reactormag.com
An Infallible Ranking of Crime-Solving Clergy
Lists
Mysteries
An Infallible Ranking of Crime-Solving Clergy
There’s a surprising amount of crossover between sleuthing and pastoral care.
By Leah Schnelbach
|
Published on December 11, 2025
Credit: Netflix
Comment
0
Share New
Share
Credit: Netflix
I am a simple person: Rian Johnson releases a new Benoit Blanc mystery, and I see it as often as possible during its theatrical window, and then stream it on Netflix. Wake Up Dead Man is one of my favorite films of the year, and its main character—Father Jud Duplenticy—has inspired me to round up some of the best holy sleuths I could find.
As always this is subjective. Be assured that Father Jud is #1 in my heart if not on this list.
#15. Father Michael William Logan — I Confess!
This is a Hitchcock movie in which Montgomery Clift plays a young hot priest in Quebec City who is framed for murder by his church’s groundskeeper. I’m including it here because Father Michael William Logan becomes very glancingly involved in the investigation of the murder before he himself is too much of a suspect. I expected a taut thriller, but this movie is a bit bumpy—the plot is extremely convoluted, there are multiple subplots about the priest’s former girlfriend and blackmail, so there are only a few sections that really dig into what to me is the most interesting part: since the groundkeeper confessed his murder, the priest is bound by the seal of the confession and can’t clear his own name.
There is one sequence that I think really takes the film to the level it needed, where Clift wanders through Quebec City framed by religious iconography. He starts outside a cemetery. Later, as he walks up a hill, Hitchcock shoots him from across the street, where there’s a statue of Jesus carrying the cross up Golgotha flanked by Roman soldiers. A few minutes later, Clift seeks refuge in a different church, walks in, and fixes his eyes on the crucifix which is, after all, a graphic record of a body broken by state violence. There’s no escape for him, and he knows that.
#14. Assorted Priests — Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James
Fathers Martin, Sebastian, Peregrine, and John don’t actually do too much investigating in P.D. James novel Death in the Holy Orders, as they leave most of it to DCI Adam Dalgliesh. But they do try to assist as they can. And then, in the adaptation of the book for the Channel 5 series Dalgliesh, Father Martin is cut out entirely and his actions divided among the other three. But I still wanted to include them as the book itself is an interesting take on a religious mystery.
In both the book and television versions, DCI Dalgliesh is the son of a rector with “a stubborn streak of rationality”, whose history with religion bubbles under the surface of his stoic exterior. While the plot is pretty convoluted, the book gets into some interesting shades between the Church of England, starker Protestantism, and Anglo-Catholicism, but in both cases I think the story could have done with a bit more theology and church details to hammer home how St. Anselm’s, the site of the murder(s), was a unique site for the crimes that occur, and how those crimes would have affected the faculty and students’ faith and livelihoods.
#13. Lady Lupin — Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggins
Lady Lupin is the bubbly, adorable, scatterbrained new wife of Canon Andrew Hastings. I have to assume she’s a slight parody of Agatha Christie’s Griselda Clement (who appears a little further up the list), as she’s a gorgeous blonde 21-year-old, straight out of London society, who is about as unprepared for the vicarage as anyone could be. But, on the night her longterm society boyfriend was going to propose, she met the 38-years-old, silvering-at-the-temples Canon Hastings at a dinner, and by the end of the night the two were completely twitterpated.
When Andrew’s pompous young curate, Andrew Young, dies from poison on Christmas Eve (so inconvenient!) Loops takes it upon herself to investigate, with help from her London friends Duds and Tommy, and Andrew’s nephew Jack. Lupin is… well, now, in our technology-addled world, her miniscule attention span and talent for non-sequitur would seem perfectly normal, but at the time author Joan Coggins was writing a gentle parody of un-upperclass woman, kindhearted, but flighty and always focused on exactly the wrong details—until those details turn out to be useful in a murder investigation. It’s easier to just show you what we’re dealing with, so here’s a brief excerpt of Lupin trying to speak with her nephew about a certain Miss Oliver, who might be a murder suspect:
“She is a tiresome woman, I hate people who wriggle, and she was rather nasty about June and Diana.”“Why?” asked Jack sharply.“I don’t know, I’m sure. I suppose she was born like it. Where was I?”“You didn’t say, but I gather it was somewhere with Miss Oliver.”“Oh yes, so I was, unfortunately. We were in my sitting room. I know we were there because of the housekeeping money.”“What housekeeping money?”“The money that was stolen, of course.”“You never said anything about any money being stolen.”“Well, I suppose I had forgotten. One can’t think of everything. There was Duds cutting her hair off after telling me she had grown it, and then the carol service, and now poor Mr. Young being dead. It would seem heartless to begrudge ten pounds.”
The whole book is like this! It’s great! Lupin doesn’t so much help solve the case, as much as free associate her way down the right path, so she can’t be too high on the list.
#12. Merrily Watkins — Midwinter of the Spirit
Here again, I’ve seen the ITV adaptation, and haven’t yet read Phil Rickman’s books. Merrily Watkins (Anna Maxwell Martin) was a promising character in an interesting premise, but the execution left her fairly low on this list.
She’s already an Anglican minister, recently widowed and trying to navigate her relationship with her daughter, who’s grieving much more than she appears to be. As the series opens, she’s training to become a Deliverance Minister, the Anglican Church’s somewhat more empathetic and holistic take on the role of exorcist. The show shifts in tone between suspense, family drama, and occasionally straight-up supernatural horror.
The problem is that Merrily waffles constantly about whether she should even be a Deliverance Minister. (Her “mentor”, a Minister named Huw Owen [David Threlfall], explicitly tells her she’s not cut out for it.) She allows a malevolent spirit to get its hooks in her immediately, and then ends up helping to investigate a series of deaths said spirit may have caused. She doesn’t make any friends in the police force, because the two police officers we deal with walk Merrily into the site of a horrifying occult ritual, complete with corpse and a plethora of anti-Christian imagery, with no warning whatsoever, and she’s utterly traumatized. They don’t seem to have any reason to do this, she isn’t a regular consultant.
As the show continues she develops a sort of demonic stigmata (which, cool), and seems possessed at time. Her daughter gets caught up in the occult… cult… and for obvious reasons Merrily devotes more time to that than the case, so a local social worker and Merrily’s mentor end up doing far more of the investigating than she does, although she does come back into the investigation toward the end. But on top of that, aside from the one time when she possible got possessed by an evil spirit during an attempted Deliverance, we don’t really get to see the inner workings of Deliverance Ministry, and we never see Merrily actually vicar-ing. OH and the cops continue to suck and take her to a second occult site with no warning, but she handles it better the second time. But also, why? One other thing I found interesting—there is a cross-shaped clean spot on the wall above Merrily’s bed, which the show doesn’t address, but which seemed fairly reminiscent of the similar cross-shaped clean spot on the wall of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks’ church in Wake Up Dead Man.
#11. Father Robert Koesler — The Rosary Murders
Much as in I Confess!, the main drama engine here (aside from, y’know, murder) is the seal of confession. The murderer confesses to the murders, and Father Robert Koeslar (Donald Sutherland) is then unable to go to the police for protection, because telling them anything would break the seal. He tries to solve the mystery on his own, hoping to get the man to turn himself in (also as in I Confess!) but as the murderer has legitimate beef with the Catholic Church, there’s no way he’ll be so obliging. The crime directly involves priests whom Koeslar knows, and the murderer plants replicas of his dead daughter’s black rosary on each victim, ratcheting up the psychological torment for the embattled priest, who was already having doubts about continuing in his line of work.
Father Koeslar does a decent job of tracking down clues, and in the end does far more to solve the mystery than any of the police do, or the journalist who shows up to do research/tempt him away from his vocation. (A really tired trope that does NOT turn up in Wake Up Dead Man!) In the end, the whole crime turns on the confession, though, and the one time Sutherland tries to hint to his superior that something’s up the man harshly rebukes him. Ultimately while it’s not always successful as a sexy thriller, the film becomes a really interesting meditation on a kind of spiritual doom, and Father Loesar proves pretty good at amateur sleuthing. Also? A pre-teen Jack White makes an appearance as an altar server!
#10. Father Jud Duplenticy — Wake Up Dead Man
This blurb is short because until Wake Up Dead Man hits Netflix this Friday, I am not spoiling a single thing about this movie! I will say, however, that Father Jud Duplenticy is my favorite film character of the year. For a while, he proves to be an excellent natural detective. He notices clues—even a few that elude the great Benoit Blanc—connects dots, and draws on his deep knowledge of his parishioners to weigh their potential murdery-ness.
But the reason I love this movie so much is that at a certain point he quits playing detective to re-focus on his calling as a priest. And ALSO without spoiling anything, as in a few of these mysteries, the rite of confession proves pivotal to the mystery, and to Jud’s arc as a person, as does the concept of grace. Jud would have been an excellent sleuth, but I’m glad he picked the career path he’s on.
#9. Canon Clement — Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
I sometimes forget that Agatha Christie is hilarious. But this book is full of zingers, deadpan wit, and smirking asides. Canon Clement is a delightful narrator, a middle-aged reverend who claims to be utterly baffled by his decision to propose to his wife, the wild, funny, entirely unsuitable Griselda. Griselda can neither cook, nor manage a household, and revels in the kind of snark that is unbecoming to a vicar’s wife—and I can only assume she inspired the aforementioned Lady Lupin. But it’s clear that Canon Clement is absolutely besotted with her, and that’s our first clue that Clement might be slightly unreliable as he describes his small parish.
What’s extra fun is that as the book goes along, we get the increasing sense of Clement as a person—welcoming, non-judgmental, but with a streak of moral belief that comes out in a fiery sermon that leads straight into the book’s climax. The only reason he’s so low on the list is that, well, he’s trying to play amateur sleuth in a book that has Miss freaking Marple in it. She walks into a tea at the vicarage with seven main suspects already in mind (he’s shocked at the number) and then spends the book on the edges of the story, working through possibilities, observing human nature, and finally solving the whole thing with just enough time to help the police apprehend those responsible, and hopefully, save the life of a hapless victim. While Clement is the narrator, and a fantastic one, Miss Marple is the star.
#8. Father Dowling & Sister Steve — The Father Dowling Mysteries
Two things about Father Dowling Mysteries before I go any further: one episode features a disappearing dead body that a news team tries to spin into a miracle, much like Wake Up Dead Man; Father Dowling is threatened with reassignment to Alaska if he doesn’t cut out all the sleuthing, which leads me to believe that Paolo Sorrentino is a fan of the show.
Now as for why Fr Dowling and Sr. Steve are here—Dowling is a good snooper. He’s great at finding tiny clues and noticing things. Sister Steve, because of her rough childhood, is good at whatever the narrative needs her to be, whether it’s being a flair bartender, picking locks, or hotwiring tractors—but rest assured she also gets super upset at the sight of a dead body, so the audience can be reassured that she’s really a sensitive girl under that tough wisecracking exterior.
However, Dowling also uses his collar to straight up lie to people, to let people make assumptions that he can leverage assume that he’s there for innocent reasons when he’s not, and there’s a fair streak of “1980s-1990s Television Miracles”—when the narrative shows us that God or whatever is micromanaging things to the extent the a phone rings just when a baddie is about to find our holy sleuths, or illicit lovers decide to hit pause on their mutual seduction just long enough for the hidden nun to escape. Father Dowling also has an evil twin brother, but to be fair every TV character had an evil twin back then.
#7. Canon Daniel Clement — Murder Before Evensong by Rev. Richard Coles
The Canon Clement mysteries are written by an actual vicar, The Reverend Richard Coles, who used to be in Bronski Beat, had a hit single with The Communards (he the one on the synth), and is one of the inspirations for Tom Hollander and James Wood’s excellent BBC series, Rev. Canon Clement is a pretty good sleuth, the fun of these books is watching him balance that work against the constant maintenance of the parish, his care for his parishioners (be they murderers or no), and his own attempts have an actual spiritual life—a thing that is often not mentioned AT ALL in these kinds of books. (It’s also, obviously, a riff on Agatha Christie’s A Murder at the Vicarage, with a singular Canon Clement rather than Christie’s Canon Clements.)
Where book Canon Clement seems mild-mannered and a bit hapless, in the TV adaptation (which stars Matthew Lewis as the reverend) Canon Clement is obviously reeling from family upheaval, and resentful of his mother, his bishop, and certain members of his flock. This makes the drama hit a bit harder as he tries to be a good pastor even when he feels no one appreciates it. The show also leans much more into the cultural milieu of 1988, as Canon Clements ministers to AIDs patients even though that scandalizes some people in his parish, and his bishop tries to discourage it as political activism rather than basic ministry. The fact that one of the main characters is gay is made more central to the drama, and clearly plays off the fact that Canon Clements is battling homophobia.
In both cases, he takes to detective work immediately, and pieces together clues both on and his own and in tandem with Detective Sergeant Neil Vanloo, who tries to turn him into a sort of de facto assistant before realizing that their goals are not quite aligned. The initial murder is surprisingly grisly, with Canon Clement finding a body in his church because his two adorable dachshunds are, er, walking around in, and licking, the victim’s blood, and Clement reveals his own moral core by repeatedly affirming his hope that the killer finds forgiveness just as the town as a whole finds closure. But he gets this spot because in both the book and the TV adaptation, he’s the one who figures out key pieces in the mystery, even before the stalwart DS Vanloo.
#6. Reverend Sydney Chambers — Grantchester
Oh, Sydney Chambers.
Now I have not read James Runcie’s book series yet (I understand they take a drastically different path) and I have not watched the two vicars who succeed Sydney in his post. But in Series 1-4 of the show, Sydney is a good natural detective who gets into the game because he’s unsatisfied by his life as a vicar. For whatever reason, his flashbacks to his WWII service have gotten worse, and he craves distraction—or, I should say, a new distraction, to add to the jazz, whiskey, and revolving door of women that are already distracting him.
It’s astonishing that he ever finishes a sermon.
After being glancingly involved with a police investigation, he pitches himself to grizzled, cynical Detective Inspector Geordie Keating as a sort of assistant: between his collar and his charm, he can get people to tell him things they won’t tell anyone else. Geordie is skeptical but tries it, and soon Sydney is solving cases alongside him all the time.
Where in a lot of these stories, confession is seen as absolutely sacrosanct, and the priest can’t divulge anything their told even at the risk of their own life or freedom, Sydney pops his collar on and listens really hard, and you soon start to wonder If Geordie ever solved any crimes before he acquired his own personal vicar.
The reason Sydney is so high on the list is because when his season are at their best, they dig into the basic clash between someone who’s supposed to help the guilty find reconciliation with God and society, and someone who’s supposed to catch the guilty and hand them over to a secular justice system. A good example of this is threaded through Series Two. Sydney and Geordie are at loggerheads because a young man is set to be executed for causing the death of a school friend. Geordie thinks executing the boy will be “justice”, while Sydney thinks it’s the state taking “vengeance” after a tragedy. The two men argue over it repeatedly, but come back together when Geordie is implicated in a (really great) locked room murder that he and Sydney solve together. But their sense of unity is immediately shattered when the young man is given his execution date, Sydney goes with him to witness his death at the gallows, and Geordie then approaches Sydney at his church ostensibly to invite him for a drink, but really to needle him about why he aways sides with the “bad ones”. This leads to a knock-down fight that turns the altar into a brawltar
It perfectly exemplifies what this weird subgenre can do, interrogating the idea of justice, asking whether forgiveness is possible, setting the conversation up between a person whose job is just…religion, and one whose job is policing. But then it ends with Sydney’s now-pregnant ex-girlfriend turning up to say she’s left her husband and has nowhere else to go and I’m like GET BACK TO THE ETHICS.
UGH this show.
#5. Reverend Clare Fergusson — In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming
Clare Fergusson is an ex-Army helicopter pilot who came to the priesthood in her early 30s. In her first real posting, she’s now the first female Episcopal priest of Millers Kill, an upstate New York town that, like a lot of towns in America, is seeing a divide between the corporate people who can afford picturesque Americana, and the families who are falling through the cracks each time another mill or factory closes. Reverend Fergusson’s new parish is run by a well-heeled board who are clearly in the former camp, and clearly are clearly planning to keep her on a tight leash. But then a poor mother abandons a baby on the church doorstep, and Clare realizes she’s going to have to fight back to include people from all sides of the tracks.
In an effort to get to know the town, she goes out on patrol with police chief Russ Van Alstyne, and almost immediately finds a dead body. Over the rest of the book, she applies her empathy and listening skills to find clues that Russ would never spot, and the two essentially work the case in parallel lines, with, once again, the seal of confession causing one or two stumbling blocks along the way,
Over the course of the series, Clare and Russ have to deal with their attraction to each other—which is first complicated by the then-married Russ finding out that Episcopal priest are not, in fact, celibate—Clare has to cope with conservative higher-ups, and the two of them deal with various “controversial” issues in a small town—teen motherhood, generational poverty, immigrant communities, gay-bashing—with Clare being the voice of inclusion and good faith, and Russ sometimes being more close-minded. But the series lets them argue it out, and points out Clare’s occasional naivety as well as Russ’ need to be more flexible.
#4. Rabbi David Small — The Rabbi Small Mysteries by Harry Kemelman
The blurb on one of Harry Kemelman’s David Small Mysteries goes as such: “Why is this Rabbi different from all other rabbis? Because he’s a detective.”
Like several of the other clergypeople on this list, Rabbi David Small ends up investigating a murder because he wakes up a suspect. When a murdered girl is found in the yard next to his Temple, and her handbag is found in his car, he gradually works through his congregation, and much of the small town of Barnard’s Crossing, Massachusetts, learning everything he can about her life to try to understand its ending. Along the way he forms a friendship with Police Chief Hugh Lanigan and resolves half a dozen skirmishes within his congregation.
But the best bit of the first book, for me, is when Rabbi Small and his wife drop in on Chief Lanigan and his wife, and the quartet spend a quiet afternoon discussing religion over Tom Collinses. (This is while Rabbi Small is still a major suspect, by the way.) Again and again Kemelman stops the plots for human moments, for arguments between neighbors, for inside jokes and longstanding feuds, until the reader understands just how horrible the crimes have been, to disrupt the vibrant life unfolding in Barnard’s Crossing.
Rabbi Small applies his Talmudic training and analytical mind equally to every problem, with an attention to granular detail that makes him one of the best sleuths on the list.
#3. Brother Cadfael — Cadfael
Cadfael takes small town murder mystery tropes and sends them back to a medieval village, complete with high society family drama (except sometimes it’s a literal King), plucky assistants (novitiates) and even a lovelorn, morally ambiguous policeman in the form of “deputy sheriff” Hugh Beringar.
Brother Cadfael himself is a former Crusader, who has seen so much of the world and its evils that his view on society sometimes seem more 1990s than 1290s. Derek Jacobi is, obviously, fantastic. Cadfael uses his deep knowledge of plants and herbs to solve crimes. Cadfael notices everything. He uses his status as a Benedictine Brother to fade into the background, to appear harmless, to allow people to think he’s a naive, innocent man. But as fa former professional soldier, he’s seen human nature at its worst and at its most noble, and he can spot lies from a buttress away. He and the other brothers are forever finding bodies in the river, or having their Compline singing interrupted by people bursting through the church doors with news of murder, the medieval townsfolk seem surprisingly OK with modern procedural work, and it’s great.
#2. Father Brown — Father Brown Mysteries by G.K. Chesterton
Father Brown uses his observation, keen knowledge of human nature, and other peoples’ underestimation of him to solve crimes. Generally the police don’t want his help, and actively discourage it. He is a much more typical priest—he thinks in terms of eternity, sin, justice, judgement, repentance. While in the 2013 series he’s also a war veteran, having served in WWI as a soldier, and in WWII as a chaplain, he still holds his cards closer to his vestments. Not for him the jazz and whiskey beloved of Sydney Chambers, the high-risk shenanigans of Father Dowling (except I guess occasionally in the 2013 series, if his nemesis Flambeau show up), or the highly emotional confessions of Father Jud. The seal of confession often looms large in these stories as his aim is to reconcile criminals with God before he worries about any secular authority. Or, well, to quote a particularly dark Father Brown story, “The Chief Mourner of Marne”:
“We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction,” [Father Brown] said. “We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those who really need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that neither the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will pardon. Leave us with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real crimes; mean as St. Peter when the cock crew, and yet the dawn came.”
Which is also kind of what Wake Up Dead Man is about!
(Also featured in the 2013 Father Brown? A very young Josh O’Connor, in Series 3’s “The Curse of Amenhotep”)
#1. William of Baskerville — The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
William of Baskerville is the brilliant creation of the equally brilliant Umberto Eco. Eco’s character draws on Sherlock Holmes, which creates the fascinating situation of watching someone with a Holmes-level intellect grapple with the 14th Century. Then he sends William and his novice, the young Benedictine Adso, off to a Benedictine monastery where they’re embroiled in a web of murder, conspiracy, sexual abuse, and fanaticism. The book is nearly 600 pages of dense theological musings and deadpan wit, and it’s sold more than 50 million copies worldwide, which gives me a tiny sliver of hope for the human race I GUESS.
Also? There are six different video games based on this book. If I ever update this list, I am playing all of them.
William has Sherlock’s sharp perception, his deadpan wit, his occasional sharpness with those who can’t keep up, and his taste for “some herb” that he learned about from “the infidels”. When the host Abbot comes to William to ask him to investigate the murder, they first launch into an intricate debate about William’s time as an Inquisitor, in which William, gently but firmly, insists that he didn’t usually credit the Devil with the evil acts of men—because he was too busy trying to prove whether they’d committed the acts, and if so, deliver them over to human, earthly justice. This opening conversation sets the tone of William’s whole outlook on life, where he tries to pursue knowledge for its own sake, and refuses to give in to supernatural fears when natural explanations are right there. And here, too, the seal of confession hides clues that would have allowed Willaim to solve the murders much quicker.
In 1986, The Name of the Rose was adapted into a film by director Jean-Jacques Annaud with Sean Connery as William, F. Murray Abraham as the real-life Inquisitor Bernard Gui, and a VERY young Christian Slater as Adso. The first twenty minutes of the film bring the core theme to the fore, as William, a Franciscan, clashes with some far stuffier Benedictines over whether knowledge for its own sake is an affront to God, whether curiosity is of the Evil One, and whether laughing is a one-way ticket to Hell. In case you’re looking for something to pair with your next rewatch of Conclave, this movie holds up pretty well!
But the real reason William comes in at Number 1 isn’t even his sleuthing, it’s that, when the monastery’s library catches fire, he risks his life to save as many books as possible.
My deepest apologies if I’ve missed some first-rate detective work, or ignored some terrible investigative blunders—especially in the cases where I only covered the book and not its adaptation (or vice versa). Add them in the comments! Tell me who I overlooked![end-mark]
The post An Infallible Ranking of Crime-Solving Clergy appeared first on Reactor.