Chesterton's Brown & Greeley's Blackie

...I don't want to threaten you, but....' '"I do want to threaten you,' said Father Brown in a voice like a rolling drum...

...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...

...that is not to look down on one who doesn't know it...

...George Lukacs defines the problems of the author and his characters this way: "The objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality...and the characteristic structure of its matter is discreteness, the separation between interiority and adventure" (The Theory of the Novel, MIT Press...

...Brown is the incarnation of his understanding that there is even a Christian way to catch a criminal...

...All the characters in Blackie's domain, heroes and villains alike, are rich, powerful, Irish Catholics...

...Here we have linked the sacramentalities of sex and priesthood mediated by storytelling...

...Like Father Blackie, Brown is surrounded with evils—generally murders—but the adventures to which Chesterton subjects his character are devoid of the same sense of violence or torture...

...Valentine's Night, Cornelius O'Connor, who was the high school sweetheart of Catherine Collins, consults Blackie Ryan in trying to solve the murder of the husband of Collins's lover...

...For like God, a storyteller creates people, sets them in motion, outlines a scenario for them, falls in love with them, and then is not able to control what they do...

...sex in Greeley's novels is stereotyped, repetitive, and symbolic, and in that sense unreal, part of the myth...

...He judges and brings others to justice, but is not himself vulnerable...

...For Greeley, the status of mythmaker confers authority—in all senses of the word: it includes the right to define the world...

...Thus, in Chesterton's "The Invisible Man," the victim was quite alone at the time of the murder, being guarded by a watchman above suspicion...

...His method consists primarily of interviewing all family members and business partners, especially with a view to establishing a motive, and searching for incriminating statements (much more important than the physical clues which may only prove what Blackie already knows...

...Stand still,' [the thief] said in a hacking whisper...

...Father Brown would certainly not be impressed...

...Blackie Ryan knows the answers because of who he is, and who he is is the Druid of a politically powerful tribe...

...Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is a private investigator and Charles Dickens's Inspector Bucket is a police functionary...

...He reveals what should be kept secret (that he is carrying a valuable object, a cross set with sapphires...

...The insights disclosed in these novels about the workings of the celibate mind are only compounded and enriched by the fact that the novelist is also a celibate priest...

...Blackie, on the other hand, exists in a world in which sex, power, money, and priestly status are all equated—all undifferentiated in God's eyes, all needing redemption, and all capable of being instruments of God's love...

...Father Blackie insists on swifter retribution...

...nSt...

...Whereas Chesterton's Father Brown, virtually without political power, enters a case either through a personal connection with a former sinner or by apparent, but illusory, chance, Father Blackie, as a kind of chaplain to one powerful Chicago clan, comes into the picture when this clan is threatened...

...Greeley is a celibate and is denied the sacrament that fascinates him most: not confession as is Chesterton's Father Brown, but sex...

...This species of experiment is necessary, in Brown's world, because the culprit can take any appearance...

...18.14 August 1992 this point on in the series, Flambeau is apt to bring Father Brown into a case...

...Although he believes in freedom, Father Brown does not believe in chance...

...Father Brown is content to trust a sinner's conscience and God's mercy...

...Chesterton found the celibate priest wiser than two Cambridge dons about real evil...

...By this definition, Chesterton and Greeley could hardly be further apart...

...mythmaking and the telling of the story stand quite apart from this sacramental reality...

...In "The Blue Cross" he switches the contents of a saltcellar and sugar shaker in order to observe his companion's response: "A man generally makes a small scene if he finds salt in his coffee...

...No group, or individual, is exempt from the corruptions of evil...

...An author is the form-giver to the characters' inner struggles and their adventures...

...knocked at every empty house, turned down every cut de sac, went up every lane blocked with rubbish, went round every crescent that led him uselessly out of the way...

...Though there is a compulsive, monotonous, and inexhaustible quality to his novels' sexual narratives, Greeley is absolutely correct when he defends them as not being "dirty...

...Father Blackie is more the dramatic hero who, following Lukacs's definition, lacks interiority...

...Happy Are the Meek features a Satanic priest, Father Armande, who has "breath like a sewer," and his doppelganger, Wolfe Tone Quinlan, a drooling, sadistic, incestuous drunk...

...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...

...Unlike Father Brown, however, Blackie is not the central character of the mystery series, but is the element that "holds the stories together" and coexists with power, money, and sex—other essential elements...

...Instead of going to the right places— banks, police stations, rendezvous—he systematically went to the wrong places...

...Father Brown voices a classic expression of that sensibility in "The Hammer of God": "I am a man...

...The thief Flambeau, for example, has the power of disguising himself to look like almost anybody: an apple-woman, a grenadier, a duchess, even a priest...

...Father Brown sets things in disorder to measure the energy or real state of affairs in a case...

...Father Brown's attitude is neatly summed up in a snatch of dialogue from "The Eye of Apollo": '"Shall I stop him?' asked Flambeau, bounding towards the exit, for Kalon had already thrown the door wide open...

...Nowhere does the person of the author reveal himself or herself more clearly than in the telling of the story and its prevailing mythopoeic values...

...This reflects one of Chesterton's own aphorisms, "There is even a Christian way to teach the alphabet...

...In other places Greeley emphasizes the significance of "the sacramental imagination" that must say in word or picture that human passion is a hint of divine passion: "if God is love then surely S/He is present in sexual love...

...It is the power of the sacraments and the sacramentality of human error and repentance that captivates Father Brown...

...Father Brown abhors violence...

...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...

...B.C...

...Thus, in "The Blue Cross," Flambeau, in the criminal phase of his life, is arrested, but he will eventually repent of his life and join the police force...

...In seven instances Greeley compares Father Blackie to Father Brown, the priest-detective created by G.K...

...In contrast: '"Don't think about it, Vinney.' I jumped up, whipped the Berretta into position with both my hands, and jammed it across my desk into his forehead...

...Fortunately, they can usually be identified by their appearance: they are almost always repulsive old men—though they may have attractive handmaidens...

...In his autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest (Pocket Books, 1986), he says that all of his "novels are about God's love...

...Greeley accepts the interpretation of a colleague that "Blackie and Maria are Andy's vision of God" and goes on to elaborate: "The passionately loving and implacably seductive Maria [fully sexually active] and the ingenious, determined mystery-solving Blackie [celibate]....Only God is better, more lovely than Maria, more comic and resourceful than Blackie...

...Compare these two excerpts...

...The pains that Greeley has taken to link the two priest-detectives invite serious investigation, an invitation we intend to pursue here...

...In Blackie's world, however, true crimes are committed only by the truly evil, those damned by their very nature...

...In a chapter of his autobiography entitled, "The Storyteller," Greeley explains that Blackie Ryan is a character who has lurked in his imagination for a long, long time and who "sometimes" speaks in the author's voice...

...He alters his check in a restaurant, but in order to overpay...

...LAMB lectures on literature at the University of Maryland...

...The discourse of "confession" in Chesterton's life is very much like Brown's modus operandi...

...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, 1982): "The attractiveness of the [Irish-American romance] for America at the present time may be more than merely a nostalgia for a lost culture of shared values, it may be, more seriously and distressingly, a nostalgia for a simplified world of easy solutions and unexamined bromides that was false to begin with...

...Careful analysis offers a more complex reading...

...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...

...The Invisible Man" ends with a detection but not an arrest: "Father Brown (Continued on page 24) Commonweal 14 August 1992:19 (Continued from page 19) walked those snow-covered hills under the stars for many hours with a murderer, and what they said to each other will never be known...

...Listen to me...

...He began writing the Father Brown mysteries in 1910 and only later (1922) converted to Roman Catholicism "to get rid of my sins...

...And in explaining his entry into Roman Catholicism, Chesterton observed, "that the Catholic church knew more about good than I did was easy to believe...

...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...

...Nowhere is the difference between Father Brown and Father Blackie more dramatic than in the climactic scenes in which the culprits are revealed...

...In fact, Greeley embraces his vocation as a storyteller as both sacred and sacramental...

...Chesterton might agree...

...In contrast, Greeley's priests relish political power and are privy to CIA operatives and highly placed Vatican contacts...

...Here Brown's appearance is intimately connected with his office...

...Asa convert, Chesterton relished the freedom of the Christian message and its sacraments...

...Chesterton...

...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...

...At the heart of Father Brown's universe we find the discourse of the confession: a dialectical process aimed at discovering a sinner's true position before God...

...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...

...Commonweal Authorship is likewise equated with power...

...Father Blackie, on the other hand, always comes into a case at the behest of a relative, a friend, or a client of the family...

...In this regard Greeley's intent is much the same as Chesterton's message...

...When it comes to sex, Father Brown and Father Blackie exist in different worlds...

...Greeley defines sacrament in the broadest terms as "whatever discloses grace to us, especially water, fire, food, drink, and sex...

...With this, the circle closes...

...Her novice-mistress blames the attack on Cathy...

...Sometimes the murderer is simply allowed to escape, as in "The Sins of Prince Saradine...

...Thus, Father Brown, who knows that the potential for evil lurks in every human heart, must work much harder than Father Blackie, who needs only to figure out which dirty, kinky old man is to blame and then to place him in the chain of causality...

...And, though Father Blackie's captive is not sent to the electric chair, neither is he led to repentance: "Vinney was in a psychiatric institution where he would spend his few remaining days....Prognosis: hopeless...

...Father Brown enters the world of crime and detection seemingly at random and sometimes he simply stumbles onto the scene of the crime...

...His object is not to bring anyone to the gallows but rather to bring criminals to confession and reconciliation...

...In his autobiography Chesterton reveals how significant he found the informed, wise counsel of Father 24.14 August 1992 Commonweal O'Connor: "To prevent me from falling into a mare's nest, he told me certain facts he knew about perverted practices...

...This, at any rate, is the impression one gets of the culture of Irish-American Catholicism from Greeley's [novels...

...and therefore have all devils in my heart...

...In Virgin and Martyr, Catherine Collins is sexually attacked by a drunken old priest...

...Of course, Blackie's gun is just a toy, but in recapitulating the scene later, he accentuates the violence of his act: "[If] he had moved a millimeter closer to the gun he was in fact carrying, I would have bashed him, weak old man or not, on the skull...

...At the same time, Chesteron endows Father Brown with external qualities unlike his model...

...and "story theologians" David Tracy and John Shea...

...Don't even think about it.' "Mike Casey and the three cops in my bedroom had no trouble putting the cuffs on him and taking away his gun, a mirror image of mine" (Father Blackie in Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice...

...Greeley laments at length in his autobiography that few critics understand his juxtaposing money, sex, and celibate priests, and concludes emphatically that "sex is edifying and religious and important...

...Greeley repeatedly and explicitly embraces the identity of "storyteller of God": "I think I know a little bit more about how it feels to be God...

...In Blackie's universe the demons are all in others: priests—who are satanic, drunken, sandal-wearing, misguided, unfaithful, or otherwise irredeemable—or reprehensible dirty old men, usually Irish...

...Brown's power is quite simple: it derives from confession and reconciliation...

...He links Blackie with Anne Maria O'Brien Reilly (Angels of September), whom he identifies as one of his most mature heroines, "a lay woman who has been savaged by the church through much of her life...

...The divergence of the two authors is based not on sacrament or intent but on different ideas about the role of authorship in mythmaking...

...Four stories later, Flambeau repents of his career of crime and becomes a detective, and from A.W.R...

...But what motive can there possibly be for a parish priest or a monsignor to involve himself in police matters...

...Greeley's characters are the products of his own imagination...

...Solving crimes is simply part of their jobs...

...And then, instead of accepting a refund, he breaks a window to even up the account, thus changing the world slightly to allow lesser (but still inductive) minds to follow his trail...

...In Rite of Spring, Brendan, who once dated Blackie's sister, Eileen Ryan, seeks the priest's help...

...Moreover, the real distinction between Father Brown and Father Blackie, and between Chesterton and Greeley, is not in their understanding of the relationship of priests and the church to evil but rather where each locates access to divine power and salvation...

...But the body of Greeley's work is important, and provides a wealth of information about the church and the priesthood...

...Father Brown's motive in taking up a case, invariably, is a desire to move the criminal to penitence and reconciliation...

...In the "Blue Cross," he attracts the attention of the master-criminal Flambeau by dangling a jeweled cross as bait...

...He defended this crazy course quite logically...

...he apparent impossibility of detecting a criminal is another convention of detective fiction...

...And that is the modus operandi of the "private-eye" detective story, as well...

...But what is revealed as being truly sacred and as having meaning...

...This article is drawn from their research work of an ongoing study of celibacy in literature and life...

...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...

...His adventures exist outside of him...

...That she knew more about evil than I did seemed incredible...

...In "The Innocence of Father Brown," Chesterton discusses the method of Valentin, another of his detectives...

...Indeed, his writing is not salacious or sexually stimulating...

...He drops his parcels on the ground in order to pick them up again...

...He credits his awareness of its power to three people: anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who taught him that "religion is a set of symbols that provide explanations of the ultimate problems of life and templates for responding to those problems...

...I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched'" (from "The Innocence of Father Brown...

...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...

...SIPE is the author of A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (BrunerlMazel, Inc...

...ather Brown is clearly modeled on a real priest, Father John O'Connor, a Yorkshire pastor, who was an important figure in Chesterton's life and intellectual development...

...he enters as part of an elaborate web of kinship or power involving patronage and obligation...

...Brown's response to the seamless world is to make minute changes in it in order to ascertain its structure...

...the detective's task is to find the opening in a seamless world...

...But what of the creator—the storyteller...

...It could be argued that within the confines of the narrative it is not Father Blackie who makes Vinney insane and confines him to an institution, any more than it is Blackie who burns Sister Hilaire alive, or who tortures Catherine Collins...

...He reverses signs for peaches and Brazil nuts, confuses anthropological categories of "outside the house" and "inside the house" by pitching soup onto a wall (acceptable behavior on the street but not in a restaurant...

...No, let him pass,' said Father Brown with a strange deep sigh that seemed to come from the center of the universe...

...Blackie is merely an observer to these horrors, is he not...

...if he doesn't, he has some reason for keeping quiet...

...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 widow and her new lover back to the church (specifically, back to Blackie's parish...

...Brown reveals his humanity over and over in his interactions with other sinners who, like himself, are in need of compassion...

...Later, when Cathy is serving as a lay missionary in "Costaguana," she is sold by a sandal-wearing, New Age-talking, people's priest, Father Tuohy, to a monstrous police official who turns her over to his men for torture and rape...

...In some of Chesterton's stories, the penitent murderer decides to turn himself in as part of his gesture of reconciliation...

...CHESTERTON'S BROWN & a,w.rspe GREELEY'S BLACKIE B c TWO VERY DIFFERENT DETECTIVES onsignor 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...

...Just as sex is (or can be) a sacrament for Greeley, so the sacrament of mythmaking, of storytelling, becomes identified with sexuality...

...He follows clues with the sense of personal power conferred by simple lived truth and the shared human struggle...

...And certainly Greeley's desire to show the church and the priesthood as instruments of God's love is explicit...

...Let Cain pass by, for he belongs to God.'" The contrast to Father Blackie, who acts as a kind of auxiliary to the police in Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice, could not be more striking...

...this kind of surrender occurs in "The Wrong Shape" and in "The Hammer of God...

...Whereas Chesterton took his taletelling lightly, Greeley claims mythmaking as a privileged sacrament...

...In Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice the murderer turns out to be Vinney Nelligan, a "dirty, kinky old man," although for a time Blackie suspects a Vatican hit man who dresses in the traditional ("very heavy") habit of the Franciscans...

...Blackie knows who the truly evil are, of course, but they have to be connected to a specific crime in order to be punished...

...Greeley argues in his autobiography and elsewhere (Publisher's Weekly, April 10,1987) that he must be doing something right to be selling so many books and making so much money...

...We are not at all sure that Chesterton would agree with these criteria...

...Here Father Brown is consulted by Flambeau, the detective...

...It is out of his shared humanity that he interacts vigorously and salvifically with the criminal...