Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on Something ‘Savage, Uncanny and Frightening’ in the South)

“[I]t was in a small Southern city… that I once saw the surface crack for a minute and something savage, uncanny and frightening rear its head. Then the surface closed again—and when I have gone back there since, I’ve been surprised to find myself as charmed as ever by the magnolia trees and the singing darkies in the street and the sensuous warm nights. I have been charmed, too, by the bountiful hospitality and the languorous easy-going outdoor life and the almost universal good manners. But all too frequently I am the prey of a vivid nightmare that recalls what I experienced in that town five years ago.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Dance,” The Red Book Magazine (June 1926), reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (March 1953)

A century ago this month, The Red Book Magazine published something unusual for F. Scott Fitzgerald: a murder mystery. He was not completely averse to genre fiction (his short stories “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and "A Short Trip Home" have Gothic/horror elements), but his foray into detective stories was another matter entirely.

How much of  it was a lark while he did the rounds of night spots in France, where he had moved so he and his family could live more cheaply? (His output for the year consisted of the short story "Your Way and Mine" and the essay "How To Waste Material.") And how much of it was part of a fascination with murder that was leading him on a dead end in his initial stages of creating the long-gestating Tender Is the Night? 

To be sure, neither Agatha Christie, with her cunning plots, nor Dashiell Hammett, with his terse dialogue and morally compromised characters, had much to fear by this interloper in their territory.

But Fitzgerald being Fitzgerald, he had to bring something of himself to this exercise. There’s his fascination with the South, where he had met his wife Zelda; his almost effortlessly lyrical writing style; and his “flaming youth” characters, this time transplanted to a Charleston small-town ball.

And with a single phrase that sounds distinctly politically incorrect in our time—“singing darkies in the street”—he introduces a concern he had slipped into his novel from the year before, The Great Gatsby: race. 

Recall that from that Jazz Age masterpiece, his hideously brutal and idiotic recipient of inherited wealth, Tom Buchanan, launches into an incoherent rant about “Nordic” superiority—a precursor of the “great replacement theory” advocated most prominently today by Tucker Carlson.

In “The Dance,” suspicion of the murder that unexpectedly breaks out in this “small Southern city” falls on one of the “singing darkies” evoked by the story’s female narrator—and the threat of lynching hangs very much in the air.

“The Dance” was not included among the 43 tales collected in 1989 by literary scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli for The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But as far as I’m concerned, just about everything Fitzgerald wrote had some mark of charm or style—and this curious work of short fiction is no different.

Quote of the Day (Martin Cruz Smith, on a World of ‘Money, Propaganda, and Terror’)

“It came back, Arkady knew, to three things: money, propaganda, and terror. They weren’t discrete entities but a triskelion, forever whirling around each other. This was the mindset of spies, the men whose formative years had been spent in the margins of the shadow world. The more rules you break, the more success you have. The game never pauses and never stops. There are no periods of war and peace, just active hostility and retrenchments. There are no threats other than those which can be talked up, or in many cases made up, the better to justify eliminating them. There are no social problems that would be solved if solving them would reduce people’s dependence on the state. There are no grand plans, no master strategies, just the lust for power, the insane addictive desire to accumulate more and more because too much is never enough.”— American mystery and suspense novelist Martin Cruz Smith (1942-2025), Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine (2023)

What Donald Trump has presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shouldn’t be dignified with the phrase “peace plan.” Even “surrender plan” has the diplomatic scent of perfume about it. Believe it or not, I don’t even think “appeasement” does it.

No, in its demands that Ukraine yield significant portions of its territory to Russia and cap the size of its security forces, along with an implied threat to curtail U.S. weapons deliveries if Zelenskyy doesn’t capitulate by Thanksgiving, the right word is "ultimatum"—something that Russian President Vladimir Putin (pictured) might make.

While reading this penultimate of 11 Arkady Renko mysteries by the late superb Martin Cruz Smith, I came across a succinct passage on Ukrainian history that I wish Trump could have read.

But what would have been the use? The President’s attention span is such that he’s lucky to digest a few bullets on a Powerpoint slide, let alone interconnected sentences.

Then I came across the quote above. Forget about Trump—I wish large portions of MAGA could read and ponder this. It explains so much about Putin, and, by the end, Trump himself (“There are no threats other than those which can be talked up, or in many cases made up”).

If the American President is not authoritarian, like the Russian leader, then he’s at least authoritarian-curious, and even more likely authoritarian-adjacent.

Quote of the Day (Laura Miller, on Mystery Stories)

“In a detective story, the mystery both propels the plot and gives the sleuth license to venture into places and milieus where she doesn't typically belong. Who done it, then, is the secret that strips all other secrets of their sanctity. In the better mysteries, the solution also turns the world of the story inside out, revealing how things actually work behind the façade. And, in the best mysteries, the detective herself is cracked open and remade, sometimes even destroyed, by the truth. This points to another shortcoming of series detectives: their fans find their familiar methods and quirks comforting and would be disappointed if each book didn’t serve up more of the same.”— American journalist and critic Laura Miller, “Walk the Line” (review of Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies), The New Yorker, Apr. 24-May 1, 2023

Quote of the Day (Anna Stolley Persky, on an Alarming Note Received in April, 40 Years Ago)

“Esther opened the first note on a Tuesday, on a breezy April afternoon in Northern Virginia. The note—off-white paper, folded twice, addressed in capital letters to ‘The Jews on Elm Street’—had been slipped into the mailbox underneath several bills and a Sears, Roebuck catalog….Sliding the rest of the mail under one arm, Esther opened the note. Inside the note was one thing, just a symbol, and yet not just a symbol, not to Esther and certainly not to her grandmother, who had barely escaped the war. Inside the note was a swastika, intended just for them, the only Jews on Elm Street.”—American lawyer, journalist, and essayist Anna Stolley Persky, “The Jews on Elm Street,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September-October 2024

With all the things requiring my focus these days, I don’t have the time to take in all the detection fiction I want to read. But this short story by Anna Stolley Persky called insistently for my attention from its first few paragraphs.

It’s not just a crime story, but a coming-of-age tale involving 14-year-old Esther, forced to confront mounting, insidious terror few would believe possible in the Northern Virginia suburb Cherry Tree. And—especially relevant now—it’s about the persistence of antisemitism, decades after the US defeated its most dangerous exponent in World War II, and about the ordinary people—even those, like Esther’s beloved grandmother Orly, waning in physical strength—called upon to defend against it again.

The threatening notes in the initial paragraphs of this short story escalate until Orly pieces together the clues to determine who was responsible for sending them. Though it is set in the mid-1980s (there are references to Columbo reruns and to Murder, She Wrote, “a newer show Orly had started watching”), it is all too applicable to America in 2025:

“Here, Orly thought, was a life lesson for Esther. The authorities were not necessarily there to protect THEM. Here was the lesson she never wanted, but always needed her granddaughter to understand. Maybe things changed a little. Certainly, this country was better than others, but eventually it all circled back to the same idea: They would always be struggling against the same prejudices, over and over, generation after generation.”

I greatly enjoyed this, Ms. Persky’s first published fiction—and evidently, I’m far from the only one. It has been named a finalist for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for Best First Mystery Story, to be given in early May. I look forward to more work by this fellow Columbo devotee who, like me, believes, as she noted in this guest post for the “Something Is Going to Happen!” blog, in the importance of “character-driven” detective novels.

Quote of the Day (Peter Robinson, on ‘Summer Rain’)

“The rain was still falling, obscuring the higher green dale sides and their latticework of drystone walls. Lyndgarth, a cluster of limestone cottages and a church huddled around a small village green, looked like an Impressionist painting. The rain-darkened ruins of Devraulx Abbey, just up the hill to his left, poked through the trees like a setting for Camelot.

“[Detective Inspector Alan] Banks rolled down his window and listened to the rain slapping against leaves and dancing on the river’s surface. To the west, he could see the drumlin that Jerry Singer had felt so strongly about.

“Today, it looked ghostly in the rain, and it was easy to imagine the place as some ancient barrow where the spirits of Bronze Age men lingered. But it wasn’t a barrow; it was a drumlin created by glacial deposits. And Jerry Singer hadn’t been a Bronze Age man in his previous lifetime; he had been a sixties hippie, or so he believed.”—British-Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson (1950-2022), “Summer Rain,” in Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories (2004)

Looks like in my part of the Northeast, we’re in for another day or so of “summer rain.” The sky has been darkening and rumbling over the last couple of hours. I will be glad that when it’s all over, the landscape won’t resemble what Inspector Banks encounters…

Quote of the Day (Raymond Chandler, on a Femme Fatale)

“Smart, smooth and no good. She had a way with men. She could make them crawl over her shoes.” —American mystery novelist Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), The Lady in the Lake (1944)

The character described in Chandler’s mystery, Mildred Haveland, was played by Jayne Meadows (pictured here) in Robert Montgomery’s film adaptation. Yes, seeing her with a gun pointed at you, I guess you could say she was “no good.”

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on Parents and Children Out of Sync)

“People are trying so hard to live through their children. And the children keep trying so hard to live up to their parents, or live them down. Everybody's living through or for or against somebody else. It doesn't make too much sense, and it isn't working too well.” — American-Canadian crime fiction writer Ross Macdonald (1916-1983), The Far Side of the Dollar (1965)

Beginning in the late 1950s, watching in horror with writer wife Margaret Millar the psychological difficulties experienced by their only child, Macdonald returned obsessively to the theme of generational conflict in his novels featuring Lew Archer.

Starting off as more or less a cynical private eye in the mold of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Archer grew increasingly introspective and sensitive as he solved cases involving the mutual wounds inflicted on the older and younger generations.

Macdonald’s work can be regarded as a time capsule for the “generation gap” that became a catchphrase of the Sixties. 

But in certain ways, the dilemma he described in the above quote remains, just shifting—and perhaps increasing—because of its move to the digital realm, where traumas are more transparent and exploitable than they were in the early postwar period.

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on the Physical and Moral Environment of Southern California)

“There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.” ― American mystery novelist Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Drowning Pool (1950)

I can think of at least two American detective movies of the 1970s whose producers made a fatal mistake: taking their protagonist out of the setting that, in their original source, functioned almost as a character in its own right. One of these films was the 1978 remake of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, which transplanted hero Philip Marlowe from the “mean streets” of Los Angeles and Hollywood all the way to London.

Something not quite as dramatic, but ultimately just as fatal, occurred with The Drowning Pool, when Hollywood made a second film featuring Ross Macdonald’s answer to Chandler’s hard-boiled but decent private eye, Lew Archer (renamed for the big screen Lew Harper). Paul Newman (pictured) played the character again, as he had done in Harper in 1965.

But, for some reason I don’t know and can’t imagine, the film’s creative team decided to set the movie in Louisiana rather than in Southern California, where Archer/Harper functioned as a probing conscience. It was a terrible choice. This film was nowhere near as good as its predecessor, and—perhaps thankfully—Newman never played the role again.

Quote of the Day (Arthur Conan Doyle, on His Exceedingly Eccentric, ‘Untidy’ Genius Detective)

“An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.”—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), “The Musgrave Ritual,” in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)

(The actor in the image accompanying this post is Basil Rathbone, who set the template for subsequent cinematic depictions of Sherlock Holmes.)

Quote of the Day (John Dickson Carr, on Clues and ‘The Fine Detective Story’)

“The fine detective story…does not consist of ‘a’ clue. It is a ladder of clues, a pattern of evidence, joined together with such cunning that even the experienced reader may be deceived: until, in the blaze of the surprise ending, he suddenly sees the whole design.”—American mystery writer John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), “The Grandest Game in the World,” originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1963, reprinted in The Door to Doom and Other Detections, edited by Douglas G. Greene (1991)

Quote of the Day (Raymond Chandler, on a Bad Seed of the Filthy Rich)

“The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick…. Carmen [Sternwood] stood in front of me, like a bad girl in the principal's office.”— Mystery novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), The Big Sleep (1939)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1946 film adaptation of The Big Sleep, with Martha Vickers as “bad girl” Carmen Sternwood and, of course, Humphrey Bogart as private detective Philip Marlowe.

Quote of the Day (Raymond Chandler, on His Deliberate Use of Slang)

“I had to learn American just like a foreign language. To use it I had to study it and analyze it. I’m an intellectual snob who happens to have a fondness for the American vernacular largely because I grew up on Latin and Greek. As a result, when I use slang, solecisms, colloquialisms, snide talk or any kind of off-beat language, I do it deliberately. The literary use of slang is a study in itself. I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.” — Mystery novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), letter to Alex Burris, Mar. 18, 1949, in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane (1981)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on an Early Victorian Detective)

“Inspector Field is the bustling speaker. Inspector Field's eye is the roving eye that searches every corner of the cellar as he talks. Inspector Field's hand is the well-known hand that has collared half the people here, and motioned their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, male and female friends, inexorably to New South Wales. Yet Inspector Field stands in this den, the Sultan of the place. Every thief here cowers before him, like a schoolboy before his schoolmaster. All watch him, all answer when addressed, all laugh at his jokes, all seek to propitiate him. This cellar company alone—to say nothing of the crowd surrounding the entrance from the street above, and making the steps shine with eyes—is strong enough to murder us all, and willing enough to do it; but, let Inspector Field have a mind to pick out one thief here, and take him; let him produce that ghostly truncheon from his pocket, and say, with his business-air, 'My lad, I want you!' and all Rats' Castle shall be stricken with paralysis, and not a finger move against him, as he fits the handcuffs on!”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), “On Duty With Inspector Field,” in Household Words, June 14, 1851, reprinted in The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories, edited by Michael Sims (2012)

While editing the weekly magazine Household Words in the early 1850s, Charles Dickens sometimes published his own work—roughly 100 stories and articles in the first three years of its existence. Although much of this output reflected his longtime concerns—notably, housing, education, factory life—another aspect of urban poverty began to grip him: crime.

In particular, he became fascinated with London’s Metropolitan Police, established by Robert Peel in 1829. Thirteen years later, Charles Frederick Field became one of the first members of its Detective Department.

Chief Inspector Field would have appealed to Dickens for his plain-spoken manner, his rich fund of stories drawn from his work, and, through his disguises in pursuit of wrongdoers, his flair for the dramatic.

But, as the quote above indicates, Dickens also valued Field and his colleagues as stalwart bulwarks against the disorder that the novelist saw as increasingly threatening London. That sense had been further validated earlier in 1851 when Field apprehended Charles Gill, a would-be assassin of British Prime Minister Lord John Russell.

Upon retiring from the Detective Department at age 47 in 1852, Field set up shop as a private investigator, a trade he continued to ply for the next dozen years.

But even before he left the London police force, Field had left such an indelible impression that Dickens used him as the model for “Inspector Bucket” in the 1853 novel Bleak House—which, as noted in Claire Tomalin’s 2011 biography of the writer, is “a mystery story, a whodunnit, as well as an account of English society.”

The conventions of the mystery story—and especially of the police procedural—are so well established by now that it’s hard to imagine what it was like at its beginnings. But Dickens in effect set the prototype for Inspector Morse, Christopher Foyle, DCI Banks, Jane Tennison, and other British TV detectives with this metropolitan investigator as implacably determined to ferret out the truth as he was compassionate towards the victims of crime.

(Inspector Bucket also figures in the BBC mashup series Dickensian. I find it delicious that the Irish actor Stephen Rea—shown here in the role—played this pillar of Victorian England.)

This Day in Literary History (P.D. James, Who Went From Trauma Survivor to Bestselling ‘Queen of Crime,’ Born)

Aug. 3, 1920—P.D. James, who was thrust into the workforce as a result of trauma, then became known as “The Queen of Crime” through mysteries that dealt with the violent aftermath of such crises, was born in Oxford, England.

Many fans of Phyllis Dorothy James (as she was christened) would be astounded to know that this creator of graceful prose—not to mention of a hero-detective who writes poetry, Adam Dalgleish—was entirely self-taught. Despite her birth in Oxford and residence in Cambridge later in childhood, she never graduated from a university, as her impecunious father saw little value in girls going on for higher education.

The most powerful impetus for her career, in fact, was not education, but her need to provide for her family because of the mental illness afflicting those closest to her.

When a full-scale biography finally tells the story of “Baroness James of Holland Park” (her title when she was created a life peer in 1991), her longtime readers will surely want to know how she shouldered and survived two traumas in relatively quick succession—first, her mother’s placement in a mental hospital in Phyllis’ mid-teens (forcing her to care for two younger sisters), and, in her late twenties, her husband’s mental illness (requiring that she become the sole breadwinner for her two young daughters).

In the case of the latter incident, she married medical student Ernest Connor Bantry White in 1941. While serving as a doctor in WWII, White suffered a mental breakdown, but his condition was not deemed war-related, so he received no disability pension. Now needing to provide for him and their daughters, James began to work for the U.K.’s Hospital Service in 1949.

 

Fifteen years later, White died. Over the years, James was reticent about his death. But, in a 2010 interview with Nigel Farndale of the U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph, she admitted that his demise in 1964 was related to his mental illness and that she had discovered his body.

By this time, James was already six years into writing detective fiction, but—much like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens before her—she pursued writing after her day job had ended. In 1968, she began serving in the Home Office—first in the Police Department, then as a senior civil servant in the Criminal Policy Department, focusing on juvenile crime.

James’ combined three decades in the workforce not only inspired particular elements of her plot (e.g., watching a patient being fed through a tube led her to use this as a murder method in Shroud for a Nightingale) but enabled her to gain knowledge of organizational environments, especially how individuals reacted in these settings.

Consequently, James remembered later, settings became the starting point of her imaginative process. They were varied, and sometimes quite unusual: a private nursing home, a nuclear power station, a Church of England theological college, even an island fortress where a Jacobean tragedy would be performed.

Growing critical acclaim and book sales—as well as revenues from TV adaptations of her works—enabled James to leave the civil service in 1979 and concentrate on writing full-time. In the remaining years before her death in 2014, James became more prolific and more ambitious, moving away from detective tales into more general psychological suspense (Innocent Blood) and even dystopian fiction (Children of Men). 

Although Scotland Yard policeman Commander Adam Dalgliesh represented her most consistent and frequent source of remuneration (14 books over 44 years), I suspect that James may have invested most of herself psychologically in a different detective: Cordelia Gray. 

In An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), Gray, like her creator, finds herself thrust by a tragedy involving a male partner into a position far outside her comfort zone: in this case, as sole owner of a private detective agency. Moreover, like James, Gray triumphs over doubting males through hard work, piercing intelligence, and undaunted courage.

The concern with individual psychology that is the wellspring of James’ fiction inevitably widens to wider consideration of how the social fabric is torn by those who suffer early on. In her late-life Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, James concluded: 

“What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give….Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.”

A crime, James told NPR’s Linda Wertheimer in a 2009 interview, is solved “not by good luck or divine intervention. It's solved by a human being. By human courage and human intelligence and human perseverance. In a sense, the detective story is a small celebration of reason and order in our very disorderly world."

In the interwar “Golden Age” of detective fiction, four female predecessors had combined to "[lift] a rather despised genre into a form which could be taken seriously," James once explained: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers. The latter two especially influenced her by setting her standards for style and characterization.

Perhaps even more than Allingham and Sayers, though, James demonstrated that she was not just a superb genre writer but a superb writer, period—one unafraid to pick up her life after crushing tragedy, and to depict how society, in the form of detectives, reassert the social order sundered by personal traumas.

(Thanks to my friend Holly for alerting me to James' quote about children.)

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on the Cost of Money)

“ ‘What did the old man want?’

‘Your husband’s money, just like everyone else.’

‘But not you, eh?’ Her voice was sardonic.

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘Money costs too much.’”―American mystery novelist Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Goodbye Look (1963)

Flashback, June 1954: ‘Father Brown’ Role Triggers Guinness Conversion

Featuring a sterling British cast and one of the most unusual sleuths in the history of detective fiction, Father Brown premiered this month in the U.K.

For many mystery fans, it was a chance to see, on something other than the printed page, the adventures of the owlish, unassuming Roman Catholic prelate created by G.K. Chesterton. For the movie’s star, Alec Guinness, the role represented far more: the catalyst for his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

In childhood, the Father Brown stories became my avenue into the marvelously versatile Chesterton, who tried his literary talents not only in detective fiction but also the novel, poetry, essays, biographies, and Christian apologetic literature. Though not a Catholic when he invented his clerical sleuth, the author became one halfway through producing these 53 stories, in 1922. Something of the same conversion process took place with Guinness.

Seeing the 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets a couple of weeks ago reminded me of Guinness’ amazing versatility and ability to disappear completely into a role. (In this case, eight: the number of eight heirs—including one woman—to an aristocrat’s fortune, all of whom fell victim to a poor relation.) 

The Bridge on the River Kwai won Guinness his Oscar and Star Wars brought him last financial security. But Father Brown (retitled The Detective for its American release) brought the actor something else entirely: a different path in his spiritual life.

Like another inveterate actor-diarist, Richard Burton, Guinness was tormented by self-loathing. The Welshman considered acting a misuse of his talents, but Guinness struggled with a variety of issues.

The full extent of Guinness’ malaise did not become generally known to the public until after his death in 2000: catty comments confided to his diary over fellow actors; shame over his illegitimacy; anger toward his alcoholic, thieving mother; a difficult relationship with his wife and son; and questions about his sexual orientation.

In the case of the latter, nobody has ever come forward to claim a homosexual relationship. But several aspects of his life suggest inclinations that others detected or that he himself wrote about, including:

*his father-in-law’s joking nickname for him, that of a gay male ballet dancer;

*diary references to other males making passes at him, or to attractive young men;

*visits to Turkish baths;

*stopping sleeping with his wife after age 40;

*visible discomfort with romantic scenes he had to play.

If Guinness was gay, he did not have to look far to see what it might cost him. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean’s involvement in the Cambridge spy ring of the early 1950s fed suspicions that homosexuals in the intelligence service and armed forces represented inherent security threats. Just the day before the premiere of Father Brown, Alan Turing—the mathematician who cracked the Nazis “Enigma” code during WWII—allegedly committed suicide after accepting chemical castration in lieu of prison for violating laws against “gross indecency.” Guinness’ contemporary among London’s elite actors, John Gielgud, had been arrested just the year before in a public restroom in Chelsea for “'persistently importuning men for immoral purposes.” 

In a 2003 interview with the UK paper The Daily Telegraph, Guinness’ friend and biographer, novelist Piers Paul Read, explained that by the early 1950s, the actor "was suffering from tremendous bouts of depression, because of his homosexuality and the contradiction between that and his love of [his wife] Merula and his family, and looking for a faith that would give him something to hold it all together.”

Guinness had returned to the Anglican faith of his childhood during World War II, but now he began edging closer toward Catholicism. When his son had been stricken with polio at age 11, Guinness began stopping in a nearby Catholic church to pray for his recovery (which did, in fact, come to pass). 

Then, another incident, during the filming of Father Brown, drew him even closer to the Church. A young boy, finding him still in costume for his role, took his hand and accompanied the “priest” off the set. 

The youngster made a profound impression on the actor. "Continuing my walk," he later noted, "I reflected that a Church that could inspire such confidence in a child, making priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable, could not be as scheming or as creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudices."

Guinness formally entered the Church two years later. Becoming a Catholic did not make his securities or anxieties disappear. But like another English convert, Evelyn Waugh, he saw the Church as a bulwark against moral relativism and looked askance at a number of post-Vatican II changes. 

On the 40^th anniversary of his entrance into the Church, Guinness wrote in his diary: “I rejoice in that and wish it had come decades earlier.”

A year or two ago, while channel-surfing, I came across the current BBC version of Father Brown. Despite its notching seven seasons on the air, I could not mount the kind of enthusiasm for it that I did for the Guinness film. The plot was pedestrian and the directors could not match the smooth handling demonstrated by Hamer, who was working yet again with Guinness and co-star Greenwood (and, playing the thief that the priest rescues from crime and sin, Peter Finch).