Investigating the art of murder mysteries: An interview with Fiorella De Maria

“There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories,” G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1901. “While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilisation, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilisation itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions… For the present it is enough to point out that this form of art, like every form of art down to a comic song, has the whole truth of the universe behind it”

Chesterton was right: Every fictional story carries echoes of Eden, of what we had and what we lost, and of the desperate measures we take to regain it. This is especially true of the detective story, which explores questions about justice. “Where is Abel your brother?” the first Sleuth asked. “I do not know,” the first murderer answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Catholics do not have a monopoly on the mystery genre, but detective fiction holds a prominent place in the Catholic literary canon. Among the founding members of the famous Detection Club were G. K. Chesterton, who served as its president, and Msgr. Ronald Knox, whose Ten Rules for Detective Fiction helped shape the genre’s Golden Age.

Writing in this tradition today is author Fiorella De Maria, whose most recent Father Gabriel mystery, Missing, Presumed Lost, was recently released from Ignatius Press. Fiorella is an award-winning Anglo-Maltese writer living in Surrey, England who studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge.

She recently shared her thoughts on detective fiction generally and the Father Gabriel series specifically.

CWR: One thing I’ve learned as an author and editor: there’s always a story behind the story. How did the Father Gabriel series come about?

Fiorella De Maria: I have always wanted to write a series. There is something about being able to develop a character over multiple stories that really appeals. I read my first Sherlock Holmes story when I was seven years old—I scared myself half to death reading The Speckled Band, but I was hooked on classic crime fiction from that moment. I grew up on a diet of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Chesterton, and other crime writers, so creating my own detective was probably an accident waiting to happen.

I grew up in Wiltshire in the South-West of England, near a Benedictine abbey, so the action of the series takes place in and around the beautiful region in which I grew up.

CWR: Had you written murder mysteries before? How well did you know the genre and its conventions before you began work on the Father Gabriel series?

Fiorella De Maria: I had never written a murder mystery before the Father Gabriel series, though another novel of mine, A Most Dangerous Innocence, is a mystery story set in a quintessentially English setting, a 1940s boarding school.

CWR: Do you have a favorite murder mystery trope?

Fiorella De Maria: There’s nothing like a good denouement, though it is surprisingly easy to get wrong—the author has to work very hard to ensure that no clues have been left out and that the big reveal does not turn into an epic info-dumping session. I quite enjoyed playing with the Incompetent Policeman figure too, which features in most classic murder mysteries because of the failure of Scotland Yard to find Jack the Ripper.

Father Gabriel and Inspector Applegate do eventually develop a grudging respect for one another, and it has been interesting to develop their relationship along more positive lines.

CWR: We know that murder mystery conventions can be used in any setting, but the setting will dictate how they’re used. Regarding motive, method, and means, science fiction must take futuristic technology into account. Fantasy fiction incorporates magical elements, while historical fiction must consider the particularities of its own setting. In what ways does the post-World War II English setting shape the Father Gabriel stories?

Fiorella De Maria: The post-war rural setting means that much more of the act of solving the crime comes down to deduction and intuition. It was a world without DNA testing and other aspects of modern forensics, but also without easy communication, such as mobile phones, or any telephones at all in some cases. In the late 1940s, rationing was still in place for many products—foodstuffs, clothing, petrol—and car ownership was a rarity.

Father Gabriel has to rely on his deductive powers and fortitude, as at times he ends up physically isolated in dangerous situations without any possibility of backup arriving in time.

CWR: The post-war setting works especially well for a murder mystery series, doesn’t it? People are reeling and suffering and acting out their anger and grief.

Fiorella De Maria: Absolutely. It was one of the reasons why I chose this setting. People are suffering and living with the effects of extreme trauma, but there are also thousands of people uprooted, struggling to settle in a new country, trying to bury the past or reinvent themselves.

Also, there are many unresolved war crimes. Each of my books looks at a different aspect of the war: the concentration camps, stolen Jewish art, the collusion of scientists in the development of weapons of mass destruction, etc. The peace following a major conflict is a time of reckoning, and that is very much reflected in the Father Gabriel mysteries.

CWR: By now, the priest-sleuth is a well-established archetype. What makes Father Gabriel distinctive?

Fiorella De Maria: I wanted Father Gabriel to be convincingly a priest and a Benedictine as well as a detective.

I love the Father Brown stories and have been heavily influenced by them as a writer of mysteries, but my one complaint is that we never really see Father Brown being a priest, saying Mass, hearing confessions, etc.

Father Gabriel is a late vocation, and there has been a lot of tragedy in his own life, making him aware of the lifelong consequences of sin. He knows that everyone touched by murder will suffer in some way, that following a guilty verdict someone is going to hang, and the family and friends of the victim will struggle to heal their broken lives. You see Father Gabriel comforting the bereaved, counselling a suspect to tell the truth, rushing to anoint a condemned person, even entering the death chamber.

Father Gabriel’s priesthood is at the heart of who he is, as a man and as a detective.

CWR: Would you say that Father Gabriel is a man of his time?

Fiorella De Maria: I try to make him as much a man of his time as possible. One of the biggest weaknesses of contemporary fiction is the tendency to put entirely modern characters into period dress, expressing ideas and attitudes that would have made no sense at the time. Father Gabriel is a man forged by the events of the first half of the twentieth century. He had an Edwardian childhood, he had a public school education—private to Americans—and he served in the Trenches. His outlook on life has to reflect that. However, as an English Catholic, Father Gabriel would also have grown up with a strong sense of being an outsider, judged and misunderstood in a country where anti-Catholic bigotry was commonplace.

CWR: I’m reminded of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in which the setting is a fourteenth-century Benedictine monastery, while the sleuth, Brother William, is a Franciscan. The sleuth is often an outsider, and given the story’s setting, a mendicant was perhaps Eco’s only option. In your series, however, we have the reverse: Father Gabriel is a Benedictine who, despite the Benedictine ideal of stability, ends up being sent away–and then stumbling upon mysteries which he can’t help but solve. The tension between his sleuthing and his Benedictine vocation is a frequent theme.

Fiorella De Maria: It is, and the reader frequently sees Father Gabriel getting himself into all kinds of awkward situations, trying to solve crimes and remain faithful to his vocation at the same time. It is almost inevitable at the end of the first book, that Father Gabriel is going to be sent into exile, after repeated rule-breaking, but my favourite moment is where Father Gabriel is dashing to the police station between parish activities, trying to work out how on earth Father Brown ran a parish as well as solving crimes!

CWR: When I read mysteries, I’m always interested in how the sleuth character develops through the course of a series. For example, Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey is almost cartoonish in the early stories. Sayers later developed Lord Peter’s backstory, especially the impact his service during World War I had on him, which helped. But not until she introduces Harriet Vane does Lord Peter’s character develop to its fullest extent—which makes perfect sense to me. The mystery story is usually plot-driven, and the love story is character-driven. Put them together and they bolster and correct each other. With Father Gabriel, however, the love story is in the past—he had a wife and daughter who died tragically. From the beginning of the series, he is grappling with their deaths. Father Gabriel’s character continues to develop, and you reveal more and more of the backstory as the series progresses, but you didn’t begin his story with only his outer shell.

Fiorella De Maria: I always envisaged Father Gabriel as a late vocation, and I have always been aware that many priests and religious have left behind very different lives. There were monks I knew growing up who had been city lawyers, who had served in the army, and in some cases, had been widowed young. One of the priests at my parish lost his wife very suddenly, and his experience of bereavement has helped him reach out to others who are suffering loss

In Father Gabriel’s case, he is motivated to seek justice for the victims of murder because he was unable to save the lives of his beloved wife and child.

CWR: The fact that Father Gabriel is a widower also fits the post-war setting. He, too, is reeling and grieving.

Fiorella De Maria: Yes, in some ways his grief is symbolic of a grieving nation. Suffering and grief are a lived reality for Father Gabriel, and it gives him a sense of solidarity with the thousands of families left reeling by the death of a loved one. Few families in Britain escaped the War unscathed, and some families in cities such as London and Coventry were destroyed altogether.

CWR: Chesterton’s description of the detective “cross[ing] London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland” seems apt when thinking of Fr. Gabriel living in this post-war world.

Fiorella De Maria: I couldn’t have said it better than Chesterton. Father Gabriel is of the world and also not of it.

CWR: Do you have favorites among the series’ cast of characters? I’m fond of Abbot Ambrose myself.

Fiorella De Maria: Not sure I’m allowed to say; it would be like having a favourite child! Besides Father Gabriel, of course, I am fond of Cuthbert because he forms a connection with the old century, but cheeky, straight-talking little Brother Gerard is my firm favourite. My husband’s grandfather was from Catholic Lancashire, and I feel very close to him whenever Gerard appears on the scene.

CWR: Do you have any more Father Gabriel mysteries in the works? Does the series continue?

Fiorella De Maria: Possibly. Given half a chance, I would keep going back to 1940s Wiltshire indefinitely.

CWR: I hope you do, for your readers’ sake! Thank you, Fiorella, for the interview.

• Fiorella De Maria’s Father Gabriel Mysteries—The Sleeping Witness, The Vanishing Woman, See No Evil, Death of a Scholar, and the latest release, Missing, Presumed Lost—are available from Ignatius Press.