A GENTLE MURDERER

A priest and a police detective, working unaware of each other, seek the killer of a Manhattan call girl.

Father Duffy, assistant pastor of St. Timothy’s, begins by meeting the murderer in his confessional. Telling the priest, “I think I’ve killed someone….I’m confessing everything that made me do this,” the shadowy figure rambles on about his early life until Father Duffy gives him conditional absolution and he vanishes into the night. The next morning Dolly Gebhardt’s maid finds her in bed beaten to death with a hammer. DS Ben Goldsmith, who’s assigned to the case, follows the evidence along procedural lines, interviewing Dolly’s clients and friends even as Father Duffy, armed with the few facts the murderer shared with him, takes a week off and searches for traces of him in Pennsylvania, Chicago, and Cleveland before the clues take him back to New York just as Goldsmith’s investigation is closing in on the murderer. Although both the officer and the priest are working with incomplete information, Davis, writing in 1951, makes it clear early on who the killer is; the mystery lies, as the man had indicated in his confession, in just how the events of his life drove him to an act of violence that shocks him as much as anyone else. The pace is deliberate and most of the characters lightly sketched in. But the portrait of the murderer that gradually emerges from the testimony of the many people whose lives crossed his without ever taking any special note of him is at once so unsparing and so compassionate that readers are as likely to end up sympathizing with him as with his victim.

A simmering tour de force of detection from both ends of the trail.