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

Commonweal, August 14, 1992 by A.W.R. Sipe, B.C. Lamb

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]...."