a thriller writer’s religious experience

I started my first blog two years ago: it never got off the ground partly because its subject was a bit vague: thrillers and mysteries by Christian authors, but not explicitly Christian in content or theme. Not Gospel book store stuff, in other words, but books by the likes of James Lee Burke and Dean Koontz, aimed at the secular market, but including an understated affirmation of Christian values. If you want to recommend anyone, please comment or send me a blog at steve.weatherbe@gmail.com
Anyway, one of my favorite fiction writers is Michael Gruber, though for 15 years I thought his name by Robert K. Tanenbaum,. I just interviewed him for the National Catholic Register. Here’s my story on him.

Catholic thriller writer uses supernatural as a probe
By Steve Weatherbe

When thriller writer Michael Gruber had his first religious experience, he was in the middle of a personal crisis that produced symptoms of self-destructiveness, hypochondria and agoraphobia, especially on airplanes.
He was also on a flight from New York to Seattle, and in the middle of a thunderstorm.
I was aware of a Presence
“The overhead compartments we’re popping open, the bags were falling out, “he recalled in a recent interview with the Register, “and I had what I can only call a very profound religious experience. I was aware of a Presence. I was being spoken to by it—and at that moment the turbulence stopped.”
Until then Gruber, who has written seven novels since 2003 under his own name and ghostwritten 15 of the highly successful Karp-Ciampi legal thrillers for cousin Robert K. Tanenbaum, had been an agnostic, though a lapsing one.
“I’d read a lot of Simone Weil, who was Jewish too, and thought that, though I was attracted by Christianity like her, I could never be baptized a Christian,” he told the Register in a recent phone interview occasioned by the publication of his latest novel, The Good Son.
The day after the thunderstorm, while sitting in the pews at Seattle’s St. James Cathedral for an RCIA service in which his wife was a sponsor, he pondered his spiritual isolation. “When the priest elevated the Host and said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God,’ it was like a shock wave radiating out from it.’”
He asked himself, ‘What would it be like to accept that something unique was happening here and 2000 years ago in Palestine? And at that moment, suddenly, I did accept it.” (He was baptized in 2001 and now teaches RCIA himself.)
Gruber had actually been imagining what having faith would be like for several years in his legal thrillers revolving around the marriage of Butch Karp, a cerebral, secular, Jewish prosecuting attorney in New York City, and Marlene Ciampi, a hot-headed, liberal Catholic private detective. “It was a domestic comedy: how two people cope with huge differences, raise an unusual family and still love each other,” he says.—leaving out the suspense and frequent violence.
While most genre serials, such as Robert B. Parker’s Spenser detective books, feature an unchanging protagonist encountering new challenges, the Karp-Ciampi family changes.
True, Karp remained noble and stoic at the insistence of Robert Tanenbaum, the retired lawyer who had conceived the series in 1984, and then left all the writing to Gruber.
But in the course of the 15 books, Marlene is blinded in one eye, becomes a vigilante more than willing to take the law into her own hands Sicilian-style, falls into alcoholism and recovers, and leaves her husband; one son is blinded in both eyes, and her daughter Lucy matures from being a mere linguistic genius to a mystic who communes with saints.
“To write about Lucy I had to imagine what it would be like to have such faith,” says Gruber.
Significantly, Lucy became his most interesting character and he proposed to his cousin that he write a novel, and perhaps a new series, about her alone, under his own name, while continuing to pen the main series as Tanenbaum’s silent partner. His cousin balked.
So after 10 million copies sold, Gruber quit the relationship, triggering his emotional crisis, his conversion, and his emergence as a novelist in his own right—and write.
Gruber says he never expected to be a novelist at all, though he had always planned to be a writer. “I thought it would non-fiction. I thought I would enter the New York literary scene as copy editor, work may way up and then write my own books.”

Meeting Catholicism through Thomas Merton
Raised in a secular Jewish home in Brooklyn, he followed the plan to Columbia University, where he first encountered Catholicism in the still vibrant memory of Thomas Merton. Merton had edited a literary magazine at Columbia in his undergraduate days and Gruber now held down the same job. “I even got his old desk,” he recalls. He also read his books and mulled the problem Merton posed for him: “It was hard to believe someone like him could become a monk.”
When Gruber’s plan for himself grew too oppressive, he jumped ship and studied science instead, getting a PhD and becoming a policy analyst with an ascending series of governments, reaching the White House during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
Along the way, the Karp-Ciampi series came out of the blue, when his cousin, a prominent Manhattan district attorney, asked for help on a novel. “I wrote it as a lark, but it was successful and they asked for more,” he says.
That ill-fated series now lurches on with a new writer and diminished sales, while Gruber continues to get phone calls from unhappy readers of the original books who’ve just learned about his departure.
As for the novels he has written since, he readily admits that most have not even approached the popularity of the Karp-Ciampi books. “I’m a cult writer now. I have a cult readership.”
The sole best seller was The Book of Light and Shadows, premised on the possibility that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic who wrote a lost play about Mary, Queen of Scots.
A domestic comedy with guns
Like most of his books it is a domestic comedy with guns, as the plot moves back and forth in time between Shakepeare’s England—and the New York of literary lawyer Jake Mishkin, whose marriage is broken.
Mishkin is something of secret Catholic too—to himself. The protagonist hunts for the lost manuscript while he hunts for love in all the wrong places, and finally seems fated to end up with the wife –and faith–he started with, but maybe not the lost play.
In his latest, The Good Son, he tells of a Catholic, Jungian therapist, long married into a Pakistani Muslim family, who is kidnapped by El Qaeda terrorists and rescued by her son, an American special forces operator. As always, there is lots of gunplay and keen observation of family dynamics. As a bonus, there is Jungian dreamwork and trenchant criticism of both Western hedonism and Islamic misogyny.
Gruber says his basic approach is to probe at the “reductionist” and scientific assumptions of Western culture. As his pokers, he sometimes uses Catholicism and sometimes the supernatural, Christian, pagan, or both. The results, for many, make for good reading.