At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I looked for books to read in this upcoming 2024. I put a little extra effort into finding murder mysteries by older Catholic authors for my personal list, thinking it might help my writing. (It hasn’t so far…)

For January, I’ve read …
The Viaduct Murder by Ronald Knox, 1926. Father Ronald Knox was an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism under the influence of G. K. Chesterton’s writings. Interestingly, he converted before Chesterton himself did. Knox was an early enthusiast for Sherlock Homes. An essay from the “Imaginative Conservative” contains Knox’s rules for writing what we may call, British cozy detective fiction. (https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/04/dean-detective-fictions-decalogue-appreciation-monsignor-ronald-knox.html)

I wasn’t excited by The Viaduct Murder. I found the beginning confusing, and I figured out the end, because it was very Chestertonian. Someone of that time period would have had a different reaction. (Though I don’t know what that reaction would have been.) You can read The Viaduct Murder for free on Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72585/pg72585-images.html ). Other books by Fr. Knox are available through Cluny Media. He wrote extensively on the Bible and religion, along with his six detective novels. (https://clunymedia.com/collections/ronald-knox)

The World, the Flesh and Father Smith by Bruce Marshall, 1944, was a surprising book. The protagonist, Father Smith, is a priest in Scotland. The book begins before WWI and finishes some twenty-five years later during WWII. It was republished in 2017 by Human Adventure Books and is part of something called the Library of the Christian Spirit. (It actually might be the entire library, for all I could find out.) The book itself is a lovely picture of Father Smith’s life for twenty-five years as a priest. And, by lovely, I mean that Father Smith has a very clear and true picture of the frailty of mankind, and how gentle, yet firm, you have to be about it. But he doesn’t wallow in the ugliness that he confronts. The book has a lot of dry humor (one of his converts is Lady Ipecacuanha). Really, it’s worth a try.

I read some P. G. Wodehouse. I reread The Tall Stranger by D. E. Stevenson. I like the characters in this book but as a writer the structure of it confuses me. I reread the Letter to Dr. Hyde from the Robert Louis Stevenson archives. I found an article on Alice Thomas Ellis in “Catholic Culture” here, https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=6763 She was recommended by several people, but I have not read any of her books. I’m unconvinced, after that essay, that I want to.

And in the last week, I’ve read five Perry Mason books by Erle Stanley Gardner. It takes me about two hours to finish one, and I was looking for escape. Gardner was incredibly popular and wrote a boatload of these books. He has lovely introductions in some of these books, about police detectives who were getting into the forensics of crime. Gardner gives a really nice shoutout to Captain Frances Lee of the New Hampshire police who was also somehow a millionaire and gave a lot of money to Harvard to help educate forensics investigators in the 1950’s.

The stories themselves tend to begin with an active set-up of mystery and end with Mason in the courtroom, trying to save his client, and win his case. That courtroom dialogue is a huge feature of the books. Many of the books have scantily clad girls on the cover, which, I can imagine, did not make my mother happy. Oddly, though, the cover is usually the most risqué thing about the book. These are not books to reread, at least from my viewpoint. Once you know exactly how Mason is going to get someone off, there’s not a lot to go back for. This is not precisely a criticism. I’m just saying that there isn’t usually a developing relationship to go back and think about. And that is why I reread books. I think. Except…

… I have read a book called Joy Cometh in the Mourning by Dave Freer, about ten times. It’s a charming mystery, set in Australia. It fascinates me, because the author sketches out a lot of characters with a lot of backstory, in a very economical way. (They include an Episcopalian minister named Joy.) It’s never a heavy information dump. The information needed to solve the mystery is so cleverly placed, that the first time I read the book I thought the author cheated, and went back to look. The information was in front of me at least five times for each bit needed. It was incredibly clever.

In the Gardner books I might guess that Mason should be investigating why X happened, but I can’t tell what it means, till he figures it out himself. It’s fun, but it hasn’t been an enticing reread.

Also, the relationship between Perry Mason and his secretary, Della Street, is mostly not written into the books. However, at the end of Book 12 (?) Mason proposes to Della. She asks if she could keep working, if she were his wife. He says absolutely not, and one reason is, that if she were his wife he couldn’t keep ordering her around. She then turns him down, saying that she would be stuck at home, and he’d get another secretary who would be the one sharing his life.

I’m still chewing on that.