Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

Aimée Thurlo, accompanied by her poodles, Ella (black) and Doggett (white), goes over a transcript of the mystery novel "False Witness" in her home on Albuquerque's West Side. The novel, written by Thurlo and her husband, David, is the latest in the couple's series about Sister Agatha, a Catholic nun. The Sister Agatha books are part of a large and growing mystery subgenre featuring religious sleuths.

Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

With the deadline for "False Witness" fast approaching, Aimée and David Thurlo work together to whip the novel about their detective nun into shape. The couple has written more than 50 novels together. "I can't ever see us running out of ideas," David said. "What we do run out of sometimes is time."

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David and Aimée Thurlo don't seem the type to be pushing nuns around, but they're getting desperate.

The deadline for the final version of "False Witness," the fourth entry in their Sister Agatha mystery series, is coming up on Good Friday and their editor has advised them to change the motivation of Sister Bernarda, a colorful supporting character.

Oh, sure. Easy for an editor to say. But Sister Bernarda is not easily manipulated. She was a Marine sergeant, serving 20 years with the Corps, before joining the Sisters of the Blessed Adoration and taking up residence at the order's monastery near Bernalillo. When she talks, Bernarda often sounds more like a drill instructor than a bride of Christ.

But hold on. Sister Bernarda, her religious order and Our Lady of Hope Monastery are all fictitious, the fruits of David and Aim‚e's teeming imaginations. The Thurlos can do anything they want with them.

"Once, in one of the Ella (Clah) novels, we changed who done it, changed who the killer was," David said on a recent afternoon at the couple's home near the southern edge of Corrales.

David, 58, and Aimée, "younger than David," have been married nearly 37 years and have been a writing team for much of that time, turning out more than 50 novels.

They are best known for their mystery series featuring Navajo Police Special Investigator Ella Clah. "Turquoise Girl," the 13th Clah novel, is due out next month from Forge.

The Sister Agatha series, which debuted in 2002 with "Bad Faith," is a change of pace from the police procedural Clah series. The Agathas are religious mysteries, part of a popular subgenre of detective fiction featuring servants of God as amateur sleuths.

Aimée sees the Sister Agatha books as lighted candles in a grim, dark world, a more relaxed approach to homicide.

"I really wanted to sink myself into something gentle," she said. "I'm so tired of turning on the TV at night and seeing programs trying to outgross each other."

David said the Sister Agatha series permits him and Aimée to write stories that don't have car chases and things blowing up.

"When you have a sleuth who is a nun, you can't just get out of things with a gunfight or a fistfight," he said. "The story has to have more structure to it."

But that doesn't mean the Sister Agatha books are dull.

Sister Agatha was an investigative reporter before taking the veil. She courses the roads in and around Bernalillo and Albuquerque in a cherry-red, 1986, classic Harley-Davidson motorcycle with a sidecar. Pax, a large, white German shepherd, who was once a police dog, rides in the sidecar.

One challenge of the series, David said, is maintaining the anchor of the monastery while finding credible ways for Sister Agatha to stumble onto crime scenes.

They solved that in "Bad Faith" by bringing crime to the monastery. Father Anselm dies of poisoning while saying Mass for the nuns.

"Mass continued, but as father began to consecrate the bread and wine, he staggered back. He swayed slowly for a moment and then fell to his knees, retching violently. Then clutching his chest, he began to gasp for air."

The nuns were witnesses to a crime. But they were suspects, too. For the sake of the monastery, Sister Agatha would have to use her old investigative reporting skills to get to the bottom of this.

Father Brown's flock

Religious mysteries can trace their lineage back at least as far as G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, which first appeared in book form in the 1911 collection "The Innocence of Father Brown."

Philip Grosset, a fan of these kinds of mysteries, has identified 70 such series on his Clerical Detectives Web site. And there are more than that.

Besides mystery novels about nuns, such as the Sister Agatha books, there are series about Catholic priests, such as Ralph McInerny's Father Dowling; rabbis, Harry Kemelman's Rabbi Small; Protestant ministers, Charles Merrill Smith's Rev. Randollph; female Episcopal priests, Michelle Blake's Lily Connor; and medieval monks, Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael.

Some series are written by people who themselves have religious vocations. Episcopal priest Cristina Sumners is the author of the Rev. Kathryn Koerney books, Catholic Sister Carol Anne O'Marie writes the Sister Mary Helen series and Catholic priest the Rev. Andrew Greeley pens the Father (later Bishop) Blackie Ryan mysteries.

There's even a series written by an ex-priest. After leaving the Catholic priesthood, the late William X. Kienzle wrote 24 mystery novels about Father Robert Koesler, a Detroit priest who is always up to his Roman collar in murder.

There are so many of these books, they must be popular. But why?

"I think a religious figure is someone readers believe they can trust, a sleuth they can count on to be smart," said Margaret Coel, a Colorado mystery novelist who writes a series about Father John O'Malley, a Jesuit priest assigned to the Wind River (Arapaho/Shoshone) Reservation in Wyoming.

Coel, "old enough to be a grandmother," talked on her cell phone this week as she and her husband traveled near Pueblo on their way back to their home in Boulder.

She said people in religious service are usually astute observers of human nature, which makes them good detectives.

"They deal with all kinds of people, and a priest, in confession, has heard everything," Coel said. "Another thing about having a priest in a mystery novel is that people trust him and will come to him when something horrible has happened to them or to their family. It is very believable."

Julia Spencer-Fleming is the author of a mystery series about the Rev. Clare Fergusson, a former Army helicopter pilot who is an Episcopal priest in New York's Adirondack Mountains. Spencer-Fleming, herself a fervent Episcopalian, said the fact that faith is a big part of many people's lives is another reason for the popularity of religious mysteries.

"Their spiritual practice is an important part of their lives, and they enjoy reading about protagonists in which this is also true," Spencer-Flemings, 45, said during a phone interview this week from her home, a 185-year-old farmhouse near Portland, Maine.

She said good religious mystery fiction can be windows into a faith.

"Preaching is very boring," Spencer-Fleming said. "But learning the way people of faith do things, their attitudes and their beliefs, is good as long as you can slip it in between the exciting stuff - helicopters falling out of the sky and so forth."

Christopher Meehan, the author of several religious mysteries and, until recently, religion editor of the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette, said he thinks the mystery genre in general is built on the most basic of religious themes.

"It's good versus evil," he said. "John MacDonald's Travis McGee novels are not overtly religious, but McGee is a knight-errant on a mission of good."

Faith and felonies

Meehan said it was the mystery fiction of Albuquerque's Tony Hillerman that inspired him to begin writing his own mystery series about the Rev. Calvin Turkstra, a Dutch Reformed Church minister at a rural Michigan church.

He said Hillerman's fiction, set in the world of the Navajo, brought spirituality to the mystery.

"It's about another world," Meehan, 57, said during a phone interview from his Grand Rapids, Mich., home. "It's about how that other world relates to this world and how (Hillerman's Navajo) detectives relate to both worlds."

Many religious mysteries mix murder with their main characters' struggles with their faith and their own human frailty.

In Meehan's "Murder on the Grand" (Thunder Bay Press, 1997), the Rev. Turkstra punches a man in the face instead of turning the other cheek.

"He solves mysteries through his relationships with people," Meehan said. "But he struggles with his faith in God and with the way he practices his faith."

Spencer-Fleming's Rev. Clare Fergusson is tormented by her feelings for Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne, a married man. At the conclusion of 2006's "All Mortal Flesh," the most recent book in the series, Russ' wife is found murdered, leaving Clare and the chief under a cloud of suspicion while Spencer-Fleming writes the follow-up novel.

"It's very enjoyable to write," she said of the work in progress, due out in late fall or early winter. "It is more interesting to write about people with problems. We want a happy ending, but too much happiness is dull."

Coel's Father John is a recovering alcoholic who must contend with his attraction to Arapaho lawyer Vicky Holden, the other major character in the Wind River Reservation mysteries, which will number 13 novels with the publication in September of "The Girl With Braided Hair."

"Father John struggles with his vows of celibacy," Coel said. "He is a human being, but he is committed to his faith. I try to show what his life is like, the loneliness of the job, which is what led to his alcoholism.

"But he is a man of very strong faith, a strong character."

In their Sister Agatha mysteries, the Thurlos take on community problems - gangs, art theft, the exploitation of children - rather than controversies within the church.

But some authors of religious mysteries confront church issues.

Meehan deals with the role of women in the church in 1997's "Murder on the Grand," Spencer-Fleming's Clare Fergusson risks her bishops displeasure by officiating at a gay marriage in 2003's "A Fountain Filled With Blood" and Coel's Father John is infuriated when a pedophile priest is assigned to his reservation mission church in last year's "The Drowning Man."

Coel, Meehan, Spencer-Fleming and the Thurlos said that letters from their readers - lay people and religious alike - are generally supportive and appreciative of the way they portray their spiritual sleuths.

"I've received a number of e-mails from around the country from (female) Episcopal priests, who say their congregations claim they are (the model for) Clare Fergusson," Spencer-Fleming said.

But Coel said she received some less-than-complimentary letters from priests upset by the pedophile cleric in "The Drowning Man."

"I'm sorry about that, but it's in the news," said Coel, a practicing Catholic who attended Marquette University, a Jesuit school. "My purpose was to show how good priests, like Father John, are affected by this horrible scandal."

And, of course, to tell a gripping mystery story while she's about it.

Partners in crime

David Thurlo specializes in the plot and the action. Aimée contributes the characters and the dialogue.

"Together, we make one perfect writer," Aimée said.

She writes in a disorderly bedroom cluttered with books, knickknacks and a 2-pound pet rat named Stevie.

David writes on the other side of their house, in the kind of neat, organized space you'd expect from a man who taught science for 25 years at Taylor Middle School.

In between are three poodles - Doggett, Marlowe and Ella - and a pit bull named Chole, who wanders in from outside periodically to keep the poodles and visitors in line.

The Ella Clah books and the Thurlos' series about Navajo vampire cop Lee Nez owe much to David's experiences growing up on the Navajo Reservation, where his father worked - first at a helium plant and later for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

But the Sister Agatha series, published by St. Martin's Minotaur, was inspired by Aimée's years as a student at a Catholic boarding school operated by the Ursuline Sisters in Arcadia, Mo.

Aimée was born in the island nation of Cuba. Her mother died when she was 7. When the Castro regime pressured the rest of the family into leaving for America a couple of years later, her father, a world-traveling engineer, put her in the Ursuline school so the nuns could look after her.

She remembers that only a sheet separated the girls' quarters from the nuns' rooms.

In a way, the Sister Agatha series - which also includes "Thief in Retreat" (2004) and "Prey for a Miracle" (2006) - is Aimée's way of trying to recapture a quiet span in her life, a time she did not fully appreciate as a rebellious young girl who once ran away from the school.

"I loved the silence in the convent school," she said. "Silence enfolded you in solitude and peace. It was not something to run away from. It was something to run to."

And when Sister Agatha has run the bad guys to ground, it is that peaceful silence that returns to Our Lady of Hope, the monastery just north of Bernalillo, in a place only the Thurlos know.

"As the monastery's bells chimed in the distance, calling the nuns for None, the canonical hour that commemorated the ninth hour when Christ died, Sister Agatha said a brief prayer - for herself, for Father Anselm and for the monastery."