And Then There Were Nun

There’s a killer somewhere out there on the loose, and he’s targeting the Catholic priests and nuns of Detroit. The murderer leaves his calling card behind at every crime scene: a black rosary left clutched in his victim’s hand. The media is outraged, and are eagerly tracking the Rosary Killer’s every move, putting enormous pressure on the cops to solve the case. Luckily, they have their top man on the job, Lieutenant Koznicki… and he in turn gets some help from some rather unlikely sources, one of them being Father Robert Koesler…

William X. Kienzle’s The Rosary Murders was his first book, and the first Father Koesler mystery. Published in 1979, the book is another entry into serial killer territory, and unfortunately was advertised with the word “mystery”. This is no mystery, this is a thriller. The killer’s identity remains unknown until we find out with everyone else. Father Koesler is not so much a detective as much as he is there at the right place and time. This is just your typical serial killer thriller plot, with the single twist of being set within the Catholic community of Detroit.

All Aboard the Cliché Train!!!

There’s a certain type of mystery plot out there that is really starting to get on my nerves. The plot isn’t confined to a single sub-genre. The book can be set in a charming English village where an elderly lady plays the role of amateur sleuth. It can just as easily be a tough-as-nails hardboiled story about a tough wise-cracking PI. But for some reason, many authors think it’s a clever idea to use the following twist ending: the killer is gay.

What does the author of such a tale expect me to do? Throw my hands in the air and scream “Oh, my God!!! A gay person!!! I thought they were only mythical creatures that hid in forests, picked berries while the moon was full, and secretly stole pens whenever you needed them!” This twist ending has long outgrown its shock value… and its welcome. And the ending has introduced a brand-new set of clichés to the genre, clichés I’m sick of seeing.

Kicking the Habit

Earlier this year, I made my first acquaintance with Catherine Aird by reading His Burial Too. Although I expressed genuine enthusiasm for the locked-room situation and its resolution (which contains a very good trick at its core), I thought the book suffered from a poor sense of pacing, with a second act that dragged interminably on as the detectives investigated trails that were all-too-obviously dead ends. I had hopes that The Religious Body would be an improvement— the plot sounded like a riot and Aird showed an excellent sense of humour that could make such a story enjoyable. The result was not quite what I expected, though…

The Religious Body opens in the Convent of St. Anselm. One of the nuns, Sister Anne, is nowhere to be found, until somebody stumbles over her body at the foot of the cellar stairs. C. D. Sloan arrives with Constable Crosby in tow to investigate, and he decides that all this just doesn’t add up. Eventually, he decides Sister Anne was murdered, and begins to try finding the killer.

Sister Act

My acquaintance with Anthony Boucher (rhymes with voucher) has been limited to date. I mainly know him as one of the scriptwriters on the radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which was always a delight to listen to, even when Basil Rathbone left the show. Boucher and his partner in crime, Denis Green, came up with interesting problems for Holmes to investigate; although the mysteries themselves were often easily solved (after all, the episodes were less than a half hour long) they showed creativity in their scenarios. Overall, they were interesting expansions of references to un-chronicled cases throughout the Holmes canon. (Occasionally, they dramatized the original stories as well, such as The Speckled Band or A Scandal in Bohemia.)

I’m also aware of Boucher’s influential role as a mystery critic, but he was also involved in the world of science fiction. (You can read all that and more in the back of the IPL edition, which I own, where one "Burke N. Hare" gives a brief biographical outline of Boucher's life. Incidentally, the cover to Nine Times Nine is proof that Nicky Zann is a genius. After all, thanks to his genius, I bought that monstrosity, The Affair at Royalties. Awful, awful stuff. I'm still attending group therapy to get over it. But his cover is once again magnificent, and really intrigued me and intellectually blackmailed me to read this book.) But until now, I never read a novel by Boucher. This mistake has been rectified, as I’ve finished his excellent novel, Nine Times Nine.

Whoever's Behind This Haunting Will Have a Long Chat With Mother Superior...

It is incredible what you can find during an afternoon at your local library. After my recent review of William DeAndrea’s Killed on the Ice, when I found myself at my library, I couldn’t resist looking at the shelf to see if there were more DeAndreas, even though I knew there weren’t (thanks to the magic of the Internet). When I started to walk away towards the door, something caught my eye, and I stopped at the next shelf. A hardcover book with an altogether too-familiar spine was sitting there on the shelf—it was a Black Dagger Crime edition of Too Many Ghosts, by Paul Gallico (best-known, perhaps, as the author of The Poseidon Adventure, which made for an unreasonably delightful movie).

I really like the way old Dell Mapback editions would start out, by telling you what the book would be about, listing the most intriguing-sounding things about the plot. I will try to do the same.