CHICAGO — Margot Douaihy reached Chicago's Lincoln Park in a roundabout way. She grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She came from a religious family and a long line of clergy. She went to Catholic school, but as she got older, Douaihy felt distanced from the church. She was queer and in the closet. She moved to Massachusetts and became a poet. Several years ago, when she decided to tiptoe toward her love of mystery novels, she came up with a kind of homage to the hard-boiled detective thriller, with a twist: Her amateur sleuth was a queer badass nun. The book critiqued institutions, foregrounded sexuality and retained some lyricism, without losing the compulsive page-turning playfulness of a breezy read.
Its title, “Scorched Grace,” carried a dime-rack luridness, and its prose would set Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Robert B. Parker’s Spenser at ease: Douaihy’s suns don’t rise, they appear with a “slow simmer,” like “the swollen red of a mosquito bite.”
It was smart, fun, but the problem was, when her agent tried shopping the book to publishers, this nun thing stopped them: Douaihy’s Sister Holiday is two-fisted, chain-smoking, 33-year-old gay clergy with tattoos, deep faith and a seeming inability to find inner peace. “The church can be damaging to a lot of people, especially queer people,” Douaihy said, “yet it’s also an anchor and comforting for many of those same people. I wanted a mystery to make sense of that conflict. The genre can be surprisingly elastic.”
