Given the novel’s strong sense of place, Debra decided to include maps of featured locations in the paperback edition of The Mystery of Things.

Illustrated by John Murphy, there are five maps in all, which can be viewed individually (click on the links) or downloaded as a .pdf suitable for printing. We hope this will be especially helpful for those readers who have the hardcover edition without maps.

Also, be sure and check out the “places” pages of our people-places-things section for more information about individual locations, such as Milwaukee City Hall or Holy Hill.

The Maps:

Many of the leading characters in The Mystery of Things are students or faculty of the Heisler Institute for the Study of Western Civilization on Milwaukee’s east side overlooking Lake Michigan. An institute for graduate studies in the Liberal Arts with an emphasis on Western history, literature and culture, the Institute is, of course, fictional, but its inspiration has roots in the numerous privately-funded and founded Catholic colleges and universities that have sprung up since Vatican II—institutions such as Christendom College, Thomas Aquinas College and Ave Maria University. Seen by supporters as more orthodox alternatives to older Catholic institutions of higher learning that have been led down a primrose path of secularism, and by opponents as bastions of reaction, the new institutions have often proved loci of controversy, both at the local and ecclesial level. And so it is in the novel with the Heisler Institute.

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter One from the perspective of the protagonist, James Iregon, a doctoral candidate in Shakespeare Studies:

At the top of the bluff the path opened out near the Water Tower, a city landmark in Victorian Gothic. Beyond that, rising higher still with adolescent hubris in Cream City brick and blue-green glass, stood the newly completed Heisler Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.

According to its own glossy brochure, the Heisler Institute was a place of advanced study dedicated to the principle that Art and Idea shape the structure of our world. Or perhaps more accurately, James thought, given the pugilistic temperament of its patron, “Mad” Max Heisler, a gauntlet thrown in the face of godless postmodernism.

Pushing through the Institute’s mahogany doors, James entered the Institute’s diamond-shaped atrium. Open to the full height of the tower’s seven stories, the atrium’s overhanging galleries met a sharply pitched roof of turquoise glass. The tower’s eastern window jutted out over the lake like the prow of a ship, flooding the atrium’s white marble floor in muted, swimming light. Tiny human figures passed to and fro high above on the upper galleries, like pilgrims making their haphazard way to some empyrean blue-green heaven. The nautical motifs notwithstanding, skeptical members of the local media had already dubbed the place “St. Max’s Cathedral.”

“‘Mad’ Max Heisler,” read one Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial, “great Lakes Bank CEO and the wealthiest and most controversial businessman in town, has built his museum of antiquated ideals, his cenotaph for Dead White European Males, the way medieval kings built chantries and cathedrals—in atonement for their sins.” In some circles the place was known as “Heisler’s Folly.”

Debra Murphy’s inspiration for the Heisler Institute building itself is the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Debra’s alma mater and hometown. (For shots of the Beckman Insitute’s atrium, designed by architect click here, here and here. Debra’s imagined a diamond shaped atrium rather than a rectangular one, and surrounded by galleries, rather than galleries just on one end, but you get the idea.) Any woman, and indeed man knows just how spectacular diamonds are. The shape of a diamond is entirely unrivaled. Having a ring on your finger from 77-Diamonds or somewhere similar is great but having a diamond shape building is something else. The shape really does offer so much potential. Designed by the architectural firm of Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, the Beckman Institute building was funded (much like tMoT’s fictional Heisler Insitute) by the generous $40M donation of Arnold and Mabel Beckman.

Click here for the novel’s map illustration of Milwaukee’s east side, giving the fictional location of the Heisler Institute. Below is a Google map centered on the same area.

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The “Scenic Tower” is the right hand tower (if you’re facing the facade) of the  Holy Hill Basilica. It features prominently in several key scenes of The Mystery of Things.

Here is a gallery of photos taken by the author’s daughter, Rachel Murphy, from inside and outside the Scenic Tower. Click on the thumbnails for the larger pictures.

While the word “cult” has the general meaning of any particular form of worship involving rituals and a specific theology, in recent times it has taken on an additional and largely sinister meaning; i.e., of “a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.” (Dictionary.com). Such groups can be found both as autonomous entities and religions or as communities/groups/organizatons within a larger established religion, such as Catholicism.

In the case of cults within a larger established religion, one may not necessarily find evidence of obvious “heterodoxy”, although the group will likely overemphasize one or more doctrines at the expense of others, but one will always find evidence of “heteropraxis”. This heteropraxis usually includes an extreme value being placed on obedience and loyalty to a leader who views himself as having received a special vocation directly from God for some special mission of great importance. Given fallen human nature, such leaders tend to become increasingly grandiose and make increasingly totalitarian demands on the lives and consciences of their adherents, sometimes with tragic consequences, such as at Jonestown.

In The Mystery of Things, this phenomenon, and its potential effects on individuals, is explored in the guise of SANA, the fictional “Student Apostolate of North America” described by the novel’s protagonist, James Ireton, as “a more-Catholic-than-the-Pope faction of devotees whose steel plated leader, Peter Krato, served up new daily dogmas with the communal breakfast sausage.”

Along non-fictional lines (although occasionally referencing the novel) Debra Murphy has also published (on her blog and CatholicExchange.com) a series of articles on the nature of Catholic cults in connection with the recent scandal involving the founder of the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi. At the time of this writing, those groups are being investigated by the Vatican after it was revealed (after years of complaints by ex-members that had gone largely ignored) that Fr. Maciel, the founder, had father illegitimate children at the same time that he and his leaders were encouraging the LC/RC members to view him as a living saint.

For an in-depth discussion of the phenonmenon of cult-like activities within the Church, see Debra Murphy’s series:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Forum on Catholic Exchange
Part 3: People–and Cultures–of the Lie
Part 4: Transparency
Part 5: Public Face vs. Private Face
Part 6: Relevant Articles
Part 7: Conscience in Canon Law and the New Movements
Part 8: False Conscience and its Bitter Fruits
Part 9: More Relevant Links
Part 10: Q & A with canon lawyer Pete Vere
Part 11: False Conscience and True Obedience

Question: Tell us something about The Mystery of Things.

Debra Murphy: It’s essentially St. George-vs-the-Dragon in the form of a modern mystery-thriller. In keeping with the Elizabethan motifs in the book, the version of the St. George tale that I borrow from is the Redcrosse Knight/Una story in Book I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. And of course I also steal liberally from Shakespeare, particularly Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear.

Q: Where did the idea for the book come from?

DM: Thereby hangs a tale. I was on a weekend retreat at the Carmelite Shrine of Holy Hill in southeastern Wisconsin—praying, among other things, about my sense of having a vocation to write, though I didn’t know about what in particular. As it happens, I tend to be deeply affected by places and locations, and Holy Hill is incredibly atmospheric, rather like a European abbey or (at least at night or in winter) something out of Daphne Du Maurier. One afternoon as I climbed to the viewing platform at the top of the shrine’s Scenic Tower—it’s the highest point in southeastern Wisconsin, I understand—it suddenly hit me that this would be a terrific place to set a climactic battle between good and evil in the form of a contemporary murder mystery. Within a day’s time I had my main characters and basic plot. Of course, it took me another fourteen years to finish, polish, and get the thing published, but that’s another story.

Q: Was it a conscious decision from the beginning to work with a St. George and the Dragon theme?

DM: Not originally. I knew from the beginning I wanted to weave Shakespearean themes into it, by way of the protagonist being a Shakespeare scholar, but the St. George business actually came as a complete surprise to me. I was doing background research on Elizabethan literature, reading a variety of Shakespeare’s precursors and contemporaries—stuff I figured my characters would have read in the course of their graduate studies—when I happened to pick up Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. Book I is Spenser’s treatment of the classic St. George-and-the- Dragon story, and I was absolutely pole-axed to discover that Spenser’s plot and characters mirrored my own plot and characters right down to the ground. It was really quite uncanny. There’s nothing new under the sun, I guess. And of course every writer is familiar with the idea of there being only “33 Basic Plots” or “nine basic plots,” or whatever-you-will, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that I had somehow managed to tap into a very old story.

In any event, after that, I couldn’t resist the opportunity of weaving in that extra layer of meaning, particularly since it had an Elizabethan origin. It’s by no means essential to know all this to enjoy the story, but it does add a bit of something extra for those readers who are into such things.

Q: Which you obviously are. What is Shakespeare’s attraction for you?

DM: There’s no bottom to Shakespeare. You can read or see his plays a hundred times and still not reach the end of Shakespeare’s insights and conundrums and layers of meaning.

And then there’s the unparalleled richness and extravagance of his language. We live in a time that has grown so accustomed to the spare minimalism of the Hemingway school of writing that we sometimes forget that there’s more than one way to tell a story. As a writer, I’ve found it very liberating. I would even say that spending a lot of time with Shakespeare has inspired me to throw off my temperamental timidity and get a little wild and woolly with the language sometimes, when I think the scene calls for it.

Finally, Shakespeare is impossible to pin down on almost anything. Incredibly slippery. Which makes it very easy for all of his fans, as diverse as they are, to read themselves and their obsessions into his work. It’s one reason, I think, that the so-called “Authorship Question” refuses to go away. You’d be amazed how many lawyers swear up and down that Shakespeare must have been a lawyer. Ditto “nobleman” and “courtier” and “doctor” and “Catholic” and “Jew” and “alchemist” and “Freemason” and who knows what all. In that sense, Shakespeare is completely unprecedented. The original literary Everyman.

Q: You tackle some pretty serious themes in the book: Religious redemption and religious fundamentalism; the ecology of evil; the so-called “language of the body” and the potentially destructive marriage of sex and violence in our contemporary culture, which John Paul II described as threatening to become a “culture of death”…these are the sorts of subjects usually dealt with in literary novels, or theological treatises. Why write a thriller, of all things?

DM: The best answer I can give you is to quote from an essay G.K.Chesterton wrote in 1930 called “The Ideal Detective Story.”

There is one aspect of the detective story which is almost inevitably left out in considering the detective stories. That tales of this type are generally slight, sensational, and in some ways superficial, I know better than most people, for I have written them myself. If I say there is in the abstract something quite different, which may be called the Ideal Detective Story, I do not mean that I can write it. I call it the Ideal Detective Story because I cannot write it. Anyhow, I do think that such a story, while it must be sensational, need not be superficial. In theory, though not commonly in practice, it is possible to write a subtle and creative novel, of deep philosophy and delicate psychology, and yet cast it in the form of a sensational shocker.

The essence of a mystery tale is that we are suddenly confronted with a truth which we have never suspected and yet can see to be true. There is no reason, in logic, why this truth should not be a profound and convincing one as much as a shallow and conventional one.

Like Chesterton, I have no hope of writing “the Ideal Detective Story”; but, like Chesterton, I also love detective stories and the pursuit of truth. To go for a bit of both in one story is my way of trying to come up with a novel that’s both entertaining on a superficial level, and satisfying―or at least challenging―on a deeper level.

Q: The Mystery of Things has a strong sense of place. And yet most mysteries and especially thrillers are set in cities like New York or Los Angeles or Chicago. Why, besides the fact that you lived in the area for twelve years, did you choose to set your novel in Milwaukee?

DM: I love Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin. Or I should say, I love everything about it except January, February, and March. Even so, we only moved to the Pacific Northwest because that’s where the extended family was, and we thought that was important to be close to them while our children were growing up.

Besides, Milwaukee has (I think) a wholly undeserved reputation for being a bowling-alley, blue-collar town, probably because of shows like Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and Wayne’s World. While that “biggest small town in the country” image is true to a degree, and part of the city’s comfort and charm, Milwaukee is also an architecturally beautiful city, and its history has made it one of the most ethnically interesting in the country. I can think of no other American city which so reminds me of Europe, for instance. Maybe it’s because of all the German restaurants, and the fact that I spent a college year in Austria.

And then there’s Lake Michigan. They don’t call it an “inland sea” for nothing. There are thousands of ships wrecked at the bottom of those seemingly placid waters. I think the Great Lakes are tremendously evocative and mysterious. The combination of the culture and the Lake were irresistible to me.

Q: The subtitle of the book is, “Book 1 of The Ashland Grail Cycle.” What’s that all about?

DM: As with the St. George business, I didn’t originally plan it this way, but The Mystery of Things, though a self-contained story, evolved in my mind thematically. I eventually realized that I was going to have more to say on the subjects touched upon in the book. Like the St. George-and-the-Dragon motif of Things, all the books—right now I’ve mapped out five, should I live so long—will be connected by the mythopoeic element of Arthurian themes. Specifically the Grail motif and the Grail Quest. And by some continuing characters, of course, or at least interrelated characters.

Three of the next four books will be set in the small town of Ashland in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon, home of the world-famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Hence the “Ashland” of the title. Ashland may be small, but it’s like San Francisco writ small, and a lot of “culture” goes on there of every form and description. Too, the Rogue Valley, sometimes known among its eclectic citizenry as “the State of Jefferson,” is another wonderfully atmospheric setting for a series of thrillers. Studying up on the region’s history and culture is half the fun of working on the books.

Q: What’s the next book going to be about?

DM: The title of the next book is All the World’s a Stage. It will take place perhaps a decade after Things, and revolve around the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Q: You said that three of the next four books will take place in Ashland. What about the fourth?

DM: I’m planning a sort of “prequel,” to be published between books two and three, and set in Nazi-occupied Vienna. I’ve actually been thinking about and researching this one since I was a teenager, and I’m still wondering if I’m going to have the gumption to give it a go.

Q: Why is that?

DM: The more one studies the history of the twentieth century, Nazism and the Holocaust in particular, the more one is confronted with the flabbergasting reality of evil. Scripture calls it “The Mystery of Iniquity,” and they don’t call it a mystery for nothing. The biggest there is, second only to the Mystery of its opposite, love.

Q: Speaking of mystery then, one last question about The Mystery of Things…where did the title come from, specifically?

DM: “The mystery of things” comes from a famous passage in Act V of King Lear:

…Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
that ebb and flow by the moon.

See? I just can’t get away from “mystery.” It’s all around us, and yet too many of us get too distracted by the “things” part to take note of it. In the end, I suspect that’s all I’ll ever really be writing about.

Click here for a gallery of exterior photos of Holy Hill
Click here for a gallery of photos of the shrine’s Scenic Tower

Click here to download a larger version of the above picture, taken by the author’s daughter on a recent visit, and suitable for use as a computer desktop.

The Carmelite Shrine of Mary, Help of Christians, in Hubertus, Wisconsin, otherwise known as “Holy Hill”, is about a forty-five minute drive NW of Milwaukee. In The Mystery of Things, the brother of the female protagonist, Lupe Cruz, is a Carmelite friar there, and the shrine serves as the setting of several of the most important scenes in the novel. Moreover, Holy Hill was where Debra Murphy first got the idea for the novel, while on retreat there in the early nineties. (For more on this, see Q & A with Debra Murphy.)

Here is a brief excerpt from Chapter Eight, set at Holy Hill:

Neither said a word as Lupe led James up the path, then underneath a large concrete portico at the top of the hill, which served as porch for the main church above. Climbing the stairs on the other side, they emerged onto the porch itself, which was bordered by a chest-high wall that resembled the ramparts of a medieval castle.

It was hardly as imposing as his beloved Salisbury Cathedral, James thought, but the Carmelite Shrine of Holy Hill, dedicated to Our Lady, Help of Christians, nevertheless reminded him a good deal of a grand European abbey, sitting like a queen atop the highest hill in the Kettle Moraine. Forest colors of opal, emerald, ruby, and garnet, set against a sky of lucent blue, cascaded downward on all sides of the Shrine like precious jewels sown into the trialing silks of her majesty’s robe.

The Scenic Tower

Of special interest to the visitor (and the reader of The Mystery of Things) is the Shrine’s right-hand tower, the so-called “Scenic Tower” (click here for the slideshow). Here’s more from Chapter Eight:

After dropping a couple of dollars in the donation box inside the door, they began the nearly three hundred foot climb up the Scenic Tower, taking the ever-narrowing stairs single file. The dark stairwell…made James feel as if he were climbing to the bottom of the sea. He was grateful when he finally felt some fresh air against his face.

They stepped out into a small platform near the top. It was perhaps ten feet square and constructed of sandblasted brick walls and a floor of cement tiles. Pairs of tall, narrow lancet windows beneath large rose windows, all crisscrossed with iron grillwork and open to the air, afforded an unobstructed view of the spectacular countryside at all four points of the compass. Raising the collar of his leather bomber jacket against the fierce wind, James surveyed his perimeter: the Shrine’s bell tower was to the north, the main body of the church to the east, and the rolling Wisconsin countryside to the south and west everywhere resplendent.

Stepping to the lancet window on the west side, James peered between the iron grillwork to look down at the blacktop driveway directly beneath them. The distance didn’t seem so terribly great until he spotted a pair of pilgrims approaching the door far below. In the warping perspective of nearly three hundred feet, the two women looked like little more than colorful leaves blown to the ground by a hilltop gust of wind.

Basilica

In June, 2006, Holy Hill made news in a most unfortunate way when a couple of youthful would-be satanists vandalized the Shrine. It was with double pleasure, then, when we learned that Pope Benedict had named Holy Hill a Minor Basilica later that fall. (Go here for a wonderful Catholic Herald slideshow of the November 19, 2006 dedication Mass, presided by Archbishop Timothy Dolan of Milwaukee.

Here’s from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee report:

This is a blessing and Holy Hill is a national treasure of the Church, richly deserving of this status,” Archbishop Dolan [of Milwaukee] said. “Under the attentive care of the Discalced Carmelites, Holy Hill and the National Shrine of Mary, Help of Christians, remains a wonderful confluence of natural beauty, peaceful prayer, great spiritual nourishment, evangelical mission and the focal point of a vibrant local, regional and national church.

For much more about Holy Hill, visit the Shrine’s website.

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Our Lady of Guadalupe

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe figures prominently in The Mystery of Things. Known to Catholics as “Mother of the Americas”, her miraculous image, which was given in 1532 to the Aztec Christian, St. Juan Diego, a mere decade after the catastrophic conquest of Mexico by the Spanish, yearly draws millions of visiters to her shrine in Mexico City, particularly around the time of her feast, December 12.

For a larger close-up of Our Lady, click on the picture to the right.

Here’s an excerpt from chapter two of the novel in which the image first appears:

James’s eyes had faltered on a large picture on the wall behind him. It was the astonishing color that caught his eye first, the dusty but luminescent turquoise of a floor length mantle covering the head and body of a dark haired young woman. Golden rays streamed outwards from behind the woman’s back, as if she were blocking out the noonday sun. It was in the same instant that James realized that something in the woman’s gentle face reminded him of Lupe Cruz tht he also realized, by the woman’s reverent posture and folded hands, that he was looking at an icon of the Virgin Mary, painted in a style such as he had never seen.

Then James felt as if he couldn’t breathe, because he had seen this picture before, or rather something very much like it, in a waking dream from his other life—a vision of beauty, glory and terror, which he had spent the better part of the last three years trying to blot from his memory.

A birdlike tremolo warbled in James’s mind, and his nostrils filled with the forgotten scent of roses.

The Mystery of Things, among other things, is an exploration of the effect of a full spectrum of Christian and Catholic beliefs on the lives of contemporary young people thirsting for meaning in an often violent and chaotic world. In a faith tradition as old as Christianity, and especially given its missionary calling to bring the “Good News” to the ends of the earth, it should not be surprising that a religion of over a billion and a half adherents, two-thirds of whom are baptized Catholics, should produce a “spectrum” of belief, which, though based on a single creed, nonetheless admits of a Joseph’s coat of theological orientations, vocations, communities, and spiritualities, a few of which prove over time to be dark. Jesus said as much when he told his disciples that they would be able to tell the light from the dark (or the “wheat” from the “chaff”) by way of their “fruits”. St. Paul, too, counseled the churches under his care to “test the spirits” when they were confronted by new situations or ideas or leaders.

Aspects of Catholicism explored in the novel include (click on the links for more information):

• the phenomenon of “Catholic cults” and their potential impact on individuals. (This theme is exemplified by the fictional group SANA, or “Student Apostolate of North America”)
• the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Completed in 2001, the Quadracci Pavilion, named after philanthropists Betty and Harry Quadracci, was designed by famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava as a spectular lakeside addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Most people think of a shore bird when they see the unusual structure, now a Milwaukee landmark, and that appears to have been the architect’s inspiration. James Ireton, however, the protagonist of The Mystery of Things, thinks of something else when he sees it.

Here’s a brief excerpt from chapter one, as James awakes from a nightmare while napping on Bradford Beach, on the shores of Lake Michigan:

Raking sand from his blonde hair, James scoured his perimeter…nothing. Only the expanse of lethargic water, nibbling at the shore, and the occasional seagull winging on the scant breeze above here-and-there groupings of sunbathers, not yet ready to return to school or work after the long Labor Day weekend. To the south looped the curve of Milwaukee’s modest skyline, where the distant sails of the Quadracci Pavilion shone white in the sunlight like a spectral Viking ship come ashore, and the Hoan Bridge beyond it reflected silver.

Here’s an excellent recent Smithsonian magazine article on the Quadracci Pavilion.