Catholic Thriller Writer uses Supernatural as a Probe (part two)

By Steve Weatherbe

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 Air 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.