Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  Nothing came of that. Events carried him away, as they tend to do with young men of action. I saw him once more, in Superior Court, when he was gathering evidence for the defendants in the Isla Vista trial. Then he went underground on another case, and I haven’t seen him since. But let me describe him. He is built like a middleweight, dark and slightly exotic in physical appearance, his dress faintly mod, his hair neither long nor short. His style could be that of a graduate student or an artist, or possibly a young lawyer for the defense. But he is more diffident than self-assertive. He watches and listens, and talks just enough to hold up his end of the conversation. For all his goodwill and energy, there is a touch of sadness in his expression, as if there had been some trouble in his life, a fracture in his world which all his investigative efforts had failed to mend.

  I think self-knowledge, and a matching knowledge of the world, are what the serious private detective may be after. I’ve known a couple of older detectives who had found these things. One of them, an experienced operative from Los Angeles, went into a minority neighborhood where a crime had been committed. Within twenty-four hours, with his white hair and his outgoing democratic manners, he was the friend and virtual confidant of half the families on the block. I know a Nevada detective who works six days a week running down the losers who flock to the gaming tables. On the seventh day he acts as the ombudsman and unofficial justice of the peace for his working-class neighborhood in Reno. He is a good and gentle man, nondescript in appearance, short in height, casual in speech and dress, profoundly offended by violence.

  I don’t wish to imply that all private detectives scatter kindness. But the ones I’ve known tend to be reasonable men. If there are sadists and psychopaths among them, they don’t last very long in this rather exacting work. The fictional detectives who revel in killing don’t belong to the real world. They inhabit a sado-masochistic dream world where no license is required, either for the detective or for the wild dreamer at the typewriter.

  What makes a private detective, then? Why does he choose the shadow instead of the sunlight? Why does his interest in other men’s lives often seem to transcend his interest in his own?

  A good private detective has an appetite for life which isn’t satisfied by a single role or place. He likes to move through society both horizontally and vertically, studying people like an anthropologist. And like an anthropologist he tends to fall a little in love with his subjects, even if they happen to be the most primitive savages of the urban jungle.

  Possibly he became a detective originally in order to make his concern for and knowledge of people possible and then useful. He felt a certain incompleteness in himself which needed to be fulfilled by wide and extraordinary experience. He discovered a certain darkness in himself which could only be explored in terms of badly lighted streets and unknown buildings, alien rooms and the strangers who live in them.

  If my detective sounds just a little like a potential criminal or a possible writer, he is meant to. But the criminal seeks out people in order to steal their money or their secrets, or to project himself against them in a rage for power. The detective is tempted by power and knows its uses, but he subordinates a hunger for inordinate power to the requirements of the law and his own desire for understanding and knowledge. The knowledge he seeks is ultimately self-knowledge, and like his sedentary brother the writer he finds himself in the course of his life if he’s lucky.

  Father Bredder

  Leonard Holton

  THE NORMAL FUNCTION OF detectives is to apprehend criminals and to see that they are brought to justice, usually in a courtroom. A case generally is considered successful if the felon is caught and punished. It is altogether different when the detective is a clergyman. He is concerned with the laws of God, not Man, and is successful only when a soul is rescued from damnation. For him, success is far more difficult to achieve—and it is more difficult to verify.

  Father Joseph Bredder is a priest at the Franciscan Convent of the Holy Innocents in Los Angeles, but it is difficult to imagine a man who looks less like a clergyman. No doubt his years as an expert amateur boxer and as a marine sergeant contributed to the tough appearance of this gentle man. His adventures are recounted in eleven novels and he has served as the inspiration for the television series Sarge, which ran for thirteen one-hour episodes during the 1971 season, following a highly rated two-hour pilot film starring George Kennedy.

  Leonard Holton is one pseudonym of Leonard Wibberley (also known as Christopher Webb, Patrick O’Connor), the prolific author of some one hundred juveniles and novels. Wibberley’s most popular novel is The Mouse That Roared, the hilarious story of Grand Fenwick, a tiny European country that launches an attack on the United States with an invasion force of twenty longbowmen. It was made into a successful motion picture starring Peter Sellers. A native of Ireland, the 62-year-old Wibberley now lives in Hermosa Beach, California.

  Father Bredder

  by Leonard Holton

  ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO, having at the time written some forty books of various kinds, I decided for my amusement to try my hand at a detective story. The field was not entirely new to me, for at the time I had written two detective stories for juveniles: The Watermelon Mystery and The Five Dollar Watch Mystery under the pen name Patrick O’Connor, which are actually my middle names.

  The detective stories written by men these days are usually full of tough talk and tense action and casual sex. Women on the other hand tend to deal with minutiae of appearance, of habit, of thought, or dress, weather and surroundings; of remarks or absence of remarks. These form a truer but quieter picture of life as life is. As a result women in my view are far superior to men in writing detective fiction. Indeed, when I think of the great detective story writers of the twentieth century, I don’t think of Edgar Wallace (remember him?), Dashiell Hammett, or Ian Fleming, or the magnificent Ross Macdonald. I think of Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, Agatha Christie, and (a recent find for me, but certainly a writer of the first water) Emma Lathen.

  Now I’m not fond of bashing people around or shooting them, and casual sex I disagree with. On the other hand I have no great talent for the threads of detail which form the smooth and satisfactory web of the detective story as written by women writers. It occurred to me then that I had to devise a nonfussy and nonviolent sort of detective—a detective with an entirely different personality and motivation from the usual private eye; although on reflection few of them are usual. This decided me that if I made my detective a priest I could give my stories a background and quality others lacked—a spiritual quality. I reasoned that from the point of view of a priest, a crime is not merely an offense against the laws of Man. It is (infinitely more important) an offense against the laws of God. “Thou shalt not Kill,” “Thou shalt not Steal” are not, after all, reckoned man-made laws in their origin. When a criminal is caught and brought to justice, nothing at all has been achieved from the priestly point of view unless the offender acknowledges his offense against his Creator and repents it. Indeed, if the crime is murder and the culprit is executed unrepentant, he faces a sentence of eternal damnation.

  My detective, then, I made a priest whom I called Father Joseph Bredder. He would, I decided, be a priest first and a detective much later and he would always have as an urgent motivation in solving any crime the need to bring the criminal to repentance while there was still time.

  The first book I wrote in this vein was called The Saint Maker, It involved a nice old lady who killed people when they were in what is called a State of Grace—right after being absolved from their sins in confession for instance—so that, dying, they would go immediately to Heaven. She thought such killing an act of perfect Christian charity and was so sure of the rightness of what she was doing that, leaving the head of one of her victims in Father Bredder’s church, she lit a candle before the statue of Saint John the Baptist (who was, of course, beheaded).

  The lighting of the candle before the statue is what Father Bred
der, my detective, called a “spiritual fingerprint.” It is with the aid of such “spiritual fingerprints” that he often solves the crime which confronts him. This outrages his friend Lieutenant Luis Minardi, of the Los Angeles Police Department Homicide Division, who likes a more material approach. Minardi, by the way, is a Sicilian by birth and of an upper-class background. Although now an American citizen, the Sicilian remains—the tight cultural code which he feels he should impose on his daughter Barbara, a student in most of these books at the Convent of the Holy Innocents of which Father Bredder is pastor.

  Now when an author devises a detective series with a priest as a hero, it is immediately assumed that his inspiration was Chesterton’s Father Brown. Although I had certainly read a couple of the Father Brown stories, I wasn’t particularly struck by them. Chesterton spent much of his life battling the Dragon Paradox, and Father Brown isn’t, in my view, so much of a priest as he is a Paradox tamer. I’m not an expert on him, but I was never particularly struck by his spiritual depth. I don’t recall him ever visiting, as a priest, the inmates of seamy flophouse hotels, or trying to explain to children the mystery of the Christian Trinity. Father Bredder does all that appertains to the priesthood while examining bodies and diving on sunken barges for evidence which a “spiritual fingerprint” has suggested should be there. There is not in all this a whit of criticism of the classic Father Brown. I merely hope to point out that Father Bredder isn’t in the slightest degree related to Father Brown. I don’t suppose I will succeed.

  Father Joseph Bredder is a big man, well over six feet, and weighs about 180 pounds. He was born in Twin Oaks, Ohio, or Red Oak, Ohio (the detail here is confused). His father was a farmer and he was on his way to being a farmer too, when World War II broke out. He joined the Marines, was promoted to the rank of sergeant, and fought in many of the Pacific Island battles; it was this experience that made him a priest.

  Since his conversion to the priesthood is important, I’ll quote the passage concerned from the first book about him—The Saint Maker. The scene is a Pacific Island battle:

  The shout had gone back for phosphorous grenades and flame throwers, and two Marines had crawled forward with tanks on their backs. Three grenades were flung into the cave and after what seemed an eternity, half a dozen men came out. Then there was the roar of the flame throwers and the men struggled in the flames, clawing with burning hands at burning clothing, and collapsed on the ground, still burning and writhing. Suddenly he [Sergeant Bredder] had been very sick and wondered whether that was why he had been raised in a good country, with a bounteous earth and gone to church and said his prayers as hard as he could say them every night—to kill terrified men who had been brought up pagans and did not know what they were doing. That was why and when and how he had decided to become a priest.

  I had a model for this conversion. At Cardinal Vaughan’s School in London in my day, the sportsmaster and the man in charge of punishment was a priest. I still recall the deep regret I used to feel when I had to disturb him in his cozy study and say I had “come for punishment.” He was often settled before a fire with a book and a pipe and it seemed to me the height of bad manners to intrude.

  On the wall of the study was his “kit bag” (knapsack is the modern word), a sword-bayonet in its scabbard and his “tin hat,” or combat helmet as they call it these days. They were all souvenirs of World War I—The Great War—in which he had been an infantryman. His years in the Flanders trenches, among the mud, the rats, and the moldering dead, with the ever-present chatter and mutter of the guns, had made him a priest. He was a very decent man, for when he had administered punishment (which was done with a wooden stick with a broad tongue of leather on the end) he let the victim remain in his study until he had got hold of himself, lest he be seen sobbing by some boy in the hall outside. We were all grateful to him for that, and sometimes after punishment he would give us a hint about handling a cricket bat or trapping a football which helped to take our mind off the pain and indicated that the whole matter was over, and without enmity, which would have been unbecoming among gentlemen.

  In Father McClimant then (for that was his name though I am dubious of the spelling) was one source for Father Bredder. Another source was Father Joseph Brusher, S.J., now deceased, who used to teach history at Loyola University near Los Angeles. I mention him only because I stole his first name, Joseph, and intended to model Father Bredder on him. But the two are entirely different. What struck me about Father Brusher was that although he had cancer and some degenerating condition of the cells, and was supposed to age two years for every year of living, he had a huge zest for life. There was a lot of boy in him—right up to his last breath. There is a lot of boy in Father Bredder too.

  To backtrack a little: the first book was of course rejected by several publishers. Nobody understood it. It wasn’t a simple murder story. It wasn’t a beat-’em-up-and-love-’em story. The motive for the murder was queer, to say the least. And of course the rules of detective-story writing properly outlawed any trace of insanity on the part of the criminal.

  I happened to be in New York when the last rejection came in and my agent (who didn’t understand the book either) suggested I might have a chat with Ed Bond who was then in charge of detective fiction at Dodd, Mead. I had at this point rewritten the manuscript to play down the spiritual content of the book, following the well-known motto, so different from that of M-G-M, Pecunia Gratia Artis. I explained to Mr. Bond what I had been trying to do—write a book in which the real crime was against God, not Man.

  “Put that back into the manuscript,” he said, “and I’ll buy it.” And he did. That was the first of ten Father Bredder stories published by Dodd, Mead.

  Right now it would be nice to say that they swept the nation, but the fact is that they didn’t even sweep half a block of Madison Avenue. Nobody had any explanation for this, for everybody at Dodd, Mead loved Father Bredder. I think it was based in the religious trauma that had seized the whole of the Western world and centered around the proposition that God may be nothing more than a psychological response to an unfaceable fate—death. Father Bredder is not worried about this trauma. He goes on mediating as best he can between God and Man. He is worried about his own worthiness, about his lack of eloquence and his clumsiness of mind. He continues growing roses, comforting children, down-and-outs, alcoholics, millionaires, and policemen. If you were to tell him that God is merely a psychological response, et cetera, he would say quietly that God had never sworn an oath not to use psychology in His attempt to capture the love of Man.

  To complete the portrait of Father Bredder, he has a vast assortment of somewhat seedy friends and acquaintances, many of whom appear in each adventure. There is Soldier Sam who runs a coffee stall in the Main Street area of Los Angeles. He has flat feet, massive varicose veins, and bones enlarged by rickets, and he shouldn’t be alive at all except that he has also so valiant a spirit that nothing can defeat it. Hence his name—Soldier Sam.

  There is Mrs. Cha, Japanese manageress of a flophouse hotel in Los Angeles. She is a Buddhist who lives among derelicts without losing an iota of her wizened Oriental dignity. There’s Cagey Williams, a retired pug who runs a gymnasium in East Los Angeles where he trains hopefuls for any kind of a prizefight he can find anywhere. (Father Bredder was himself a boxer of some standing during and after his Marine Corps service.) And there’s the Senator, who is a ward heeler and makes no apologies at all for his outspoken opposition to “Papists.”

  There is also Reverend Mother Theresa who runs the Convent of the Holy Innocents and is of county English stock. She finds it very difficult to get along with Father Bredder, who lacks “breeding” and keeps involving the convent in the “police columns.” And there’s Mrs. Winters who keeps house for Father Bredder and wears a straw hat anchored firmly to her head with a hat pin to advertise that that is all she keeps for him.

  Father Bredder has the ability to get into a crime in a wide variety of circumstances.
He is involved with werewolves in Portugal (Deliver Us from Wolves), with the drug scene in California (The Mirror of Hell), with the fabulous Golconda Diamond which has an Indian background (The Secret of the Doubting Saint), with scuba diving (Out of the Depths), with international yacht racing (A Touch of Jonah), with an attempt to murder a baseball player coming home from second base (The Devil to Play), and with violin making (A Problem in Angels). Scuba diving, international yacht racing, ball playing, and violin making are all interests of mine, and since I also believe in immortality and Hell and Heaven, it is plain that Father Bredder and I have much in common.

  Most of the books about Father Bredder have sold to book clubs, and some appeared in paperback. There was also a television series, Sarge, based on him, or inspired by him. But the scripts departed from the original character and Sarge became (in my view) merely a policeman disguised as a priest. Still, television has paid Father Bredder the compliment of stealing several gimmicks in his plots—as for instance the burial of a body, which could not be found, in the hole dug for one of the supporting pillars of a big building in downtown Los Angeles, and the use of a musical score as a code for secret information (someone pointed out to Father Bredder, who is not musical, that the score made no sense since it changed into unrelated keys without reason).

  To complete the picture, Father Bredder sticks very closely to his vow of poverty, to the extent that he cannot bring himself to buy a tobacco pouch but keeps his tobacco in a paper envelope. He smokes a cheap, dark Carolina tobacco. He loves baseball and is an ardent fan of the Dodgers. Other than ball games he watches very little television, has a great fear, in giving advice, of sounding pompous or pious, does not carry a gun, and is opposed to violence though he will defend himself if need be. He is fond of gardening, children, and down-and-outs. He likes reading and buys old novels for a quarter or so when he feels he can afford them.