Catholic Thriller Writer Uses Supernatural as a Probe (part one)

By Steve Weatherbe
(This article also appeared in the National Catholic Register)

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.”

(come back for part two, tomorrow)