Chaste Sleuths Win by Popular Acclaim

Why did the most successful authors of detective stories opt for chaste sleuths? In the analogous literary genre of espionage, after all (to say nothing of political thrillers), spies rely on promiscuity to extract information, don’t they? Would one ever imagine James Bond altogether chaste, successful, and popular?¹ And yet, such are precisely the recurrent features of the best-loved fiction detectives. Let us find out what may explain an anomaly so blatantly at odds with the dictates of hypersexualized modernity. 

Wise historians and sociologists² observe that promiscuity undermines civilization, whereas chastity fosters moral health, social harmony, and cultural creativeness. But what is a crime story if not the restoration of social order, on a small scale, against crime and deceit? As such, fiction investigators are micro-civilizers. Within the limited scope of a novel set in such a town and covering barely a few weeks, the detective brings relief to the local community, rebuilding trust among citizens, avenging truth once twisted by lies, and reviving hope through defeating fear. Most fittingly, then, are the best detectives portrayed as chaste characters. Free from the blindness and selfishness of lust, they embody the beneficence of the human mind striving for the common good. 

Most fiction detectives are single and, as befits their status according to Christian morality, sexually abstinent. Is it because the inventor of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe³ (1809-1849) granted no wife to his detective character Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin (depicted in three stories between 1841 and 1844)? Émile Gaboriau (1832–1873), Poe’s imitator in France, also implies that his investigator hero Monsieur Lecoq is a bachelor. Victor Hugo’s relentless Inspector Javert from Les Misérables (1862) is also single. 

Thankfully, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), brought up a Catholic by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst and in Austria, spared any wife an expected matrimonial catastrophe if ever joined together with egotistic bachelor Sherlock Holmes (four novels and five collections of short-stories published between 1887 and 1927). Even the “updated” Sherlock Holmes series, which aired from 2010 to 2017 with Benedict Cumberbatch as the main character, humorously had Dr. Watson (played by Martin Freeman) protest time and again that “he is not gay!” That line was consistent with the assumption that Holmes and Waston are united in chaste friendship.⁴

Admittedly, across the Channel, Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret is married and faithful (as well as childless, having lost his young daughter). He remains so across seventy-five novels and twenty-eight short stories from 1931 to 1972. His relationship with Madame Maigret is devoid of any turbulences or romanticism. She is a good cook. One could argue that his marital status does not affect his detective work anymore than the Baker Street housekeeper Mrs. Hudson influences Sherlock Holmes’ enquiries. 

Across the Atlantic, Lieutenant Columbo is also allegedly a husband, but his wife and children never appear in the sixty-nine episodes acted by Peter Falk between 1968 and 2003. In Germany, world-famous Detective Derrick seems to have no private life. Across the two hundred and eighty-one episodes aired between 1974 and 1998, he refers only once to a former wife, and twice he is seen with a girlfriend. 

Back in the U.K., P.D. James’ detective character Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard is a very private man, a published poet, and a widower who marries again only in the fourteenth and last novel of the famous series. Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse is not married, even though he admits to girlfriends in some of the thirteen novels of the series and thirty-three television episodes aired between 1987 and 2000. 

The detective characters we have referred to up to now evince no explicit connection with Christianity, the latter being merely assumed as part of their Western upbringing in the twentieth-century. The best-selling author of all time, with sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short story collections, Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) made Christianity more explicit in 1930 with her first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, narrated by the Rev. Leonard Clement, vicar of St. Mary Mead. 

If crime fiction connects celibacy and detection skills, Christian celibates offer a particularly successful and popular subcategory. Indeed, both Agatha Christie’s investigators Hercule Poirot (a single, Belgian Catholic) and Jane Marple (an Anglican spinster) are believers, even though not proselytizers. In Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), Poirot comments: “An interesting man, that Father Lavigny.” “A monk being an archaeologist seems odd to me,” I said. “Ah, yes, you are a Protestant. Me, I am a good Catholic. I know something of priests and monks.” Poirot prays the Rosary and intercedes for the dead, whereas Miss Marple’s last words could be “More tea, vicar?” 

As if to prove the point, a 2018 version by the BBC of Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders turned Belgian layman Hercule Poirot (played by John Malkovitch attempting to speak French like a native) into a former Catholic priest who hoped to benefit people better if working as a lay detective. Such clericalization of Hercule Poirot is untrue to the letter of Agatha Christie’s novels, but it reveals a subliminal affinity between the Catholic Faith and elucidation. Seeking the truth behind and through deceptive appearances is more than a job, it is a metaphysical quest and a supernatural fulfilment. This evocation of a subconscious “Fr. Hercule Poirot” leads us to fiction detectives who are not only single and Catholic but, furthermore, consecrated persons in sacred vows. 

Following on that most-loved creation by G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936), the congenial Father Brown (featured in fifty-three short stories published between 1910 and 1936), Ellis Peters (1913-1995) offered a pleasant medieval variation with her Cadfael Chronicles (twenty-one novels, written between 1977 and 1994, and thirteen television episodes) where a Benedictine monk from Shrewsbury Abbey solves murder mysteries. 

Peter Tremayne (pen name of Peter Berresford Ellis, born 1943) carried on with the Sister Fidelma mysteries, an internationally acclaimed series of historical mysteries comprised of thirty-three novels published from 1994 to 2023, plus forty short stories published between 1993 and 2017. Set in seventh-century Ireland, the series revolves around Sister Fidelma and Brother Eadulf, her detective partner who features in nearly all episodes. 

Acute and gentle, Brother Eadulf actively contributes to solving cases. He is more to Sister Fidelma than Dr. Watson is to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, though. Halfway through the series, Brother Eadulf marries Sister Fidelma, a step not problematic in early Celtic Christianity by the author’s account. That awkward marital development may be the exception in our paradigm, unless one considers that the matrimonial element is peripheral to their real bond, namely, that of partners in detection still perceived as religious and wearing the habits of their consecration. 

In Russia, Sister Pelagia is another religious (Orthodox) nun detective, invented by Boris Akunin, with three novels published since 2006, one of which, Pelagia and the White Bulldog, was made into a television miniseries in 2009. In 2022, BBC Studios launched Sister Boniface, a television series set in 1950s England with a nun as the sympathetic detective. This follows on the Sister Joan Murder Mysteries, a series of eleven novels located in Cornwall convents, published between 1990 and 1998 by Veronica Black. 

In America, Thomistic philosophy professor Ralph McInerny (1929–2010) wrote twenty-nine novels featuring detective priest Fr. Dowling. Published between 1977 and 2011, they were successfully adapted for television in 1989-91 as the Father Dowling Mysteries. 

In Italy, Umberto Eco (1932-2016) hinted at Sherlock Holmes in his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery during the Middle Ages with the Franciscan sleuth William of Baskerville as the lead character. Lately, Fiorella De Maria revived the Catholic genre through her Father Gabriel Mysteries series (four novels published since 2017), set in 1950s rural England with a Benedictine monk investigator. The Grantchester Mysteries, by British author James Runcie⁵ (born 1959), features clergyman-detective Canon Sidney Chambers, a single⁶ Anglican vicar in post-WWII Cambridgeshire (seven novels published so far—between 2012 and 2019—also adapted for television).

Exorcist fiction arguably offers a variation on the theme of the detective priest, only dealing with supernatural evil instead of merely human thieves and murderers, like in the horror novel The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty, with two Jesuit priests, Fr. Lankester Merrin and Fr. Damien Karras, leading the action. In 2011, Mikael Håfström directed the supernatural horror film The Rite, with Sir Anthony Hopkins as senior exorcist priest Fr. Lucas Trevant. In The Priests (literally, Black Priests), directed in 2015 by Jang Jae-hyun from South Korea, Catholic priest Fr. Kim tries to exorcise a young parishioner wounded in a car accident. The Pope’s Exorcist, by Julius Avery, was released in 2023, with actor Russell Crowe playing a priest somehow inspired by real-life Fr. Gabriele Amorth (1925-2016). 

Finally, let us mention detective stories written by clerics. In The Three Taps, novelist Msgr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957) writes of his lay detective Miles Bredon, “I know—I know it is quite wrong to have your detective married until the last chapter.” Msgr. Knox theorized on detective fiction, a genre which he further illustrated through seven novels and two short stories. 

Fr. William Xavier Kienzle (1928-2000) sadly left the Catholic priesthood after decades of ministry in the Archdiocese of Detroit, Michigan. He wrote twenty-four crime novels, all set in Catholic parishes and institutions, with fictional Fr. Robert Koesler as the sleuth priest. Kienzle’s first and best-known novel, The Rosary Murders (1978), was made into a film in 1987. 

Three Anglican clergymen authored detective stories portraying clerical sleuths. Under his pseudonym Stephen Chance, the Rev. Philip Turner (1925–2006) created the Rev. Septimus Treloar. A retired Chief Inspector turned country parson, Rev. Septimus uses his police experience to solve mysteries encountered in his clerical ministry. The series comprises four novels published between 1971 and 1979, the first of which, and the best-known, Septimus and the Danedyke Mystery, was put to the screen in 1979. 

Another Anglican clergyman author of detective novels was Rev. Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch (1868-1933). In The Canon in Residence, Rev. John Smith learns during his holidays in Europe that he has been promoted to (fictional) Frattenbury Cathedral, only to have his identity stolen by a fellow traveller, with enlightening consequences. Finally, Rev. Richard Coles (formerly part of the musical pop band duo The Communards) authored the Canon Clement Mysteries, comprised of Murder Before Evensong (2022), A Death in the Parish (2023), and Murder at the Monastery (due June 2025). Canon Clement lives with his widowed mother.

In conclusion, we observe that if detective stories are so popular, it is because the audience loves to identify with a daring character seeking the truth so as to restore the goodness of order once disturbed by crime. This aspiration to seek the truth and enjoy the good is universal because God endowed the human mind with intellect to know the truth and with free will to desire the good. 

Chastely married detectives can apply the faculties of their minds to such a worthy purpose, as our survey of crime fiction shows. But celibate and even consecrated sleuths display a particular affinity with the quest for truth and the restoring of goodness. What makes them eminently credible is that they have renounced the comforts of the world and the joys of the family for the sake of an exclusive service to God and to their brethren here below, in anticipation of Heaven. They risk everything to dispel lies and overcome evil. No wonder even popular culture recognizes what fit interpreters they are of every soul’s aspiration to know the One who is truth and love. 

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1. Actually, yes, an Elizabethan “James Bond” called Fr. John Gerard, S.J., had precisely those traits, as his Autobiography of a Hunted Priest demonstrates.
2. The Global Sexual Revolution―Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom, by Gabriele Kuby (Angelico Press, 2015).
3. An American of Anglo-Irish descent, Poe spent five years of his childhood in England.
4. By contrast, the 2008 film Brideshead Revisited decided that Sebastian Flyte was homosexual.
5. Like Robert Hugh Benson, he is the son of an “Archbishop” of Canterbury.
6. The novels have him become married after some adventures, but the Grantchester television adaptation keeps him single.