"The Silent Ones" by William Brodrick

Between 2003 and 2015, British monk turned barrister William Brodrick published six mystery novels in the Father Anselm Duffy series. To call them mysteries is something of a disservice; that’s the genre they fit but they are far more. Brodrick writes really fine novels that happen to have a strong mystery element to them, and to start one is to know that you will not end up where you might expect.

The Silent Ones is the sixth and (so far) final entry in the series. It doesn’t disappoint. Like Canadian author Louise Penny and her Inspector Gamache mysteries, Brodrick’s stories only get better with each succeeding book. 

What Brodrick tackles here is the story that has publicly dominated the Catholic Church for the past 20 years – the abuse of children by the clergy. It’s a difficult story to tell and to read, even if it omits graphic descriptions. The reader doesn’t need to know the details because they are, tragically, so easy to imagine from today’s headlines.

William Brodrick

A homeless man comes to Larkwood, the monastery of the Gilbertine Order where Father Anselm lives and works. Like any visitor seeking shelter, he’s given a bed, and slowly he comes to make himself rather useful as a handyman. Then Father Anselm receives a mysterious and unnamed visitor, who asks him to find a man who’s disappeared after being question about child abuse. The man is Larkwood’s handyman, and he turns out to be a priest from another order.

But nothing in the case is straightforward. The child who made the accusation may have lied. His grandfather and uncle know more about what’s happening than they say. A reporter is tipped off about what’s going on, and he leads the press to Larkwood. The reporter himself has a family that will turn out to have untold secrets. 

Through an unusual set of circumstances, Father Anslem soon finds himself having to defend the accused man in the courtroom. And it’s there that the secrets of so many people come to be pulled into the light of day. 

Brodrick was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written six of the Father Anselm mysteries, with A Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. He lives in France. (And the Gilbertine Order was a real order of monks but was disbanded by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.)

The Silent Ones takes hold of you and doesn’t let go. Gradually one surprise after another, and one secret after another, get teased out. By the end, we’re struck with wonder at what has turned into an exceptional story of the brokenness and frailty of the human condition.

Related:

My review of The Day of the Lie by William Brodrick.

My review of Brodrick’s The 6^th Lamentation.

My review of The Gardens of the Dead by William Brodrick.

My review of A Whispered Name by William Brodrick.

My review of The Discourtesy of Death by William Brodrick.

"The Discourtesy of Death" by William Brodrick

William Brodrick, author of the Father Anselm mysteries, doesn’t shy away from tough questions. In The Day of the Lie, he tackled the multiple shades of gray in old communist regimes, and how secret police and prisoners might not be so different after all. In The Whispered Name, the subject was cowardice in wartime. 

In The Discourtesy of Death, Brodrick considers mercy killing. Or is it assisted suicide? Or is it murder?

The prior of Larkwood Monastery, where Father Anselm lives and works, has decided that Father Anselm’s gift of detection needs to be shared, a “light in the darkness,” so to speak. Without his cooperation, Father Anselm has just been featured in a splashy Sunday newspaper story – about how a monk solves crimes. It results in the monastery receiving all kinds of communications seeking Father Anselm’s help. 

Then an anonymous letter arrives. It suggests that a woman who had been paralyzed had not died of cancer but was actually murdered. And that’s the case Father Anselm is told to pursue. The woman’s husband, a well-known television personality, is the likely suspect. He’s due to be discharged from prison after throwing a brick through a store window that injured a boy. The couple’s young teenaged son has been living with his grandparents; the grandfather is a former British Army commando who was stationed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. And there’s the attending doctor, who signed the woman’s death certificate and would have known if it had been murder.

In short, there’s no lack of suspects. Father Anselm enlists the help of a former client from his law practice days whom he successfully defended twice for fraud, even though the man was likely guilty. Through all of the investigation, Anselm hopes the man will show remorse and make restitution. 

William Brodrick

But in a Father Anselm mystery, things are never what they appear to be. And Father Anselm knows far more than he lets on, even to his prior.

Brodrick was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written six of the Father Anselm mysteries, with A Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. A seventh, The Silent Ones, is being published this month. He lives in France. (And the Gilbertine Order was a real order of monks but was disbanded by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.)

The Discourtesy of Death is a compelling mystery that forces the characters (and the reader) to seriously examine beliefs and notions of life, compassion, and mercy. No one, including the reader, is going to be let off easy.

Related:

My review of The Day of the Lie by William Brodrick.

My review of Brodrick’s The 6^th Lamentation.

My review of The Gardens of the Dead by William Brodrick.

My review of A Whispered Name by William Brodrick.

Top photograph by Andrei Lazarev via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"A Whispered Name" by William Brodrick

You start to read a mystery, one in a series that you’ve been enjoying. You like the detective, you like the way the author writes, you like the interesting stories that are told. And as you begin reading the next book in the series, you discover you’re reading something else entirely. You keep looking for the mystery, the whodunit, and it doesn’t seem to be there. 

You realize as you read on – because you’re compelled to read on – that this is no mystery novel. Yes, it has the familiar detective – Father Anselm of Larkwood monastery in England. Yes, it has an air of mystery about it, because there is a mystery to be solved, or to describe it better, a 90-year-old enigma to be deciphered. And if it can be deciphered, it must also be understood.

A Whispered Name by British-Canadian author William Brodrick is a stunning, serious, literary novel, one of the best I’ve read in years. I should have been prepared for it by the second Father Anselm mystery, The Gardens of the Dead, because that novel, too, broke the boundaries of the genre. But not to the extent of A Whispered Name, originally published in 2008.

Father Anselm, a former barrister, is tending his beehives at Larkwood. He’s approached by a woman and an old man, who ask him if he knew Father Herbert Moore, a member of Anselm’s Gilbertine Order and a founder of the monastery where Anselm lives and works. He did, but, as it turns out, not well, or not well enough. She tells him that if he didn’t know that Moore was an officer in World War I, then he wouldn’t know that Moore participated in a court martial of a young soldier named Joseph Flanigan. And she leaves.

Anselm, at the direction of his prior, begins to investigate. No one in the monastery apparently knew about Father Moore’s military service. Anselm must look farther afield, to old military records stored at Kew Gardens, diaries, and descendants of other officers. Each tidbit of information he’s able to glean comes with its own enigma.

The reader has a slight advantage over Father Anselm. Not only do we get the story of Anselm’s investigation, we also get the story of Herbert Moore as it unfolded at the time. The two lines of narrative move back and forth, until they finally converge. And what looks to be a fairly straightforward court martial during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 turns out to be anything but. And what happened in 1917 still has its clutches around the present.

William Brodrick

Brodrick was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written eight of the Father Anselm mysteries, with A Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. He lives in France. (And the Gilbertine Order was a real order of monks but was disbanded by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.)

In the last 50 to 75 pages, there were few times I wasn’t moved to tears. I knew what had happened, and I knew why, in all of its convolutions. And when I finished, I knew I had read a story of substitution and redemption. 

A Whispered Name is a marvelous novel, a novel of war and family, national passions, bravery and cowardice and how the two may often be confused. And it's a novel about human decency surviving in the face of some of the worst conditions imaginable.

Related:

My review of Brodrick’s The 6^th Lamentation.

My review of The Gardens of the Deadby William Brodrick.

"The Gardens of the Dead" by William Brodrick

A notable high court judge walks to a flea market-type location near Regent’s Canal in London. She has a purpose in mind – the visit the table of one Graham Riley. Minutes afterward, with a purchase of old spoons, she is sitting in her car, frantically making a phone call. And then she dies.

The dead woman is Elizabeth Glendinning, a former partner in law chambers with Father Anselm. Anselm is now a monk in the Gilbertine Order, who follow a rule similar to that of St. Benedict. When he learns of Elizabeth’s death, he knows he’s been left a key to a security box, a key given to him by his former law partner and to be used only if she dies.

Anselm is still haunted by the last case they worked on together, and his last case before joining the order. He and Elizabeth were defending a man charged with procurement of teenaged girls for prostitution. A single question by Anselm asked of the prosecution’s chief witness caused the witness to leave the courtroom, the case to collapse, and the defendant to be freed. The defendant was Graham Riley.

Elizabeth’s son, Nicholas, a doctor in Australia, flies home for his mother’s funeral. He finds the security box key as well and gets to the box before Anselm. What’s inside is the transcript of the Graham Riley trial. But why would his mother be concerned with a trial that happened 10 years earlier?

The Gardens of the Dead, first published in 2006, is the second Father Anselm mystery by British-Canadian author William Brodrick. It’s not so much a “whodunit” as it is a “what is going on here” and “nothing is what it appears to be” story. In that sense, it is similar to the first Father Anselm mystery, The 6^th Lamentation, in which what appears to be a story about collaboration with the Nazis and war crimes turns out to be something quite different.

William Brodrick

This second mystery involves the full unraveling of the story of Elizabeth, Graham Riley, and George Bradshaw, the witness who walked out of court. And that unraveling will change everyone involved, including Anselm and Nicholas. The story moves from Anselm’s investigation, Nicholas’s research on his own, and Bradshaw, who has spent the last five years homeless but is the pivot in whatever it was that Elizabeth was up to.

In his own life Brodrick reverses the story of Father Anselm. He was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written eight of the Father Anselm mysteries, with The Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. He lives in France. (And the Gilbertine Order was a real order of monks, but was disbanded by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.)

The Gardens of the Dead is a complex mystery, one that requires close reading. But when the answers finally come, the reader feels just as changed as the characters.

Related:

My review of Brodrick’s The 6^th Lamentation.

Top photograph: Part of Lincoln’s Inn, where Elizabeth and Anselm were members of law chambers in The Gardens of the Dead. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

“The 6th Lamentation” by William Brodrick

I’m always on the lookout for new mystery series, and a few weeks ago I came across a fictional detective named Father Anselm, a brother at the Larkwood Catholic monastery in England. He’s a former barrister, familiar with the workings of criminal law, judges, and the Old Bailey (or Royal Courts of Justice).

In The 6^th Lamentation by William Brodrick (first published in 2003 in Britain and 2004 in the United States), Father Anselm unexpectedly finds himself doing detective work, and all because of a man arriving at Larkwood and asking for sanctuary.

The year is 1995. The first issue that has to be tackled is that the man seems to have nothing wrong. Second, sanctuary is no longer a church practice. Third, the brothers gradually learn that the man is suspected of being a Nazi war criminal, who as a young Gestapo officer helped deport thousands of Jews from Paris to the death camps in the east.

Father Anselm is drawn into the case of the man, and is sent to the Vatican in Rome when the monastery seeks guidance. Officials there are more than mildly interested; it turns out that a sister monastery in France may have helped the Gestapo officer and a fellow French police collaborator escape to England.

The 6^th Lamentation would have been a fascinating story with this as the narrative arc, but Brodrick layers in a second story, that of Agnes Aubret, who was almost 21 at the time of the fall of France to the Germans. Her father was Jewish; she is given “total Christian” identity papers to help her survive occupation and help a clandestine group smuggle Jewish children out of the country. But she was caught and sent to Auschwitz, and the German and the collaborating Frenchman were involved. Agnes survived, married an Englishman, and eventually settled in London. She believes her own child, born out of wedlock, did not survive the war.

William Brodrick

In his own life Brodrick reverses the story of Father Anselm. He was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written eight of the Father Anselm mysteries, with The Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. Born in the UK but having spent a portion of his life in Canada, he holds both British and Canadian citizenship. He, his wife, and three children live in France.

Nothing is as it seems to be in The 6^th Lamentation. Heroes and villains change roles, and more than once. It is a story of how the past is never really the past but continues to affect and change the present. It’s an outstanding story.

Top photograph: The German Army matching on the Champs Elysses after the surrender of France in 1940; via Bundesarchiv and Wikipedia.