The Black Shrike is the American title of a thriller released originally in Great Britain as The Dark Crusader. It was written by Alistair MacLean and published under the pseudonym Ian Stuart. MacLean claimed that he had released it that way to prove that the public would buy his work even if his name was not on the cover.

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There is a sad phenomenon of writers going Hollywood. Some authors’ early books are  everything a reader could want, but as time goes on and they start seeing their novels made into movies, their literary output loses quality. Their later novels start looking like treatments in search of a screenplay writer.

Michael Crichton’s late novel Timeline, for example, was filled with wonderful ideas and brilliant vignettes, but the plot blundered along from start to finish, with sub-plots strewn aimlessly here and there – pretty much like a movie.

Donald Hamilton’s early westerns were superb. When he switched to Matt Helm spy stories, the quality dropped considerably, but at least they were gritty and intense. The movies made from them were a bad joke – although Hamilton can hardly be blamed for what Dean Martin did to them.

Alistair McLean suffered a similar fate. A close look at his early novel The Black Shrike in comparison to his later Breakheart Pass will show you the process at work. The former is excellent; the latter is a plotless collection of scenes – good scenes, but unconnected so that they fail to have a cumulative effect.

I read and enjoyed a dozen of Alistair McLean’s books during the sixties and seventies. Two stood above the rest: H.M.S. Ulysses and The Black Shrike. H.M.S. Ulysses, was a powerful and moving story of war, based on MacLean’s experiences in the British navy. The Black Shrike was a spy novel that I stumbled onto about the same time I discovered James Bond – the early, gritty, realistic Bond of the first few novels before Hollywood turned him into a cartoon. I had no idea at the time thatThe Black Shrike was written by MacLean, who was already one of my favorites.

John Bentall is a spy, during the early cold war, for an unnamed British service. He started out as a rocket fuels scientist but has been co-opted to search out subversives in that industry. He is stubborn, smart, and dedicated, but not the top spy he appears to be at the beginning of the novel. He is of heroic mold, but closer to everyman than to superman. Not Bond, at all. Bond would have made this novel completely forgettable. It is Bentall’s humanity that makes him believable, even when the action sometimes isn’t.

The story opens – and later closes – with these words:

A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That’s how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room.

For me, that ranks with Call me Ishmael as one of the all time memorable novel openings, but you’ll have to read the book before you understand why. Bentall is sent by his small, dusty boss to track down a stolen missile called the Black Shrike. He is paired with a top female spy who will play his wife. To find the missile, they will become bait to lure the unknown forces who have been kidnapping British rocket fuel scientists. Events ensue, as the reader knows they will, but the surprise is that the “top female spy” turns out to be beautiful, charming, and – dumb? This major irritation for the reader is resolved when . . .

And this is where my telling has to stop to avoid spoilers.

Bentall falls in love with his “wife”, and without this development, the novel would have been nothing special. It is Bentall as a complete human being that elevates The Black Shrike above other novels in the genre.

When I decided to write a contemporary novel for the men’s adventure genre (today it would be shoehorned into the thriller genre), John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee and The Black Shrike provided patterns to follow – McGee for competence and Bentall for heart.

Blackie Ryan began as a priest and worked his way up the ladder to Arch-bishop while solving crime. Unlikely? What does that have to do with whether a series if fun to read?

Every time I sit back and think about Father Andrew Greeley books, I am amazed that I like them. They are so lame in so many ways, but every time I open one up and begin reading, I am immediately hooked. I wish I knew how he does that.

Father Blackie Ryan is aware of Father Brown. In Blackie Ryan’s “real” world, Father Brown is a fictional character. It’s charming to hear an imaginary person, living in an imaginary world, refer to another imaginary person, living in a different imaginary world, as if the former were real and the latter were fictional. 

I have to admit to a fascination with Catholicism. I grew up as a Southern Baptist, where I was taught that the Devil twisted the word of God in the early days after Christ’s resurrection, and spawned the Catholic Church. When I became an unbeliever, that became moot, but I think there is still a subconscious fascination with the forbidden driving my feelings.

Certainly, if I were to go shopping for a religion, I would look for something like Greeley’s All Dogs Go to Heaven version of Catholicism. I would steer clear of Chesterton’s harsher version. In Father Ryan’s world, everything will come out well in the cosmic long run, even if half the characters in any given novel end up dead. In Father Brown’s world, evil comes oozing under the door like black smoke.

It must be nice to know that everything will come out right in the end, no matter how many bad things happen along the way. For the reader, it makes the Blackie Ryan novels the literary equivalent of comfort food. I suspect that accounts for a good deal of their popularity.

Sex probably accounts for another share of their popularity. It seems odd that a series by a priest and about a priest has more sex in it than a secular thriller. I don’t intend to engage in long distance psychoanalysis, but the driving force of priestly frustration can’t be completely discounted. If all you can do about sex is think about it, you might as well write novels.

Probably the most irritating quirk in Greeley’s style is his overuse of foreshadowing. It seems sometimes that everything that is going to happen get’s a preemptive comment. If I had only known . . ., If she had only told me . . ., I should have realized . . .. These are key, repeated phrases in Greeley’s way of telling his stories. They match up with the way Ryan solves crimes through intuition. His subconscious sees the answer, and his conscious mind gets glimpses of it which fade frustratingly away. Eventually, all becomes clear, the elevator door stays open (that is Greeley’s conceit, not mine) and the crime is solved. Just in time. Or just too late, depending on how Greeley chooses to  spin it.

All this makes it sound as if I don’t like Greeley’s writing, but then why am I talking about him? Hmmm. I”ll have to think about that while I’m reading Rites of Spring for the tenth time.

John D. MacDonald, who wrote the Travis McGee books, had a schtick he loved and did very well. McGee would make a meaningful aside, through internal monolog, of some event that advanced the story and put it in context. His musing about the plate spinner in Dress Her In Indigo was one of his best.

Here is a decidedly lesser instance, written for this post by me, not by J. D. McD.:

I knew a man who had a yard full of stray cats. He fed them, petted them, and adored them. At first he named them, but he kept losing them to coyotes, to hawks, or to automobiles. After a while, he could no longer remember his first ones; they had all become interchangeable. He still adored them, but he stopped missing them when they went away.

I gave you this, instead of quoting MacDonald himself, because it encapsulates the problem of women in men’s adventure fiction. If you want to see MacDonald’s writing, go to wikiquote. If reading those selections doesn’t send you scampering to the used book store, nothing will.

Make no mistake, women are a problem in books for men. Their treatment is a balancing act. They have to be there, they have to be sexy, and there has to be sex. It isn’t a genre for eunuchs.

Of course, there are fully sexist writers who have no problem with women. They parade them, penetrate them, then shoot them. I acknowledge that these writers exist, but they don’t exist in my world, and that is all I have to say about them.

At the other end of the continuum are the characters who are married or seem relatively sexless. Most of them are found in puzzle mysteries, where the protagonist’s relationship to those around him is primarily cerebral. Holmes is the prototype. Bony, the half-aborigine outback detective who is one of my current favorites, is married to a woman who is never seen. His relationship to the sexually attractive women he deals with is always avuncular.

For the rest of the genre, there have to be beautiful women and the hero has to have a sexual relationship with them, whether consummated or not. In keeping with the fast paced nature of such writing, there are likely to be more than one woman per book. Possibly several.

If the hero is a series character with say, twenty-one books, and he romances (heavily or lightly) two or three women per book, how can he keep track? And how can book twenty-one show him as anything but shallow and jaded? That’s the problem for the writer – and for the reader as well, if he reads multiple books from the series.

Romantic literature is about finding the one. Men’s adventure books, whether thriller, mystery, or spy novel, are partly about finding the one for right now. That’s a major difference in tone.

John D. MacDonald handled the balancing act quite well with Travis McGee. J. D. McD. was a methodical writer. Before he signed a contract to do the series, he wrote the first two McGee novels to see if he could live with the character. He tried to make sure that he had disposed of each novel’s woman by the last page. He (spoiler alert) killed off McGee’s first, at the end of The Deep Blue Goodbye. It wasn’t always that lethal, although it often was. Others left in other ways. Some got married (not to McGee), some went back to their husbands, or to whatever life they had temporarily escaped from. The one notable woman who stayed over into the following book was killed in the opening chapters, setting up a revenge motive. (see 49. The Green Ripper)

When McGee was with his women, he was protective, but distant, caring but manipulative; he was self-centered and self-serving. A self possessed loner with deep wounds, well hidden, would be the romantic cliche. Women loved him. At least the fictional women in his books did. A glance at Goodreads reviews will show that women readers weren’t always so enamored.

You could fantasize being him, but you wouldn’t want your real-life sister to meet up with him. Travis McGee was a partial model for what I wanted Ian Gunn to be in Raven’s Run, but also a model for what I didn’t want him to be.

There is an obvious connection between the Catholic priest-detective Father Brown and the Catholic priest-detective Father Blackie Ryan. Since Father Brown came first, we will look at him first, and move on to Father Ryan on Wednesday.

Before we consider the real Father Brown, we have to dispose of the imposter who has recently begun a series on PBS. I watched the first two episodes with anticipation, but they were travesties. If they had not stolen the titles from Father Brown stories (without taking anything resembling the content), and if the main actor had not been so physically wrong for the part, and if they had called him Father Green or Father White, then these first two episodes would have been pretty good versions of typical British detective drama. But as Father Brown stories . . .

This bovine actor in no way resembles Father Brown, the clucking hens and stock police detective that follow him around are no substitute for Flambeau, and the plots are unrelated to the originals. As Nero Wolfe would say, “Pfui!”

Let me know if they get better, because I won’t be watching.

Now, let’s turn to the real Father Brown.

G. K. Chesterton’s friend Father John O’Conner, in a discussion of one of Chesterton’s upcoming publications, convinced him that his conclusions were wrong. He did so by quoting to Chesterton facts about criminal behavior that shocked him to the core. Far from being innocent of evil, Father O’Conner was well versed in it from hearing the confessions of criminals. This was the genesis of Father Brown.

Let’s look at an excerpt from The Sins of Prince Saradine. Father Brown and his friend Flambeau are vacationing in a small boat, on a small river in England, when they are awakened by a full moon shining through the foliage on the overhanging river bank:

“By Jove!” said Flambeau, “it’s like being in fairyland.”

Father Brown sat bolt upright in the boat and crossed himself. His movement was so abrupt that his friend asked him, with a mild stare, what was the matter.

“The people who wrote the mediaeval ballads,” answered the priest, “knew more about fairies than you do. It isn’t only nice things that happen in fairyland.”

“Oh, bosh!” said Flambeau. “Only nice things could happen under such an innocent moon. I am for pushing on now and seeing what does really come. We may die and rot before we ever see again such a moon, or such a mood.”

“All right,” said Father Brown. “I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous.”

As you may guess, the experiences which follow would not properly fit into a child’s fairy tale.

Father Brown was not a detective, despite the genre into which he has been placed, and despite the fact that he solves crimes. He is a priest. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less. He sometimes aids the law and sometimes ignores it. His notion of justice refers to a higher power than the courts, and he often finds the criminal as worthy of his attention as the victim. He comes to his understandings by intuition rather than ratiocination. He is more concerned with the soul than the body – even though there are plenty of bodies lying around in a typical Father Brown story.

If you want to know the real Father Brown, you should start with his oldest stories, found in The Innocence of Father Brown, and in the Dover edition Favorite Father Brown Stories. You may hate them; you may love them. Either way, they will be unlike any other detective stories you have encountered.