You never know. Maybe the success of the Edward Berger movie Conclave will spur a revival in the Vatican thriller? Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci done up as cardinals with a big decision to make has certainly sold a fair few cinema tickets this winter. The inner sanctums of the Catholic Church, the world of Vatican City, its arcane rituals, security and internal squabbles have appealed way beyond those who’ve ever sat through mass. The movie was of course based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Robert Harris who’s previously deep-dived other secretive institutions – the inner circles of the Nazi Party as well as the Cicero Trilogy inside the Roman Empire’s Senate. In Conclave 118 cardinals from all over the world are sequestered behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pope. Internal politics, theocratic wranglings, possible corruption, hidden secrets… electing a pope was never more exciting than in Harris’s hands.
Within the Vatican is the famed library (apparently containing a massive collection of medieval pornography and one of only two original copies of Dante’s Inferno) and the Catholic Church’s secret archives. In David Leadbetter’s fast-paced action thriller The Vatican Secret (2022) ex-Mi5 agent Joe Mason is sent to Rome to guard an elderly professor and his daughter who toil by day in the Vatican archives. It should be a cushy job but then a masked assassin shoots the professor in the confines of Vatican City. It all seems to lead to the theft of the “Vatican Book of Secrets” (I don’t think such a book actually exists BTW) that contains information that could bring down the religion as we know it.
The Vatican archives are the setting for Gary McAvoy’s nine book series of Vatican Secret Archive thrillers. Beginning with The Vivaldi Cipher (2021) starts with the election of a new Pope in the mid-18th century, famed violinist Antonio Vivaldi learns of a ring of art forgers who are replacing the Vatican’s priceless treasures with expertly-painted fakes. Three hundred years later, the confession of a dying Mafia Don alerts a Venetian priest to a wealth of forged paintings in the Vatican Museum. Father Michael Dominic, prefect of the Secret Archives, investigates, with the help of a French commando and two valiant Swiss Guards.
Real events creep into the series too. For instance The Opus Dictum (2022) begins in 1982 when Italian financier Roberto Calvi, known as “God’s Banker,” was discovered hanging under London’s Blackfriars Bridge. True story – but now Father Michael Dominic and his team (the ones from before plus some gutsy nuns) investigate and confront rogue Masons, kidnappers, and blackmailers. Over the remainder of the series Father Dominic teams up with Chicago cops, heads to Notre Dame in Paris, to Jerusalem, the English countryside and, of course, invariably back into the Vatican.
Of course usually the Vatican is a relatively sedate and calm place. As it is at the start of Gyles Brandreth’s The Vatican Murders (2011, and the fifth in his Victorian Murders series, sometimes published as Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders). It’s 1892 and Arthur Conan Doyle is intrigued when he first begins to receive mysterious packages from a Roman address mailed to his famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. So, naturally Conan Doyle and his good friend, eeerrr… Oscar Wilde (of course famously the two did dine together at the Langham Hotel in London in 1899 brought together by the American publisher and editor J M Stoddart), head to Italy where they connect the parcels to the disappearance of a young girl and to Vatican City. If you fancy the series in other books Conan Doyle and Wilde solve crimes in London, Paris and English country houses, all in a very cozy style.
Shawn Raymond Pawillo’s The Vatican Cop (2019) is a time jumping novel from 2019. In 325 AD the Roman Catholic Church is finally accepted through Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. But another agreement is made in secret to hide things that could one day shatter the religion. And that day looks like being in 2019. Special Agent Michael Poe is summoned to the Vatican to retrieve them before they are used in an unspeakable plot to destroy far more than a religion. This is the last in a four-book series featuring Special Agent Poe.
I’m afraid I’ve only been able to scratch the surface of Vatican City-set thrillers, mysteries and crime novels. That’s without including any true crime books or scandal-mongering books. But we can’t finish just yet…
Finally, dare we mention Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code? And why should we worry if we do mention him? Well, lots of readers love Brown’s six-book Robert Langdon series and, to be honest, lots of readers hate them! In fact it became particularly fashionable to hate on Brown and Langdon. And then there’s the issue of whether or not his books are anti-Catholic? The first book in the series, Angels and Demons (2009), does feature the Vatican and (to go back to where we started this Crime and the City) begins with a conclave – the College of Cardinals assembling to elect a new pope. Symbologist and Harvard professor Robert Langdon must confront the Illuminati, a secret brotherhood presumed extinct for nearly 400 years, reborn to continue their deadly vendetta against their most hated enemy, the Catholic Church. The Da Vinci Code (2010, and by far the best seller in the series) continues Langdon’s tussles with the Illuminati, this time in Paris and with the works of Leonardo Da Vinci involved. It’s Masonic secrets and Washington DC in the third book, The Lost Symbol (2009), then back to Italy for book four, Inferno (2013), which references Dante’s Inferno a lot, Barcelona for book five, Origin (2017) and for the final book (out later in 2025), The Secret of Secrets, we’re off to Prague.
So while Langdon may be battling the Vatican’s enemy, the Illuminati, Brown still gets in hot water. For instance in Then Da Vinci Code it is suggested that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, which led to protests by practising Catholics. Brown himself admits to no particular religion but that he does find the often-arcane nature of the Vatican fascinating.
And that’s what all these books, and the many others set in and around Vatican City (which is only 120 acres, surrounded by the Italian city of Rome, has an official population of 764 and is officially the world’s smallest sovereign state) have in common – very few people know what goes on in the corridors and meeting rooms of the Vatican and that makes the place endlessly fascinating and great fodder for crime writers.
