Although his novels – teeming with priests and nuns toiling away in a fallen world – sold well and were regularly adapted for film, stage and television, since his death the Scottish convert Bruce Marshall has faded into obscurity

In 2016, Pope Francis published The Name of God is Mercy, a face-to-face interview with the journalist Andrea Tornielli. In a chapter titled “Looking for the Smallest Opening”, Tornielli, who was later appointed by Francis to the Vatican Dicastery for Communication, speaks about a passage from a novel in which a French priest is listening to the confession of a young German soldier about to be executed by ­partisans. The soldier mentions various sins of the flesh and the priest explains that, to obtain absolution, he has to repent; and here a sticking point is reached. The soldier says: “How can I repent? It was something that I enjoyed, and if I had the chance I would do it again, even now. How can I repent?”

In desperation, the priest asks the soldier whether he is, at least, sorry for not being sorry. The soldier agrees. In Tornielli’s words, “The door was opened a crack, allowing absolution to come in …”

“It’s true, that’s how it is,” Francis responds, calling the episode a “a good example of the lengths to which God goes to enter the heart of man, to find that small opening that will permit him to grant grace”. The late Pope embarks on a long reflection on God’s mercy being infinitely greater than our sins, his medicine “infinitely stronger than our illnesses”.

Tornielli writes that this fictional example of the subtler workings of divine mercy comes in a 1949 novel To Every Man a Penny by Bruce Marshall (1899-1987), recently reissued by the American publisher Human Adventure Books. In fact, however, the episode comes from another Marshall novel, The World, The Flesh and Father Smith, set in Scotland rather than France. The dying but reluctant ­penitent is an old sailor who has been recounting times spent with prostitutes in Buenos Aires and Hong Kong. Just after absolution, he dies, his face shrinking “away and away, as if it were trying to become a baby’s face again”.

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