Analysis Of The Father Koesler Series

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William X. Kienzle is an American author best known for the Father Koesler Series, a series of highly popular mystery thrillers. Kienzle first started out as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church where he served for over two decades as a parish priest. Even as a priest, he was involved with writing as the editor in chief of the Michigan Catholic, the archdiocese’s newspapers. His work with the paper earned him a Catholic Press Association acknowledgement for excellence in editorial writing and a general excellence award in Journalism from the Michigan Knights of Columbus. He would leave the priesthood in 1974 after he became increasingly frustrated with canonical law that would not allow him to remarry divorcees. Kienzle’s first ever-published …show more content…

Koesler is a chain smoking personable sleuth that helps the police solve a variety of mysterious murders that occur in his parish. Given Kienzle’s background as a parish priest, many of the novels are written from the perspectives of a priest, especially his experiences with the church. As such, most of the novels are a critique of the canonical rules of the Catholic Church in narratives that may be deemed to be half-amateur sleuth, and half police procedurals. Even as the novels are first of all thrillers, there is a deeper meaning to William Kienzle’s whodunits, which make them more of moral plays rather than your classic mystery. For instance, Father Koesler is a heavy drinker and smoker and is the perfect example of the wide gulf not only between the ordinary people and the priests but also between priest and the nuns. The novels offer some great insights into the daily routines of nuns and priests, including a peek into the sacred rituals of the church, particularly the concept of confession. What is even more interesting is the authors take on differences in opinion among parishioners, nuns, and priest on issues of canon such as the rules of Vatican Two. All of these take place alongside thrilling narratives of journalists, cops, and Detroit clergymen having to deal with abortion, black magic, drug peddling prostitution, extortion, and

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