All the elements... religion, murder, mystery
Woonsocket native Russell Pennington — the brother of a former city policeman — pens suspenseful novel ‘The Last Good Christian’
Two days before Christmas in 1968, firefighters gingerly lower themselves on ropes from the Court Street bridge to retrieve a body ensnared in the craggy, iceslicked rocks at the edge of the frigid Blackstone River.
From the heavy black cloak covering the body, the recovery crew can see the victim is a priest. Then, in the inky dark night, there’s something not quite so obvious. “Don’t look like this one was a jumper,” a firefighter says, noticing the ear-to-ear gash across the cleric’s throat. No, this grisly discovery didn’t really happen – it’s the opening scene of a work of fiction by city native and longtime resident Russell Pennington, “The Last Good Christian.” Though Pennington hasn’t lived in the city for a while, his 235-page novel about a serial killer obsessed with dispatching priests to their heavenly reward is largely set in Woonsocket and other Rhode Island locations.
Judging from the attention to forensic detail in this mystery thriller, you’d think Pennington might have been a cop, like his brother, former Woonsocket Detective Ronald Pennington of Burrillville.
But he wasn’t a policeman, and never wanted to be one, says Pennington, who was born in Woonsocket and lived here or in nearby Massachusetts for many years. A 1959 graduate of Woonsocket High School, Pennington, 75, once lived in Morin Heights
Boulevard at a time when the complex was considered the state of the art in public housing.
“I really liked it there,” he says.
In addition to his brother he has two sisters who live just outside Woonsocket and “a good friend who lives in Shacktown,” better known, perhaps, as the city’s Oak Grove section. But today Pennington splits his time between residences in Uncasville, Connecticut, and Lauderdale by the Sea, Florida.
Once employed by the now-defunct Draper Corporation – a leading fabricator of textile spinning machinery in Hopedale, Mass., back in the day – Pennington worked most of his life as a tool design engineer.
But he says it was his passion for history that drove him to take up writing fiction as a hobby a few years before he retired in his mid-50s. Specifically, Pennington says he’s fascinated by the calamity of The Inquisition in the Middle Ages – that bizarre and violent chapter in the evolution of Catholicism when the church went on a murderous rampage to purge the faithless from its ranks. Depending on who’s counting, The Inquisition started in Europe around the beginning of 13th century and endured to claim thousands of lives through torture and execution for hundreds of years.
“I’ve had a lifelong interest in the Middle Ages,” says Pennington. “If you read the book you’re going to see it’s all about The Inquisition. It’s just unbelievable what was done in the name of religion. The church knew what was best for everybody and to get what it wanted they killed people and tortured people. If you read the book, that’s the message. It’s not really sub- liminal. It’s the message.”
So what about that corpse under the Court Street Bridge?
Well, as we learn through the colorful and carefully crafted literary elocutions of “The Last Good Christian,” it turns out he was a rather stern disciplinarian when he ran Mount St. Michael’s, a Christian academy that sounds suspiciously like another well-known prep school in the city. A priest of the Dominican order, like the Inquisition-era predecessors behind the ghoulish purge of the Cathar sect, his behaviormodification techniques had a rather dramatic impression in molding the character of one of his students, Bert Landry.
Landry is a troubled individual.
“He’s a religious fanatic,” says Pennington. “In 1968, he murders the priest from St. Michael’s who’s brought in as a disciplinarian. In 1996, a second Dominican priest is killed, then a third. There turns out to be five of them. He’s taking revenge on Dominicans for what they did during The Inquisition.”
The heroes of the story are Providence Police Detective Georgette Dube and an amateur novelist (and also a retired toolmaker), Trip Allen. As they zero in on the killer’s motive and identity “they come to the attention of the killer and he targets them,” the author explains.
PENNINGTON says he wrote a first draft of the book over a decade ago with an eye toward getting one of the big publishing houses interested in distributing it.
“I wrote this book in 2003 and it took about two years,” he says. “I’ve been trying to peddle it ever since. Last year I retitled it, fleshed it out a little and decided that since I’m 75 I was going to have to sell it myself if I ever wanted to see it in print.”
Like so many who aspire to see their literary work in circulation, Pennington selfpublished the book, using a company called EPIC Publishing Services. The arrangement allows him simultaneously market the title and order up copies for distribution to customers on an as-needed basis.
“I just published it last month, and it’s available in print and e-books through Amazon and Barnes & Noble,” he says.
The book features some rather handsome cover art – a graphic image of a lone pedestrian traversing a steel truss bridge on a snowy night. It’s unclear whether the human silhouette on the deck is completely unaware of the ghastly figure splayed on the blood-splashed water below or – a more chilling possibility – emotionally untethered to the carnage.
Pennington says he’s giving out complimentary copies to anyone in a position to review the book and hopes to drum up enough exposure for it to be picked up by “a real publisher.”
Pennington’s not only got drive, he’s got style – a finely-tuned ear for language that’s evident from the very first scene-setting lines of the book:
“The crowded city of textile mills and tenements straddling the Blackstone River didn’t see the year’s first murder until the day that the spy ship Pueblo’s crew was released by the North Koreans, one day before Apollo 8 was to enter Moon orbit… A riverine place, it had several bridges, the longest and highest of which was that on Court Street… The bridge loomed eighty feet above a body snagged on the rocks in the frigid river. Pallid winter sun filtered down through the aged grating and projected shadowed diamonds downward to the corpse and to the fire trucks, squad cars, and spectators lining the snowcovered riverbanks.”
Pennington’s description of the bridge is accurate for the 1960s, when it was among the few remaining steel-grate deck bridges in the state. The deck is now concrete.
Pennington calls himself “a voracious reader,” a habit that certainly helps him write well.
He’s already at work on his second novel – another one that draws on an iconic institution and a chapter of its history that it might rather forget. It’s about the San Patricios, which is Spanish for the Saint Patricks, a group of U.S. Army deserters who joined Mexico to fight for the enemy in the Mexican-American War. Eventually, the Army caught up with the Patricios and sentenced about 50 of them to death by hanging.
Though “The Last Good Christian” is informed by events that rocked the Catholic church hundreds of years ago, Pennington says it has a message about religious extremism that’s completely relevant today.
“There are religious fanatics in all faiths and there’s been some horrible things done in the name of religion by many of them,” he says. “It’s about organized religion and in this particular case it was the church. They did terrible things in the name of religion and they did it to save souls.”