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| Billie Silvey |
| Three Christian Mystery Writers |
| Many Christian writers work in the mystery genre, and many more Christians read and enjoy mystery stories. Christians are attracted to mystery stories because of their themes of sin and redemption, the struggle between good and evil, and the larger-than-life figure of the detective who reveals sin and brings justice and healing. Three well-known British mystery writers who also have reputations as Christian apologists include G. K. Chesterton, creator of the highly successful Father Brown series of short stories in the early 1900s; Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote the popular Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries in the 1930s; and P. D. James, contemporary author of twelve books featuring Scotland Yard detective and poet Adam Dalgliesh. |
| G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) A prolific English critic and author of verse, essays, novels and short stories, G. K. Chesterton was born in London. He didn’t learn to read until he was over eight, and one of his teachers told him, “If we opened your head, we should not find brain but only a lump of white fat.” Just before the turn of the century, Chesterton experienced a crisis of skepticism and depression. His marriage in 1901 to Frances Blogg helped pull him out of it. Chesterton introduced his character Father Brown in the story, “The Blue Cross,” which was published in the Storyteller in 1910. He became more widely known with the publication of two collections of short stories, The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911 and The Wisdom of Father Brown in 1914. According to biographer Elvis Rowan, Father Brown was a sort of early Columbo, “giving the appearance of being a harmless, bumbling, absent-minded fellow, but who always notices the detail that enables him to solve the case.” In his Autobiography, Chesterton explained his trademark character this way: “His commonplace exterior was meant to contrast with his unsuspected vigilance and intelligence; and that being so, of course I made his appearance shabby and shapeless, his face round and expressionless, his manners clumsy, and so on.” The Father Brown stories are packed with witty observations about society. Father Brown brings clarity from confusion with a magician’s dexterity, and Chesterton uses clear, precise words despite the florid prose style of the day. In 1922, Chesterton converted to Catholicism and wrote several theologically oriented works, including lives of Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas. He described his conversion in a collection of essays called The Thing. He also wrote literary criticism of Robert Browning and Charles Dickens. He continued writing stories almost until his death, with The Incredulity of Father Brown in 1926, The Secret of Father Brown in 1927 and The Scandal of Father Brown in 1935. Chesterton was interested in politics, and was quick to support the underdog. He believed in what he called Distributivism, redistributing the land so everyone had a cottage and a plot of ground to grow his own food and be self-sufficient. Though the practicality of the theory was questioned, it appeals to many who take a more literal approach to the social teachings of scripture. A master of aphorisms, Chesterton wrote such witty and perceptive comments as, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.” And “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies, probably because they are generally the same people.” He obviously had more than fat in his head. The Father Brown stories are fascinating puzzles with complex plots turning on a single truth, though with limited depth of character. |
| Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) Dorothy L. Sayers, the daughter of an English clergyman, was a 1915 graduate of Oxford. She worked as an advertising copywriter, helping set the style of advertising to the present day. In 1923, as a single woman of thirty, she published her first novel, Whose Body, introducing the sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey, a prime example of the literary figure who plays the fool to mask his brilliance, strength and giftedness, would go on to be the hero of fourteen volumes of novels and short stories, satisfying his creator’s need for a dashing and wealthy man in her life. Sayers later describes Wimsey: “My impression is that I was thinking about writing a detective story and that he walked in, complete with spats, and applied in an airy don’t-care-if-I-get-it way for the job of hero. . . . Lord Peter’s large income . . . was a different matter. I deliberately gave him that. After all, it cost me nothing, and at the time I was particularly hard up, and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him.”* In 1926, Sayers married Arthur Fleming, a journalist twelve years older than she was. Fleming had been gassed and shellshocked in World War I. After two years of marriage, his health began to deteriorate, and soon he was no longer able to work. Sayers supported them both with her increasing royalties. A traditional Anglican with an emphasis on doctrine, she wrote a play, The Zeal of Thy House, for the Canterbury Festival. She wrote six more plays, concluding with The Emperor Constantine in 1951. Her Man Born to be King, written for the BBC, created controversy by having Christ’s voice speaking in modern English. Her audience expected to hear Christ speaking in the Thees and Thous of King James English. Sayers translated Dante’s Divine Comedy from the Italian and Song of Roland from old French. She wrote long hours, and died unexpectedly of heart failure in December 1957. She lived out her philosophy that “The only Christian work is good work, well done.” A woman of strong convictions, Sayers once wrote about sloth, “In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Sayers writes in a light and breezy style, more modern than that of Chesterton. Her characters are stylish and sympathetic, and they become deeper as the series progresses. The longer novel form allows her the leisure to explore even commonplace events with wit and detail. Through the tangled plots of her stories, she opens the door to the fascinating period of English history between the world wars and to the fascinating working of a first-rate detective’s mind. *James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers, A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981), 120. |
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| Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey |
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| Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh |
| October 2005 |
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| P. D. James (1920- ) P. D. James was born in Oxford, the oldest daughter of an Inland Revenue (income tax) official. She spent thirty years in various branches of the British Civil Service, retiring in 1979 to become a full-time writer. She is the author of eleven novels, many of which have been filmed and broadcast on television. Like Sayers, James started writing at a difficult time in her life. Her husband was ill and she was working, taking evening classes and raising children. Unlike Sayers, James wrote slowly and carefully, taking a more philosophical approach to fiction. She raises the question that attracted her to write mysteries this way: “What makes someone who is essentially good, who is educated, who is law-abiding--someone who should be able to understand his motives and perhaps have more insight into himself and others than most people do--what makes him cross that invisible line that divides the murderer from the rest of us?” In an interview by Jennifer Reese, James said that she loves “the structure in the novel. . . . I love the ideal of bringing order out of disorder, which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanctity of human life and exorcises irrational guilt." Ralph C. Wood of Baylor University makes the case for P. D. James as a Christian novelist. “Her fiction has far profounder moral and religious import, for example, than anything to be found in the Peter Wimsey books of Sayers. Her careful attention to character portrayal, for instance, reveals a deeply incarnational conviction that human life must not be flattened into caricatures and stereotypes. It must be honored, instead, in all of its rich particularity and vexing ambiguity.” Adam Dalgliesh, James’s poet-detective, “is her hero, but not her mouthpiece.” The unbelieving son of a clergyman, he considers his occupation in Devices and Designs, Perhaps this was part of the attraction of his job, that the process of detection dignified the individual death, even the death of the least attractive, the most unworthy, mirroring in its excessive interest in clues and motives a man’s perennial fascination with the mystery of his morality, providing, too, a comforting illusion of a moral universe in which innocence could be avenged, right vindicated, order restored. But nothing was restored, certainly not life, and the only justice vindicated was the uncertain justice of men. James’s plots are intricate, her settings artistically rendered. According to Wood, James “has a Dickensian reverence for particular places. . . . Thus we are told that Dalgliesh ‘could learn more about his witness from an unobtrusive scrutiny of his rooms than from a dozen direct questions. Books, pictures, the arrangement of artifacts sometimes provided more revealing testimony than words.’” A careful craftsman, James believes “that a writer with Christian convictions can never make faith suffice for art.” But while Sayers caused a stir by having Jesus speak in modern English, James champions the use of the King James Bible and Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer in the liturgy of the Church of England. In her fragmentary autobiography, Time To Be in Earnest, she calls them "two of the nation’s seminal books. If you want to destroy a country’s tradition and soften it up for a culture you personally find more to your liking, there is no better way to begin than by an attack on its language and literature."** Writing about the setting of her Death in Holy Orders, Wood describes the connection she makes between language and the mysteries of faith as follows: There is no Christianity without strange language and difficult doctrines and unworldly practices. Absent such signs of its transcendent uniqueness, Christian faith becomes little more than moral uplift. The very existence of St. Anselm’s [the seminary in which the book is set], though small and precarious and doomed soon to die, makes its own powerful witness. Its resident priests and ordinands are surely not exemplars of unalloyed virtue; indeed, they all have reason for committing the murders. James makes it ever so clear that sin can infect the faithful even more fatally than the believing. Yet this handful of churchmen are habituated to a life of devotion and worship and communal living that gives them a depth of character that is lacking in their secular counterparts, most of whom live in solitary sufficiency. A resident of London, James has received numerous honors, including being made a Life Peer (Baroness James of Holland Park) in 1991. She has served as a magistrate, is a governor of the BBC, and chair of the Literature Advisory Panel of the Arts Council of England and of the British Council. She has received major prizes for crime writing in Great Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia. In 1999 she received the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award for long-term achievement. In her author statement on the British Council website, she explains, All fiction is an attempt to create order out of disorder and to make sense of personal experience. But the classical detective story does this within its own established conventions; a central mystery which is usually but not necessarily a murder, a closed circle of suspects, a detective, either professional or amateur, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve the crime, and a final solution which the reader would be able to arrive at himself by logical deduction from the clues. This apparent formula writing is capable of accommodating a remarkable variety of books and talents. Within the formal constraints of the detective novel I try to say something true about men and women under the stress of the ultimate crime and about the society in which they live. Of the three writers I’ve considered, James is my favorite. Her complex and distinctive characters and plots reward frequent rereading, and her craftsmanship is an example for any writer. But all three writers are good reads, well worth the time and attention their work demands. Their insights into human nature shed light on ourselves and those around us. Their precise and colorful renderings of places, times, lifestyles different from our own broaden our vision the way foreign travel can, without the cost. And their deep thoughts on the human condition, against the bold extremes of life and death, prompt us to greater awareness of the big mysteries of life.. **P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 143. |