Guest Blog: Murder in the Vatican Author Ann Margaret Lewis.

Welcome to the blog for my novel A Pius Man.



The Good News: No Snarky Theology this week.  After Communion, Lent, Sex, and Evolution, I'm taking a break.



The Even Better News: Today, we have a guest blog from Murder in the Vatican author Ann Margaret Lewis.



Since Murder in the Vatican deals with tales from the Sherlock Holmes canon that involve Holmes working with Leo XIII, I asked if she could blog about history in fiction, religious historical character in fiction, or "something like that".   As you can see, I was very helpful about picking out a topic for her.



The below was the result.



For the record, I have not doctored or altered her text in any way.  In fact, the only "edit" I made was that she insert some hyperlink footnotes to some of her statements.



And, here we go.

With Religious Characters, Honesty is the Best Policy

Ann Margaret Lewis

You can’t help but notice: people of religious faith make popular villains—especially with secular publishers and film studios. From The Three Musketeers and Hunchback of Notre Dame, to DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons. From the Godfather series, to even Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. From Voltaire’s Tartuffe, to TV shows like Showtime’s Borgias and films, comic books and animated films like Happy Feet. The list goes on and on.



So it’s safe to say that making a villain a person of religious conviction isn’t an unusual convention. A great source of conflict and interest is a character who goes against their own supposed principles, or warps them to their own ends. And in any case, to many in the secular world, someone who believes something to the exclusion of all else, someone who isn’t a relativist, has to be close-minded bigot, right?



On the contrary, having principles and sticking by them does not always mean that. Real people are not so cut and dried. What one needs to be, when creating characters and even creating their villains, is honest. Otherwise, the whole convention just gets to be….well…cliché.



When I wrote Murder in the Vatican, I did my best to portray Pope Leo XIII in a way that was, I hope, honest. I would be just as honest in writing about a shameful pope like Alexander VI. But I wasn’t interested in a crummy pope. I’ll leave that for Showtime to cover (yawn). Our secular culture is so hungry to see religious figures as corrupt, they rewrite history to try to turn those who were fine people into villains—as is this case of the pope of this blog, Venerable Pius XII. And not just he, but Benedict XVI as well—if he isn’t a Nazi (here Benedict’s the story in his own words), then he’s a protector of paedophiles (never mind that he was one of the one’s trying to do right in that regard).



So it stands to reason that I decided to do something—well—different—to go against the grain. The religious folks in my book aren’t the villains. While, Pope Leo is a man of his time, he is also a man of the future in thought. He was a son of a noble family, quite different from his predecessor and successor (Pius IX and Piux X) both of whom came from humbler beginnings. Perhaps that is why Leo has not been put on the sainthood track, though his care for the poor and the working class was legendary. But I realized through simple research, all I had to do was write Leo as he was to the best of my ability to have an interesting character.



Sherlock Holmes himself says in the story “A Case of Identity”—“Life is infinitely stranger than the mind of man can invent.” I would suggest to the would-be storytellers of the world that before you go with the tired cliché of a corrupt religious character, try making them three dimensional, tell the truth about them. Give them a point of sympathy, for most humans have one. It is far more satisfying for your readers/viewers (not to mention less bigoted).

About the Author: Ann Margaret Lewis

Born and raised in Waterford, Michigan, Ann Margaret Lewis attended Michigan State University, where she received her Bachelor's degree in English Literature. She began her writing career writing tie-in children’s books and short stories for DC Comics. Before Murder in the Vatican: The Church Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, she published a second edition of her book, Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Alien Species, for Random House.

Ann is a classically trained soprano, and has performed around the New York City area. She has many interests from music to art history, to theology and all forms of literature. She is the President of the Catholic Writers Guild, an international organization for Catholic Writers and the coordinator of the Catholic Writers Conference LIVE. After living in New York City for fifteen years, Ann moved to Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband Joseph Lewis and their son, Raymond. Together they enjoy their life in the heartland.

But what is he when he's at Home? Other Novel Ideas.

I've had people in my Real Life tell me that they're confused about what I'm selling at the moment.



I post on my personal pages about what I'm working on, while at the same time inviting them to look over A Pius Man. 



So, it might be a good idea to clear things up.



To do that, I think it's time to allow you a glimpse into my dark, dark mind.



A Pius Man is only one of my thrillers. My thriller universe is interconnected, and borderline incestuous, if you read them in the order they were written. Eventually, every character in my thriller novels comes to know everyone else … if they're still alive.



And all of them ended up in A Pius Man.



Summer Death Camp, book one of the Death of an Alois Boy series.

 I had a high school that I really, really didn't like. I started writing a murder mystery series that, in the outline, started off as acting out little grudges. In the mysteries, the class pornographer wannabe ended up face down in a bucket of KY jelly. A bully who made constant KKK jokes ended up lynched with a noose made of piano wire. The “hero” was only the protagonist because he was always in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he had the inside track because he was hip-deep in the high school stupidity.  Sort of like Murder, She Wrote with teenage serial killers.



The character's name was Matthew Kovach. He started off being modeled on me, and he bored the crap out of me. Though, in my outline, by book four, he stopped looking like me, and became far more interesting.



He shows up in A Pius Legacy.



It Was Only on Stun

It Was Only on Stun was a novel of Sean A.P. Ryan, mercenary. He was doing security at a science fiction convention out in Long Island. It was called C-Con … no relation to I-Con, also out on Long Island, where I had volunteered once or twice.  An actress from the Balkans is about to be a major star in an American TV series that threatens to make her popular world wide--and since she had been driven out by all sides in the Balkan conflict, all sides want her dead. 



This book had everything, including two incompetent “IRA hitmen” being hunted down by Interpol Agent Maureen McGrail, and there was also Middle Earth's Most Wanted Elven Assassin … don't ask. Matthew Kovach appeared as an author, hawking his books “Tales from a Catholic High school” that looked like “Jean Shepard meets Jack the Ripper.”  It was one part comedy, one part mystery, and it ended in a massive shootout, playing hide and seek in the backwoods of Long Island, and a sword fight.



Maureen McGrail and Sean A.P. Ryan both show up in A Pius Man.



I also have a hostage novel set in a Barnes and Noble, only one of the hostages is related to a mafia don, and his "fixer" shows up.  A man named Jonathan Koenig.  Jon Koenig shows up in A Pius Stand (book three of the Pius Trilogy).



Too Secret Service, Et Al.

Too Secret Service is about a Secret Service Agent who was trained to eliminate any and all threats tot he life of the President.  During an international "incident," he is framed for attempted murder, and needs to not only get his head attached to his shoulders, but has to stop the President from being nuked.  However, CIA Assassin Catherine Miller is also investigating the same threat, and he is in her cross hairs.



Dances With Werewolves. Another Secret Service tale.  Catherine Miller has been sent to assassinate a Haitian President using voodoo to scare the natives -- human sacrifices of the tourists will scare practically anyone.  The Prime Minister, and high priest, is a little slicker, and she needs to hunt him down in New Orleans.

Meanwhile, my Secret Service Agent is investigating a laughable threat to the President--a prediction made by a Wiccan coven in San Francisco.  He stops laughing when the one who made the prediction is found vivisected.

And Matthew Kovach also wandered into this story too.  He's up in Boston trying to create a fiction universe; he wants to do to Massachusetts what Stephen Kind did to Maine.  And it looks like he found an interesting subject: Joshua Melasure's Community of the Old Time Religion.

Enter the Kraft Brothers.  Each own a magic shop in a different part of the country.  "Merle" of San Francisco works for the Federal government as an expert on weird; he also doesn't need lock picking tools.  "Tal" is a stage magician in New Orleans. And it looks like the third one, "Dalf," is dealing in magic of a slightly darker nature.

Imagine Live and Let Die, updated with Goths, vampires, and Wiccans.



Night of the Assassins-- Everyone's past comes back to haunt them.  Literally.  A guest star is one Scott "Mossad" Murphy.



Giovanni Figlia was a bit player in Too Secret Service novels, and he shows up in A Pius Man.



And, later, I go completely off the tracks. Literally. I have three series in the works that have nothing to do with any of the above. In one, I've got five books already written, and the other series has one book that I'm expanding into (probably) three.



Tales of White Ops: If I were designing the future, it would look … a lot like science fiction of the past, only better-looking. Take a group like a interstellar Templar Knights, pit them against two Sauron-like enemies, and then create a special forces unit within these alien Templars. Take one part space opera, one part Babylon 5 as written by David Weber, and one part Mission: Impossible as written by John Ringo, and you get the idea. Add a great military genius who looks like the wrong end of a horse, a psychotic President who stole an election, a telepathic special forces unit made up of complete sociopaths, and a crackpot who likes to play with nuclear bombs, and you get the idea.  I also blow up an amusement park currently named Disney Planet, have an alien mafia with its own special forces killers, and it spirals out from there.



In this series My hero's name was "Sean Patrick Ryan" -- now you know why every mention of the 21st century Ryan makes a point of calling him Sean A.P. Ryan.  Five books have been written in this series, and I'm on number six.



The Last Survivors.

A little something I co-authored with a friend of mine (or I was Shanghaied, I'm fuzzy on the details), it had been proposed to me as a dystopia in a little corner of the world that had been nuked to within an inch of its life (San Francisco). Then I asked about the rest of the world. And I asked how the rest of the politics, and the economy, and the dynamics of the society worked … and somewhere along the line, I started writing parts of it.



I had suggested a character, a spy exiled to San Francisco for being "Inconvenient," with the capital I.  My friend wanted to name him "Mr. Anderson."  When I started writing, I called him Kevin (can you tell I'm a smartass?)



 Book one is written, book two is half finished, and it's outlined to book seven.



The Last Survivors, 2093.  Three years after the minor nuclear war known as the April Fool's War, Kevin Anderson is going to take out the nuclear arsenal of the Islamic Republic of France.  His mission is blown by politicians on the Senate Foriegn Intelligence Oversight Committee.  It's time to enforce term limits.  But how do you burn a spy like that, and where do you send him?  Hint: not Miami.



The Last Survivors: Professional Ethics.  San Francisco's most famous misanthrope is a professional assassin, the last of his guild.  When a serial killer starts using San Francisco as his playground, using methods out of the assassin's playbook, it's time to go hunting.



Unnamed Vampire Project.

I don't know what prompted this particular work. It's probably because I had seen one too many vampire novels and movies so mess around with the original concept that I wanted to get back to basics. Joss Whedon at least had vampires react to crosses, and used holy water as a weapon, and then he stuck them in the smallest town he could find in California. I wanted to examine vampires from a more real-world perspective. I'm a history major: What would vampires be doing for the last century? And, because I'm a philosophy nerd, I also wanted to answer the question of why religious artifacts would work on vampires; are they automatically evil, and if so, when did free will get chucked out the window? In my vampire universe, vampires use communion wafers as suicide pills. And you can do creative things with rosaries, and full-immersion baptismal pools. I'm come up with numerous titles to this project, and absolutely none of them work—and half of them have been used already. 



And, then, at the end of the day, there's



A Pius Man.

Professor David Gerrity, PhD, has been murdered while on sabbatical looking through the Vatican Archives.  His assassin is blown up shortly after the murder, and the killer's corpse lands on the car of Giovanni Figlia, head of Vatican security.   Figlia has enough problems-- Secret Service Agent Wilhelmina Goldberg has come to audit Vatican security, and a Egyptian cop Hashim Abasi has come to coordinate the Pope's visit to Egypt.

At the same time, an al-Qaeda strategist has been murdered ... and no one is claiming credit.  Scott "Mossad" Murphy comes to Rome to investigate, and finds a beautiful German spy there to help him, Manana Shushurin.

And lurking in the background is a priest with commando skills, a Pope who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals, and a highly destructive Sean A.P. Ryan is working at the Vatican.

It has philosophy, theology, history, war, international politics, geopolitics, advanced weaponry, a mystery, betrayals, plots, three conspiracies, several counter-plots, mass murder, and enough high explosives to level a few dozen buildings.

It's fun.

A note on religion, characters, and who do you trust.

Not too long ago, a friend of mine read through the first fifty pages of A Pius Man. She was struck by something odd. The first priest who made an appearance was rather shifty looking. Her note was “is he supposed to look that menacing?”



Answer: Yes.



It occurred to me that I should address something: there might some people who think that, because I'm Catholic, means that A Pius Man is going to have an easy answer: Pope Pius XII was a saint and an action hero who could do no wrong.



This goes double for those who believe that, just because I go do church every Sunday, I must be super Catholic. (I have a disturbing vision of me in a cape that's Lenten purple. I then desire to acid wash my brain) Believe it or not, I have had people tell me this, to my face, even though it's more or less a minimum requirement.



If you fall into any of the above categories, then, good, that means you'll be surprised for most of the book.



Yes, I'm Catholic, but that doesn't mean brainwashed zombie. We'll take practically anybody. And we do: from the Kennedy clan to the founder of National Review, to the regular hosts of Crossfire. Even at the beginning, there were wise men an shepherds—for God comes to those who read many books, and those who read no books, but not those who read just one book (stolen from Bishop Fulton Sheen). For me to make every priest, Pope, Bishop, and everyone associated with the Roman Catholic church, a saint, would pretty much require a full frontal lobotomy, or total ignorance of the history of the Catholic Church. There's a reason most of the Popes have not been canonized (made a saint, not fired out of a cannon, though I can think of some priests who would benefit from the latter).



As Fr. Andrew M. Greeley, novelist, Catholic priest, and raging political Liberal, has noted, there are some good men who became Popes who made for bad leaders, and some not so nice people who became pope, but were at least able to lead a pack of vampires to a blood bank. One Pope who ended up in Dante's Hell had been a monk; a good and saintly person who all but ran screaming from the office. Several Popes had to be warlords, if only to quell the riotous local population, if not to halt advancing armies. Popes are like the rest of the members of the Catholic faith: they get all sorts.



So, when I started A Pius Man, it was after having done my homework on Pope Pius XII. Any conclusions I drew would be what I found in the history. I would burn him in effigy if I found anything amiss, and make him look good if he did good.



As for everyone else in the clergy—I've met stupid priests, good priests, gay priests, bad preachers, and I've read about the really bad ones. While I object to making Catholic priests a collection of punching bags, I'm not going to fall off the horse on the other side and make them all perfect. Trying to imagine them as perfect cardboard cutouts would actually make some of them even more boring than they are now.



It may have been John P. Marquand's character Mr. Moto who was the first obviously misleading character. The character was Japanese during a time when Imperial Japan was running roughshod over China, and spends much of the time lurking in the background. He kills at least one person with seeming little to no provocation. In the movies, they cast him as Peter Lorre, well known for playing assorted murderers and monsters of varying sorts. He was dark and sinister looking.... and he was also the hero.



However, now that I've noted that, I should probably go into something else: who the hell is the good guy here?



A Pius Man has been described more than once as a spy thriller. International intrigue will abound, and telling the good guys from the bad guys may require a score card.



Who do you trust in A Pius Man? I know I asked the question before, but seriously, think about it.





Fr. Francis Williams, SJ: a priest who not only seems to know what lurks in the hearts of men, but spends his time lurking in the background, has combat skills, and did we mention that he had connections with two known terrorists, murdered before Chapter 1? Oh, and he's also changing orders: he thinks that Opus Dei looks good.





Sean AP Ryan, mercenary: his idea of a good time generally involves shootout in public landmarks, explosives, and automatic weapons. It's well known that he's been brought to Rome to teach priests self defense tactics—even though he has a body count in the low hundreds.



Hashim Abasi, Egyptian cop: he's in Rome to coordinate security on the Pope's visit to Cairo, but his father blew himself up while working on an explosive vest, his country is on the brink of being taken over by radical extremists... and, oh, yes, it looks like he stoned his wife in an honor killing.



Scott “Mossad” Murphy and Manana Shushurin.... okay, these two look like two spies who are in Rome on a fact finding mission. One is a Catholic from Israel, and the other a member of German Intelligence. But why does Scott slowly have his resources shut down one by one, and why is she a German with a Russian last name? And why she she carrying such a large gun?



Commander Giovanni Figlia. He is the head of Papal security. To get to the Pope, you have to go through him. Then why does he steal a murder scene from the Rome Police? The victim is researching Pius XII, and the killer (and second victim) is a terrorist who spends a lot of time around the Pope's right hand man. For Figlia, how far does he think he has to go to protect the Pope?



Secret Service Agent Wilhelmina Goldberg: she's there to audit the Pope's security. She's from out of town, she was in the car with Giovanni Figlia when a body landed on it. She only just arrived in town. So, obviously, she had to have nothing to do with any murders, plots, or conspiracies. How much more obvious could it be? But did I mention that Mossad reserves the right to call upon the support of any Jew in the world at any time?



Interpol Agent Maureen McGrail: In Dublin, a priest is murdered before he can leave for Rome. He was going to testify at the canonization proceedings of Pope Pius XII, and now he has a swastika carved into his forehead and a knife sticking out of his chest. She's going to Rome to see if someone wanted to stop him from talking. She obviously has NOTHING to do with this.... even if she does have a past with mercenary Sean Ryan, and has helped him kill over a dozen people.



How did I end up with a book design in such a way that you can't really trust anyone? Just lucky I guess.