It sounds as if it`s the plot of a novel: a Benedictine monk has a crisis of faith, struggling with his alcoholism and growing interest in women. Leaving the priesthood, he enters the banking profession and marries, fathering two daughters. While commuting home from work one evening, he has a religious experience that causes him to regain his faith and renounce alcohol. Years later, he leaves banking and becomes a mystery writer, gleefully murdering people in print, then using a fictional duo to cleverly solve the crime.
Too implausible?
Not to William Love. It`s his life story.
Tall and lanky, Love sits in his study in his Hinsdale home, calmly reflecting on the curious twists and turns of his life`s journey. Dressed in a navy sweatshirt and forest green corduroy pants, his casual clothes match his informal, friendly manner.
With his silver hair and wire-rim glasses, Love looks like public television`s Bill Moyers . . . or a Presbyterian deacon.
Instead of living in community with other monks, he now lives in a home with his wife, Joyce, a nurse; two daughters: Barbara, 20, and Karen, 17; and two cats, Happy and Tigger.
The office reflects the man. A quick glance at the books lined up on his desk gives an abbreviated history of his life: ”The Complete Father Brown,” by G.K. Chesterton; ”Burden of Proof,” by Scott Turow; ”The City of God,” by Saint Augustine; a copy of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and the Collegeville Bible Commentary.
A large poster of his first book`s cover, ”The Chartreuse Clue,” with its green glowing letters, stands in contrast to the subtle earth tones of an Andrew Wyeth print on the wall.
When Love, a native of Oklahoma City, joined a Benedictine monastery in Oklahoma in 1952, he thought he was devoting the rest of his life to serving God. Although he enjoyed reading mysteries even then, he never thought he`d wind up writing them.
”I was 19 when I entered the monastery,” says Love, whose given name at birth was Frank but who took the religious name William. ”For a few years, I was really the ideal monk. I was ordained to the priesthood on my 26th birthday, and then was a priest for 11 years.”
But while the country was experiencing social upheaval during the `60s, Love was undergoing his own internal revolution: a spiritual one.
”During the time I was in the priesthood, my faith was eroding,” he says. ”I was drifting away from the things that I believed. Part of it was intellectual, part of it was having been sold on certain quote unquote truths of Christianity, such as birth control.
”But as peripheral opinions like that began to shake, then so did some fundamental, more important truths. And by the mid-`60s, I had pretty much lost any vestige of faith.”
In 1969, Love resigned. He wrote a letter to his abbot, then made an appointment to meet with him.
”To this very day, the abbot is a good friend; I feel great affection for him,” says Love. ”I went into his office to read my letter aloud to him. I was waiting to sign it in his presence, so when I finished reading it, I said, `Okay, shall I sign it?` Meaning, should we discuss it first, or should I sign it first?
”And he said, `Yeah, Father William, I really wish you would, because if you don`t sign it, people are going to say I wrote it myself.`
”It was a great comment; we both had a good laugh over it.”
Love left the monastery. He was 37, and had no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life.
”Oddly enough, when I left the priesthood, I wasn`t thinking about what I would do,” he says. ”I just knew I had to get out of the priesthood.”
His father suggested he consider banking.
”I rejected the idea immediately,” Love recalls. ”I thought, this is the last thing that I`m ever gonna do. It`s the most boring profession in the world. And frankly, there were times during my banking career that I wished it were a little more boring than it was. It got a little too exciting there at times, wondering whether people were going to pay their loans. But at the time, I thought it was too boring.
”I mentioned it to my brother, who was another successful businessman, and who never, never agreed with my dad on anything. And my brother`s reaction was, `Don`t laugh. I think he`s on to something here.`
”So I looked into banking, and the more I looked into it, the more intrigued I got by it.”
”The move out of the monastery was a surprise to everybody,” said Love`s brother Tom, who owns and operates a chain of fuel and food stores in the Southwest. ”I`m not sure the move into banking was as much of a surprise. The banking climate then was a lot different than today. There was a lot of room for creativity, exciting options. It was an exciting industry then.”
While still living in Oklahoma, Love applied to the First National Bank of Chicago; when he was accepted, he moved to the Chicago area and joined the bank`s First Scholar Program. The bank sent him to the University of Chicago to earn a master`s degree in business administration.
By this time, Love had already met Joyce and married her.
”It was a blind date,” said Joyce. ”I was 28 and he was 37, and by that time, you kind of know. When you`re attracted to someone, sometimes it`s just a chemistry thing. He was interesting, he was intelligent and fun. We met in September, and we were married in May.”
Joyce, a devout Catholic, wasn`t disturbed that her new husband had just left the priesthood.
”I wasn`t concerned about it,” she said, ”I guess because I hadn`t known him as a priest.”
Love stayed at First Chicago for 10 years, building a successful career. And although he had abandoned his faith years ago, Love still enjoyed reading the Bible. His routine was to board the Burlington Northern in Hinsdale and read the Wall Street Journal on the morning commute downtown; on his return trip, Love would read the Bible.
One day in November 1980, Love was following this routine as his train headed for Hinsdale.
”I was reading a passage from Deuteronomy, and it had to do with destroying the idols of the Philistines. It said something like: when you go into the land, you Israelites, don`t make peace with the people over there. I want you to take their idols and break them.
”The words were very alive for me as I was reading them. And I felt compelled to say: What is my idol? What is this supposed to say to me? What does this text mean to me in 1980?”
”And I heard this voice in my head. It`s the only time that I`ve ever had anything like this happen. The voice said: `Bill, your idol is drinking. And I want you to quit. I know you don`t think you can, but if you do, I will support you. Our relationship will really enter a new phase, if you can do this for me. And I`ll help you.”`
Stunned, Love told his wife about his experience when she picked him up at the station. She was surprised, because she had planned to talk with him that evening about his drinking.
”I had a few bad moments over the next week or two, but I probably went two or three years without drinking,” Love says.
He admits to drinking a beer every now and then, but limits himself to one and a half cans.
As a result of his experience on the train, Love returned to his faith. He became very involved with his church, St. Isaac Jogues in Hinsdale. He attends mass every morning and reads the Epistle. He sings in one of the choirs and helped initiate the Christian Service Commission, which reaches out to the needy.
”I think I`m a Catholic on a different level now. Before I was under the apprehension that if you were Catholic, you bought the whole thing. If the Pope came out and said it`s raining in Spain tomorrow, you`d say, that`s right, it`s raining in Spain tomorrow. That`s what a good Catholic said. And there`s something to be said for that, but that`s not the kind of Catholic I am.
”There are many things that the church says that I don`t buy. But I think the church happens to be right on abortion. I`m a Catholic, but I`m pro- birth control and anti-abortion.”
Father Donald Kocher of St. Isaac Jogues said, ”Bill is a person of deep faith. He`s very giving. He does just an immense amount of things around the parish. He`s very service-oriented.”
After working in banking for 14 years, Love went into business for himself as a consultant.
”I trained bankers in small banks, giving (the personnel) in small banks the training that the big banks give routinely,” he says. ”It was a nice job. I traveled around the country, the money was good. But then in the middle `80s, the big banks started swallowing up the little ones. Every time that happened, I lost a customer. By `88, my consulting work had pretty much dried up.”
Love began thinking about making another career change. On the advice and encouragement of long-time friend Richard Sneed, he began writing a book.
”Richard and I were priests together, 25 years ago,” says Love. ”He and I left the priesthood within a month of each other. He had been after me, he kept saying, `Why don`t you write? You`re such a good writer.`
”In the summer of `88, my wife and two daughters and I took two weeks in Spain and in southern France. When we came back, I wrote my mother, but it was such a long travelogue that I xeroxed it and sent Richard a copy. It was a 5,000-word travelogue of our travels through Spain.
”And I got a letter back from Richard. He said, `This is ridiculous. I got the travelogue, and I despise travelogues; they`re so boring. I read the first paragraph, and I was hooked. I read the whole thing in one sitting. You`re an incredible writer. You can make something boring interesting. And if you can make something boring interesting, then you can make something interesting publishable.` And I think that had its effect.”
Love also had the premise of a mystery novel percolating in his brain.
”It was a combination of those two things that got me excited enough to finally start writing,” he says.
For that first novel, Love`s premise was: What would happen if a priest woke up in a locked apartment with a murdered woman? The police would, of course, suspect the priest and fail to look for the real murderer. An innocent man would be arrested-and possibly sentenced-for a crime he didn`t commit.
”One disadvantage of the priesthood is that your reputation is both very fragile and very important,” says Love.
Love had always been an avid fan of the late mystery writer Rex Stout, who had created the famous crime-solving team of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Because he loved those characters so much, Love decided to use them in his novel. It didn`t occur to him until halfway through his book that he might not be able to use Stout`s people.
”Rex Stout died in `75,” says Love. ”Thirteen years had elapsed, and I thought, well, he`s been dead 13 years, maybe the statute of limitations has run out and I can use these characters. So I contacted the Rex Stout estate, and they immediately wrote back and said no, (Chicago author) Robert Goldsborough has the rights to the Rex Stout characters, and you can`t use them.
”I`d been a huge Rex Stout fan for so many years. I have all 71 of his stories. I was just hooked on the guy. In all the 20 years that I had this plot premise in my mind, I`d never conceived of it in any other way than a Nero Wolfe mystery. I wanted Nero Wolfe to have the case.”
Love was forced to create his own characters, and finally came up with his own team: Bishop Francis X. Regan, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, and his special assistant, wise-cracking Dave Goldman, an ex-cop-turned-private investigator and Jewish atheist.
”I think it was a brilliant marrying of two types of people,” said author Goldsborough. ”It was very good character development. That enabled him to do the kind of Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin thing, using different characters. So in a way, Bill was able to get his cake and eat it, too. He was able to able to create a kind of Wolfe-Goodwin kind of synergy between two very different kinds of people, but he created his own characters.
”Bill and I have been on three or four panels together (at mystery writing conferences) and we`ve become good friends. When we talk to a group of people, Bill will say, `I was so damn mad at this guy Goldsborough that he had beaten me to it,` and then he laughs.”
Love`s wife, Joyce, was not very enthusiastic about her husband`s new career.
”It was very difficult for me-and still is-because there is no security in writing,” she said. ”On top of that, he`s writing in my house-that was my territory. Initially, I didn`t think anything would come of his writing, and I don`t think he did either. He didn`t know whether it would be published or not. And I think he`s very good, but I think he`s also been lucky, and he`d admit that too. It`s quite a different lifestyle.”
Though Love has had four novels published, writing still isn`t paying all of the bills. He says this year he expects to take in $20,000 to $25,000 from his writing-the most since he began. But he and his wife still have to rely on savings and investments, as well a money that Joyce earns working part-time in the office of a pediatric neurologist.
Tom Love said he thinks the career move has worked out quite well for his brother.
”It sounds to me like one of those serendipitous occasions you stumble across occasionally as you go through life,” he said. ”I believe Bill`s happier doing what he`s doing now than he`s ever been in his life. He`s found his real life`s work.”
Love says writing his first book was probably the most enjoyable experience in his life, a ”peak experience.”
”I was obsessed with it, I was totally wrought up in it. I wrote it in six months, which is faster than anything I`ve written since,” he said.
Through a mutual friend, Love had submitted his manuscript to the New York literary agent Arthur Pine.
”We very seldom take on new, unknown, first-time writers,” said Pine,
”because the market is very, very tough. But a mutual friend, Hal Gershowitz, told me (Love`s manuscript) was very good, and would I mind looking at it. I had just sold a book that Hal had written. He`s a good friend, so I looked at the manuscript. And I said, the guy`s pretty good! He`s got two wonderful characters there.
”I could see this as something great that could be developing. And we took him on and sold it,” Pine said.
”The Chartreuse Clue” was bought and published by the New York company Donald I. Fine.
”I love the combination of characters, of a priest and a Jewish detective,” Pine said. ”That was very unusual, very clever.”
Love admits that Father Willie, who wakes up in the apartment with the dead woman, is based upon himself.
”There is an element of autobiography in it,” says Love. ”I lost my faith, I had a drinking problem, I was getting interested in women before I left the pristhood.”
Father Kocher said, ”I can see Bill in that book. It was a revelation of his person in many ways. For someone who knows Bill, you can really see a lot of him in that book.
”I think it`s just incredible that he got his first novel published. I don`t think that happens very often. I`ve heard of people who have a jillion of these things around and have never been accepted by a publisher.”
Although Love received mostly favorable reviews for his first book and many reviewers recognized his homage to Rex Stout`s characters, one of his most prized reactions is a letter from Bishop Joseph Imesch of the Joliet diocese.
His letter to Love reads in part: ”Congratulations! I have just had the chance to read `The Chartreuse Clue` and it was absolutely enthralling. I went to bed later than usual on several nights, and on a few of those I had to call upon every ounce of seminary learned discipline to go to bed! I thought the story moved rapidly and your characters were well developed. . . . It is also nice to read a mystery that is not saturated with sex or four-letter words. I hope you receive all the attention this book deserves.”
Love went on to write a second novel, ”The Fundamentals of Murder,” in which an out-of-town fundamentalist preacher is accused of murdering prostitutes. His just-published third book, ”Bloody Ten,” takes place in an off-Broadway theater setting. Love has handed in a fourth book to his publisher and is beginning work on a fifth.
Although the reviews of Love`s books are generally favorable, one continuing complaint is that his female characters are one-dimensional. Dave Goldman`s girlfriend, Ann Shields, seems to exist only as a foil for him.
”I`ve had one or two women say that I`m not good to one of them, that I`m not sufficiently feminist,” says Love. ”I take it very seriously.”
Love plans to continue his mystery series, but is considering writing other books as well.
”My agent wants me to try to branch out and write a non-mystery and perhaps reach out to other readers,” says Love.
Whatever genre his writing talents lead him to, Love said he has no trouble identifying his audience.
”I write for myself,” he said. ”I really try to write the kind of book I enjoy reading. And I can`t tell you what a great pleasure it is to find out that I can write a book I enjoy. I sure can`t paint a picture I enjoy, or do a poem or a piece of music, but I`ve found that I can write a book that I enjoy reading and rereading.”
