Peter's Pence
by Jon Cleary
Summary
The plan, as pitched inside an IRA splinter cell, has a mad elegance: rob the Vatican. Peter's Pence, the faithful's annual offering to Rome, plus the treasures of the papal collections, would fund the armed struggle for a generation, and the operation's inside man is Fergus McBride, an Irish American journalist handling press matters inside the Vatican, a lapsed believer whose posting gives him useful knowledge of the corridors and a conscience he considers safely retired.
Cleary runs the heist's assembly with professional relish, the cell's hard men and its dreamers, the floor plans, the timing against the liturgical calendar, and then springs the novel's pivot: the robbery goes wrong in the one way nobody planned for, and the crew improvises catastrophically upward, taking the Pope himself. What follows converts the caper into a moral pressure chamber. A hostage pontiff who receives his kidnappers with unnerving serenity; a Vatican and an Italian state negotiating with incompatible priorities; the cell fracturing between those who wanted funds and those who wanted history; and Kilfeather, the book's centre, discovering that lapsed is not the same as finished, his complicity curdling scene by scene toward a choice the novel has the nerve to price honestly.
The texture is the pleasure: Cleary's Rome runs on espresso, protocol and ancient institutional cunning, the Church itself emerging as the story's most formidable operator.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the seventies thriller at its most audacious premise, executed with craftsmanship and an unexpected theological aftertaste.
Historical Context & Significance
Peter's Pence won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1975, the second Australian winner of the American prize, twenty one years after Charlotte Jay's founding win, and its author's byline was among the era's most reliable: Jon Cleary, Sydney born, wrote a book a year for half a century, more than fifty novels including The Sundowners, filmed with Mitchum and Kerr, and the long running Scobie Malone police series that made him Australian crime fiction's founding professional.
The book's premise rode the decade's fascination with both terrorism and the Vatican, arriving between the era's actual hijackings and the conspiracy literature that would bloom around the Church's finances; reviewers enjoyed the collision of thriller machinery with genuine moral seriousness, the Cleary signature.
The Edgar sits oddly and appropriately in his career: a writer often filed as a popular storyteller taking the genre's top honour over the period's fashionable names, craft rewarded. He wrote on for three more decades, dying in 2010 with the fifty book shelf complete.