Ralph McInerny — a hundred books, thirty of them mysteries

1929–2010 · NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHY FACULTY, 1955–2009 · DIED IN SOUTH BEND

The tie. Ralph McInerny was born in Minneapolis on 24 February 1929 and came to the University of Notre Dame in 1955 to teach philosophy; he stayed fifty-four years, retired in the spring of 2009, and died in South Bend on 29 January 2010, the obituaries datelined from this city. The tie is the whole working life and the grave-side: the most prolific author this section records anywhere.

The shelf. More than a hundred books stand to his name — over two dozen works of Thomistic philosophy and theology and more than eighty novels. His first novel was Jolly Rogerson (1967). The fame is the Father Dowling mysteries: from Her Death of Cold (1977), twenty-nine novels in his lifetime through Stained Glass (2009), with a thirtieth, The Compassion of Father Dowling, published after his death in 2011; the television adaptation ran from a 1987 television movie into the series of 1989–1991 with Tom Bosley. The campus itself he mined in the Notre Dame mystery series — thirteen novels from On This Rockne (1997) to Sham Rock (2010), in which Knights of Malta endowment officers solve crimes on a campus any South Bend reader recognizes. Under the name Monica Quill he wrote ten Sister Mary Teresa mysteries from Not a Blessed Thing! (1981); the Andrew Broom legal mysteries run to six, from Cause and Effect (1987); the Egidio Manfredi pair began with Still Life (2000). His memoir, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), is the shelf's own account of itself. His scholarly standing — the Michael P. Grace Professorship, the directorship of the Jacques Maritain Center — stands in the university's record; the hundred books stand here.

Sources:

1. EBSCO research biography — born in Minneapolis 24 February 1929; the Notre Dame faculty years 1955–2009; more than a hundred books; the memoir (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); the death in South Bend, 29 January 2010.
2. The author's obituary record — the Father Dowling series from Her Death of Cold (1977), the television movie of 1987 and the series of 1989–1991, and the Notre Dame series of thirteen novels beginning On This Rockne (1997).
3. Series bibliographies (Order of Books; FictionDB) — the full Father Dowling order, twenty-nine lifetime novels through Stained Glass (2009) and the posthumous The Compassion of Father Dowling (2011); the Monica Quill and Andrew Broom series.