William Kent Krueger’s matter-of-factly Catholic action hero

By Steve Weatherbe William Kent Krueger is a Minnesota writer responsible for an enjoyable series of detective thrillers, all featuring “Cork” O’Connor, the part-Ojibway, sometime sheriff of the resource-turned-tourism town of Aurora. He’s an appealingly flawed hero, an impulsive hothead, briefly an adulterer but generally faithful, doting father of three, and an on-again, off-again Catholic. His latest book, just out and as-yet unread by me, is Northwest Angle, the title being the name of a remote corner of Minnesota cut off from the rest of the state by Lake of the Woods (down the middle of which runs the international boundary) and by the Canadian landmass. Like many of the series, a lot of the action takes place in the “Boundary Waters” (title of another book in the series) that lie along the Canada-USA border and was a canoe route for the French and Scottish Canadian voyageurs and fur traders from Montreal to Winnipeg and the prairies (the Pays d’en haut as the voyageurs called it). I know all this because as a young man I padded along the same canoe route from lake Superior to Winnipeg over hundred of portages and along many creeks, rivers and lakes, providing nourishment for thousands of mosquitoes, black flies and no-see’ems. Doing some back-filling, I just read an earlier book in the series, Heaven’s Keep, in which Cork’s wife goes missing along with a small plane full of Indian leaders (she is lawyer for the local tribe). Typically, Catholicism features incidentally in the plot: a priest provides a crucial link in the chain of evidence that leads Cork to his wife; an important meeting with two others looking for kinfolk on the plane is scheduled for “after mass” –through Cork’s subsequent attendance at mass with his son is taken for granted and not described. His family’s faith is sometimes just background; at others, such as when Cork’s wife goes missing, it is challenged. Some in his family pray; others lose faith. One will go on to become a nun. I expect Cork will someday go down to Nicaragua to investigate her murder or someone else’s murder at her behest. In the next book in the series, with his children grown and moved away, he has stopped attending church, but showing continued interest in native spirituality—dreams, quests and so on. So without making a big deal of it, Catholicism is presented as a legitimate means of dealing with the spiritual dimension, and one not in conflict with native religion. But it is not preached as a certainty by the author, but merely included as part of the makeup of some of the characters, and as a feature of life, mostly positive. I don’t think any non-Catholic or non-Christian readers would be turned off. Meanwhile, the writing is good: brisk, with good description punctuated with hot action, that together move the stories forward in a pleasing rhythm. There are plenty of interesting characters, and heartwarming and realistic family interactions. I recommend the series. A decade later, the series went on and its hero lost his Catholic faith, replacing it with Native American animism. I'm neither impressed nor convinced but such a shift is far from implausible.The author's writing skills are undiminished, although his plots do run out steam before the story is over on occasion. The author turns to not be a Catholic at all but writing about the faith from afar. In one novel he describes how some faithful Catholics have that faith weakened when they pray for delivery fro peril and it apparently comes not. I hope Christians of all varieties have deeper fate than that, and pray more often than that. Krueger has written some very well novels set in the Depression with youthful heroes which treat faith healers sympathetically, and one with Cork O'Connor himself as a youth, helping his sheriff father solve a crime that threatens to pit the local white and native communities against each other. read them all.