The laughter echoes through the halls of the mist-shrouded mansion. The clink of wine glasses, the sudden high-pitched voice of the host. A small group of seemingly innocent, happy people gather in the drawing room. Two of them are having an affair, three others were involved in a previous murder inquiry, that little old lady isn’t what she appears to be, and all of them have motives for killing the mysterious man in black.
Suddenly, a shot rings out. The maid screams. The inquisitive (but not overly surprised or distraught) group crowds around a body sprawled on the floor. Outside, the storm has arrived and the guests peer out into a snowy wonderland. The butler informs them that the phones are down.
“Well, old boy,” says the hawk-nosed individual in the interesting coat. “I suppose we’ll have to sort it out ourselves.”
It’s the classic setup. An interesting character trots around the English countryside, uncovering things folk would rather have kept hidden, asking awkward questions, pushing the limits of the law in defense of the law, and ultimately, inevitably, triumphantly arresting the local vicar for the murder.
Mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers observed half a century ago that “Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.” It is still true today. Mystery is one of the three most popular genres in the English fiction market (the other two being romance and science fiction). (1) The most-watched TV shows in the world in 2006 and 2007 were the crime shows
CSI: Las Vegas and
CSI: Miami. Even the medical drama
House, most-watched in 2008 (2), drew its inspiration from Sherlock Holmes, and another runner-up was the comedy-mystery show
Monk. Clearly, there’s just something about a mystery.
As Christians living in a culture with so many books and movies centered on violence and immorality, it is important to examine what we read and watch. That begs the question, is it ever good to use evil? After all, “what fellowship has light with darkness?”(2 Cor. 6:14, ESV)
It’s not a new idea. Many in the early 20th Century thought that “To write a story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it.”(Chesterton, Defense) But when it gets down to it, murder mysteries, at least the good old-fashioned kind, aren’t really about murder. There is invariably a body, sometimes two, but they aren’t there because the author likes killing people, but because murders happen in real life. Mysteries, particularly the ones in later years, try to accurately portray how police deal with murders, and how murder is to be dealt with. There’s one thing about mysteries that isn’t realistic, and it’s not the murders. It’s not the evil part—it’s the fact that murderers are caught. Mysteries always have happy endings.
Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth proclaimed that “in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They’re the purest literature we have.”(qtd. in Dubose, 216) The murderer is nearly always caught, and justice done. For detectives, the first commandment is devotion to law and justice. Sleuths stand as lonely sentinels against encroaching lawlessness. In literature, the closest comparison would be knights and dragons, or possibly David and Goliath. It doesn’t get much purer than that, and the pursuit of Justice is a very Christian principle.
