A Gentle Murderer

January 1, 2023
A priest and a police detective, working unaware of each other, seek the killer of a Manhattan call girl. Father Duffy, assistant pastor of St. Timothy's, begins by meeting the murderer in his confessional. Telling the priest, "I think I've killed someone....I'm confessing everything that made me do this," the shadowy figure rambles on about his early life until Father Duffy gives him conditional absolution and he vanishes into the night. The next morning Dolly Gebhardt's maid finds her in bed beaten to death with a hammer. DS Ben Goldsmith, who's assigned to the case, follows the evidence along procedural lines, interviewing Dolly's clients and friends even as Father Duffy, armed with the few facts the murderer shared with him, takes a week off and searches for traces of him in Pennsylvania, Chicago, and Cleveland before the clues take him back to New York just as Goldsmith's investigation is closing in on the murderer. Although both the officer and the priest are working with incomplete information, Davis, writing in 1951, makes it clear early on who the killer is; the mystery lies, as the man had indicated in his confession, in just how the events of his life drove him to an act of violence that shocks him as much as anyone else. The pace is deliberate and most of the characters lightly sketched in. But the portrait of the murderer that gradually emerges from the testimony of the many people whose lives crossed his without ever taking any special note of him is at once so unsparing and so compassionate that readers are as likely to end up sympathizing with him as with his victim. A simmering tour de force of detection from both ends of the trail.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 30, 2023
First published in 1951, this solid if somewhat dated mystery from MWA Grand Master Davis (1916–2014) opens on a sweltering August evening in New York City. Father Duffy, assistant pastor of St. Timothy’s, one of Manhattan’s largest Catholic parishes, is winding up his stint in the confessional when a final parishioner comes in, a hammer in his hand. “I think I killed someone,” he tells the priest, and goes on to reveal clues to his identity and that of his victim. Duffy believes he has persuaded the young man to go to the police. When, the next day, the body of a young woman is discovered and no one comes forward to confess to the murder, Duffy decides to find the killer himself. His investigations run parallel to those of NYPD Det. Sgt. Ben Goldsmith, and eventually the two converge. A third strand of the story follows the murderer. The pace can be slow in places, and as a study in psychology it’s rather simplistic by today’s standards. Crime fiction scholars will best appreciate this entry in the Library of Congress Crime Classics series.

March 1, 2023
The latest addition to the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, originally published in 1951 and authored by Dorothy Salisbury Davis, a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, has a stunner of an opening. Father Duffy, a priest in a Manhattan parish, is hearing confessions one Saturday afternoon. The last person to enter the confessional is an agitated young man who confesses that he's just committed a murder. He leaves behind a hammer, and the next day a young woman is found nearby with her face bashed in from a blow by a blunt instrument. The crux of this mystery is that the priest cannot break the seal of the confessional but must find the young man before he kills again. Davis expertly traces two separate investigations into the murder, that of the police and that of the priest. While the investigations rely almost entirely on the unbelievably total recall of landladies and housekeepers, Davis' portrayal of Father Duffy's internal struggles over solving the murder and the glimpses we get of the murderer himself are both fascinating.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.