Harry Garnish & Sister Bridget O’Toole

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Created by Frank McConnell
(1942-99)

A sort of at times cozyish spin on A.A. Fair’s Donald Lam and Bertha Cool. Or is it Nero Wolfe and Archie?

Hard-drinking, chain-smoking, slow-thinking Skokie, Illinois private eye HARRY GARNISH has a big problem in life. And it isn’t his alcohol intake, his tobacco habit or his lack of speed in the cogitation department.

No, according to Harry, the biggest problem in life is SISTER BRIDGET O’TOOLE, a fat (okay, heavy-set), chronically-optimistic, goody-goody sixty-year-old nun who just happens to be his new boss.

Seems the good Sister inherited Chicago’s O’Toole Investigative Agency, where Harry works for, from her late brother Martin and she has no intention of selling off her share of the business to Harry. Instead, she insists in becoming involved in the agency’s cases, much to Harry’s chagrin.

There’s some sharp wit here, and some snappy and even salty patter. Questions of faith occasionally bubble to the surface, but are promptly swatted away like so many bothersome houseflies…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frank DeMay McConnell was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1942, and attended St. Xavier High School there, graduating from the University of Notre Dame summa cum laude in 1964, and receiving his M.A. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1968 from Yale with a dissertation on Wordsworth’s The Prelude. He taught at Cornell University and Northwestern University, before moving on to the English Department at the University of California Santa Barbara in 1981. Over the next 16 years he proved to be a quite popular and effective professor, lecturing on the Romantics, modern and contemporary American fiction, narrative, detective and science fiction, and Shakespeare.

Besides the four Garnish/O’Toole mysteries, his books include The Confessional Imagination: a Reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude (1974), The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination (1975), Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth and Pynchon (1977), Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature (1979), and The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells (1981). He also become the “media correspondent” for for the national lay Catholic journal, Commonweal, his columns romping widely over film, television, jazz, and books, covering everything from Seinfeld and Star Wars to Marshall McLuhan and Rush Limbaugh.

According to the UCSB web site, “With lectures at once passionate and irreverent, often ribald, he held classes of five to seven hundred students spellbound on subjects as diverse as science fiction and Shakespeare. His colleagues knew him as prodigiously wide in his learning—as well as brilliantly witty, always ready with a comic story of sharp quip.”

UNDER OATH

  • “… some laugh out loud moments making for a very enjoyable start to the series.
    — Vintage45 on Murder Among Friends
  • “McConnell ( Murder Among Friends ) regales us with a Rabelaisian epic in the latest assignment for PI Harry Garnish … It’s hard to part from McConnell’s characters at the resolution of this bawdy, tense, hilarious and deeply moving mystery>”
    — Publishers Weekly on The Frog King

NOVELS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

 

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