he was an Oxford man), philosophically (Knox argues that Holmes used observation a posteriori and deduction a priori), and psychologically (Knox argues that Holmes was a man of passion rather than a cold-hearted scientist).

“A Detective Story Decalogue”

A similar mixture of levity and seriousness, of the sacred and profane, can be seen in Knox’s essay “A Detective Story Decalogue.” It was certainly appropriate for a clergyman to set down the ten commandments for the writing of detective stories. Although these are presumably objective rules for the proper behavior of detective writers, they also manifest Knox’s personality and philosophy. He had no taste for the occult and macabre, and so he rules out all supernatural or preternatural agencies in detective stories. He had a taste for logic and fair play, insisting that the criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story and that in perpetrating the crime no poisons unknown to science may be used. Knox had no taste for magic solutions; thus, the detective may have inspirations but no unexplainable intuitions, and no accident must ever help him in solving a crime. Finally, the detective must not himself commit the crime, and he must not discover any clues that are not immediately revealed to the reader.

The Viaduct Murder

Knox punctiliously obeyed these rules in all six of his detective stories, although in his first, The Viaduct Murder (1925), one critic accused him of violating the “eleventh commandment” when he allowed the police to incriminate the right man. The Viaduct Murder begins as a lighthearted satire when four golfers discover a body with a mutilated head under the railroad trestle near the third tee. Was it murder or suicide? The coroner’s jury brings in a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind, but some at the golf club suspect murder. The four amateur detectives, who constantly criticize one another’s suggestions, pay more attention to clues than motives. Suspicion is cast on a kindly clergyman of the Established Church who, the reader is asked to believe, has murdered a parishioner who has obnoxiously publicized his disbelief in the immortality of the soul. The surprise of the story is that the one character with a clear motive for committing the crime actually does commit it. Though the murderer is a Catholic, Knox makes it clear that people commit crimes not because of their religion but because of their psychology. None of the four amateur detectives solves the riddle, and here again Knox seems to be poking fun at the Higher Critics, that is, on the slant of mind that rejects a priori any likely explanation in favor of a convoluted one.

The Three Taps

Unable to settle on a single detective in his first novel, Knox committed himself to four. In the second of his detective stories, The Three Taps: A Detective Story Without a Moral (1927), he settled on a single sleuth, Miles Bredon, who became the principal character in all the other whodunits Knox wrote. Several critics have found Knox’s creation of this character unfortunate. Robert Speaight, for example, wrote that Miles Bredon was a bore and suggested that Knox should have based his detective on himself. Knox, however, was handicapped in this choice, for G. K. Chesterton had patented the priest-detective in his Father Brown stories. Like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Lord Peter Wimsey, Miles Bredon possesses an agile and penetrating mind, but Knox fails to give him a memorable personality. Bredon enjoys smoking a pipe and playing his own devilishly difficult version of the card game Patience, but these seem to be traits attached to a paper creation rather than characteristics of a living individual.

The Body in the Silo

The Indescribable Insurance Company, Bredon’s employer, also smacks more of calculation than of life. Insurance is gambling, says Knox, and Indescribable takes big risks and charges big premiums, but it is obvious that its main task is to provide interesting cases for Bredon. For example, in The Body in the Silo (1933) the body of a guest at a house party in the country is found in a silo, presumably killed by the gas generated from the fermenting vegetation. The guest happens to be insured by Indescribable, and Bredon happens to be a guest at the same party. Accidents abound in the setting up of cases for Bredon, though never in their resolution. Insurance exists as a hedge against accidents, but Knox also uses it to reveal the deeper levels in his stories. According to Indescribable, insurance provides a safety net under the tightrope walk of existence. Yet Bredon finds in his cases that there is no security in life, and the Indescribable Insurance Company ends up paying as often as it ends up winning. The implied meaning is that humankind’s only true security rests with God.

Although religion does not dominate the Bredon series the way it does Chesterton’s Father Brown series, Knox’s stories always feature characters whose religion plays an important role in the plot. Furthermore, in the resolution of these stories a moral often surfaces that is compatible with Knox’s Catholicism. For example, in The Three Taps Mr. Jephthan Mottram, a Protestant manufacturer, has a fondness for the Catholic church, and at the end of the novel the reader discovers that he has been testing the thesis that a Catholic bishop will do anything for money. Happily, the bishop involved turns out to be a man of integrity. In The Footsteps at the Lock (1928), Knox is concerned with the redemption of two unpleasant cousins, and the one with murderous intentions ends up on his deathbed surrounded by nuns and ministered to by a priest. In The Body in the Silo a murderess gets her comeuppance by killing herself in her attempt to kill her husband. Bredon uses this example of poetic justice to state his preference for allowing Providence to take a hand in the game of life.

Still Dead

Perhaps the best example of Knox’s intentions and techniques is Still Dead (1934), the novel that several critics regard as his best. The setting is the Scottish Lowlands, often a vacation retreat for Knox. The focus of the story is on the Reiver family. Donald Reiver is master of the Dorn Estate. He piloted it through World War I, but after his wife’s death, his heart was no longer in managing his property. His son Colin, however, an invalid and a heavy drinker, is ill-suited to step into his father’s shoes. Worried about the future, Donald Reiver insures Colin’s life with Indescribable. Throughout this exposition one can see Knox’s use of mild satire: Donald Reiver could not bring up a son to his liking but he could use money to turn that son into a financial asset.

An important event in the novel occurs when Colin, under the influence of alcohol, kills the gardener’s young son with his sports car. Although he is acquitted of wrongdoing, he is plagued by guilt and announces his intention to leave England. He seems to make good on his promise when he is found dead—twice. On a Monday, the head keeper sees Colin’s dead body lying by the roadside; it then vanishes, only to turn up two days later in the same spot. The manipulation of the corpse is connected with an overdue premium on Colin’s life-insurance policy, but many complications follow in connection with Colin’s supposed trip and his activity back on the estate.

Bredon is assigned to the case by his company, and his investigations uncover much contradictory evidence, some of it supporting an accidental death and some suggesting foul play. It turns out that Colin, fortified by drink, returned to the estate to apologize to the gardener for killing his young boy. Colin collapsed outside his door, and the gardener let him remain in the cold throughout the night. Once Bredon discovers what actually happened, a debate ensues over the morality of the gardener’s action. This discussion brings out the levels of Knox’s fiction: the level of law (where rules govern both the insurance company and society) and the level of Providence (where justice and mercy reign in a mysterious unity). One character sees the gardener’s action as murder because he made no effort to bring the drunk man inside. Another says that there is no law against allowing a man to die. Yet another says that the gardener helped Providence in a piece of poetic justice (Colin killed the gardener’s son through neglect, and now the gardener kills Colin by neglect). In this debate Knox makes clear that laws are blunt instruments for obtaining justice: They cannot be relied on to give the morally correct solution to human problems. Colin killed a child, in act but not in intention, and the law could not punish him. The gardener killed Colin, in intention but not in act, and the law could not accuse him. Knox concludes that if the law cannot deal with a man, then he should be left to his own conscience. In this particular case Bredon decides to persuade all to keep the truth of the affair quiet, because publicizing it would mean a multiplication of hatred, malice, and uncharitableness.

In his treatment of law and morality Knox uses a theme familiar to the hard-boiled school of writers, whose detectives often solve the human problems they encounter not by following the letter of the law but by doing what will genuinely enhance the lives of those about whom they care. Despite this similarity, Knox would never be categorized with the hard-boiled school. Rather, he belongs with G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers in the analytic school. The point of his stories is the puzzle and its solution. There is also a paucity of violence in his plots, unlike those of the hard-boiled school. Though Knox’s satire is gentle, his wit often gives some bite to it, and he uses his impish humor to relieve as well as enlighten painful situations. Most important, Knox is concerned in his stories with the workings of the moral law in characters who imagine themselves to be unnaturally immoral. As in his other works, Knox tried in his detective fiction to construct alternatives to doubt, despair, and decadence. As a priest, he found these alternatives in a world beyond appearances, approachable for many people through a recognition of the moral law. Induction or deduction would not lead to this recognition. Faith was at the heart of the matter.

Principal Series Characters:

• Miles Bredon , the Indescribable Insurance Company’s special investigator, was formerly an intelligence officer in World War I. In his early thirties when the series begins, he is a big, good-humored man of lethargic temperament, well thought of by everyone except himself. Though Bredon’s application to his duties is desultory, Indescribable finds his work so useful in cases that piqued his interest that he became indispensable to the company.
• Agnes Bredon , a convent-bred girl whose mocking eyes induced Miles to marry her at the end of World War I, makes allowances for his absorption in the trivial and is happy to serve as nurse and chauffeur for her untidy, absent-minded husband. She is a willing audience for his speculations and is always conspiring for his happiness behind his back.
• Leyland , a police inspector, was an officer in the same regiment as Bredon in World War I, where he gained a reputation for efficiency. Bredon and Leyland rarely see eye-to-eye on police methods, and Leyland, the law’s official representative, often serves as a foil to the unconventional Bredon.

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, thereby providing insight into Knox’s works.

Corbishley, Thomas, and Robert Speaight. Ronald Knox: The Priest, the Writer. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965. This volume compiles two separate biographies of Knox, Ronald Knox: The Priest by Corbishley and Ronald Knox: The Writer by Speaight.

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. Sheds light on Knox’s novels.

Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Knox Brothers. New ed., corr. and reset. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000. Corrected edition of the classic study of Ronald Knox and his three brothers.

Waugh, Evelyn. Two Lives. New York: Continuum, 2005. This reprint edition of two biographies by Waugh includes his study of Knox, first published in 1959.