Charles Merrill Smith

Reverend C P Randollph is an engaging liberally-minded Methodist clergyman who, before he was ordained, used to play quarterback for the Rams where he earned the nickname Con because of the shrewd ways he conned the opposition. He displays this shrewdness in his detective work too.

He is featured in six clerical mysteries by the American Charles Merrill Smith, himself a United Methodist minister, who used his own first hand experience of the church bureaucracy, as well as his own personal beliefs, to provide his entertaining crime stories with a really fascinating and convincing church background. His first non-fiction book, How to Become a Bishop Without Being Religious(published in 1965), had revealed the humorous style (religious but never pious) that he was to develop further in his detection fiction. His irreverent humor won him many admirers among fellow clergy and others, and made the book a best-seller - even if it may not have appealed quite so much to his local bishop!