Arthur of the Ancient and Illuminated Seers of Bavaria (who says it’s okay to blog this) writes:
Amongst other things, I enjoy reading murder mysteries, especially those from the golden age of the English whodunnit in the 20s and 30. Recently I’ve been reading up on the lives of some of those authors and I came across something rather surprising.
Of the five great authors of the English golden age, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton and Ronald Knox, all but one (Christie) were Catholic! Indeed of those three (Sayers, Chesterton and Knox) were also serious authors on philosophical matters and theology. Okay Knox was primarily a theologian who dabbled in mystery writing, but you get my drift. 🙂
I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I found it interesting.
I’m not sure what it means, either. It could be random chance, but . . .
. . . Jack Chick might take it as evidence that Catholics just have murderous tendencies.
. . . Some psychologists might take it as evidence that British Catholics have murderous thoughts, given how much they suffered persecution from the British Crown and how much alienation they suffered in British society.
. . . I might take it to mean that there’s an intellectual streak in Catholicism that results in its authors liking intellectual puzzles and this tendency then manifesting in literary form (the murder mystery being a familiar form of intellectual puzzle in fiction).
What’s your explanation for the phenomenon?
Dorothy Sayers was not Catholic; she was Church of England.
I think you hit on something with the puzzle analogy. The murder mystery is not only a puzzle, but a puzzle about something really important (life and death).
I wonder if that might help explain the popularity of crime forensics shows like CSI.
Possibly. I am a forensic analyst but not because I wanted to solve puzzles. I just happen to be good at science and love justice (went from wanting to be a lawyer to a policeman to a forensic investigator to a forensic analyst).
Uhmmm…..maybe it’s a guy thing?
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Murder and Resurrection: the Paschal MYSTERY of Our Lord Jesus Christ!
That’s what it is.
Catholics rule!
—-
WE ARE CATHOLICS
SIN IS FUTILE
PREPARE TO BE BAPTIZED
—-
“…maybe it’s a guy thing?”
Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham had Y-chromosomes?
I love British murder mysteries from that era myself, and I had noticed this phenomenon as well. I don’t have an explanation for it though…
“WE ARE CATHOLICS
SIN IS FUTILE
PREPARE TO BE BAPTIZED”
I love that, Father.
Mind if I put it on a tee-shirt?
I think that’s a somewhat idiosyncratic list of “the five great authors of the English golden age.” Why Ronald Knox and not Ngaio Marsh? Was Chesterton really a Golden Age writer? Why “the five great,” and not “the three great” or “the seven great”?
The notion that Truth (in this case, whodunnit) is written in Creation (the evidence) is a natural-law notion most congenial to Catholics and those others who take the Incarnation seriously.
PVO
Going outside England and Catholicism, you have Dostoevsky. I think all of his novels had a murder in them. (Maybe the Adolescent didn’t. The two biggies, C&P and Brothers did.)
I think it is worth distinguishing between morbid obsession and intrigue. In almost all murder novels, the murder itself is an ancilliary detail. Even an explicit murder like in C&P wasn’t gratuitous; rather it placed the reader in the mind of young fool.
Tim J.!
Go ahead! I take a medium. Thank you!
If you want to see a possible sample (with Latin, too), check out:
catholici.blogspot.com
Fraternally yours in Christ and his Church,
What’s the big deal? I’m not Catholic (yet), but I have murderous thoughts all the time. Since I started doing “the Christian thing,” I cut it off when I catch myself dwelling on murderous thoughts. However, for far too many social interactions, my first impulse very frequently involves wondering where I left my weapon.
Of course, I am Texan…
I never heard that Allingham was Catholic, and I can’t find any other mention of this — but I would be delighted if it were true. She’s very, very high in my pantheon. 🙂
An unrelated comment: I always thought of Chesterton as a golden-age writer. He wrote Father Brown stories through the 1920s and part of the 30s — at least, the last collection was published in ’35.
I believe Sayers mentioned something of the reason in one of her own books (one with Harriet Vane – I can’t recall which, though! Mea culpe). Basically, the murder mystery’s central theme is the restoration of the world to truth. If the truth is not discovered and justice not in some way served, the mystery form is not present.
By truth, of course, I don’t mean mere fact: something that Chesterton highlights in his Father Brown mystery about the fellow who only took the gold. In that one, the investigators have a pile of odd objects – various clues – meaningless facts – which Father Brown then puts together in a variety of fashions – but although all are based on facts, none of them are the truth. The truth is finally discovered by Father Brown’s probing into the mind of the fellow who most likely and in fact *did* do it.
Which brings me back to Sayers. She’s always at her best when her mysteries are mere excuses to actually examine the human heart: such as “Murder Must Advertise” and “Gaudy Night.” The crime is a result not of the author’s invention, but of a character’s philosophical motive. It’s Dorian Grey’s picture exposed.
So, essentially, if one does not believe in truth, if one does not believe in sin, if one does not believe in consequences to sin, if one does not believe in judgement and in a higher judge, one cannot truly grasp the mystery form. The nearest it can come is puzzles – a la Agatha Christie – but it doesn’t *delve.*
A good mystery isn’t a whodunnit – it’s a whydunnit. And I imagine that’s why Catholics, who are forever answering: “Idunnit” have greater interest in examining the fictional confessional.
Father Brown says that since he’s a sinner he can imagine himself in the place of the killer and can ask what he would have done. There but for the grace of God go I.
What I meant by questioning whether Chesterton was a Golden Age writer was this: With his writings — primarily The Innocence of Father Brown, but also other tales and a number of essays — he both inspired and gave a certain amount of intellectual cover for the Golden Age writers to come. Yes, he wrote detective stories after 1920, was president of the Detection Club, and so forth, but he was doing something different with his fiction, had begun writing nearly two decades before Christie’s first novel, never wrote a detective novel, and so forth.
It can be argued either way, I think, but I’m inclined to follow A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection, which places him among the turn-of-the-century impossible crime writers.
I agree with everything Emily writes, except for the deprecation of Agatha Christie as a writer of puzzles rather than mysteries.
Certainly the number, length, and style of her novels show that she was doing something other than what Sayers was doing (for which I say, thank God!). But though she wrote puzzle plots, she was not merely writing puzzles. Again and again she explored themes of good and evil, including how good becomes evil and how evil can masquerade as good. Her books presume, and often turn on, the consequences of sin, and judgement (in this world and the next) plays a significant role in many of her most famous novels.
The real puzzle novels of the Golden Age — the kind where you find yourself marking up a train schedule with a pencil and eraser — were written by people whose names aren’t remembered today.
Emily S has hit on some very good stuff! I’ve read mysteries by the authors Michelle lists & some by writers who are not Christians. It’s interesting that those written by Christians have a hope about them – whether directly or indirectly, they’re ultimately about the hope of our salvation. Those written by non-Christians tend to be more depressing, more interested in the twist at the end, & their sleuths end up disillusioned or lose a faith they had at the beginning of the story. They border on nihilistic.
So I guess it boils down, as does all fiction really, to the author’s worldview. We can all name a few fantasy or science fiction works/authors who are Christian & explain how those works have affected our spiritual lives. But alongside the Tolkiens & Lewises there are the Heinliens & Clarkes. Same for mystery writers, too.
What’s really interesting is the subject matter & time period some modern mystery writers choose. I’ve read a few of Bruce Alexander’s Sir John Fielding mysteries set in colonial England & I’ve quite liked them. I have no idea what Alexander’s faith is, if any. But the morals his characters are in keeping with those of the time period he’s working in. As are Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austin mysteries (which I’ve read less of but still liked). Because of that, I’d rather read these than the vast majority of other mysteries set in modern times. It would be very easy for writers of historical fiction to insert today’s themes & commonly held beliefs or agendas into these books in an attempt to lend them credence to today’s readers, as is done in films quite frequently (Kingdom of Heaven, Stone’s Alexander, etc). I’m sure it’s done frequently but Alexander & Barron haven’t, at least not in the books I’ve read. Let’s hope they keep it up!
Sorry.. haven’t had my ADD meds in like 6 hrs…
Have you guys ever read those Chik tracts (am I spelling that right, even?) ?? Especially the catholic ones read like science fiction. Death cookies indeed.
Don’t forget that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a fallen-away Catholic. I didn’t know that about Allingham either.
I agree that Christie has depth. There’s a lot of stuff that I thought was just decoration or irrelevant when I was twelve which now seems very wise to me. However, it really saddens me that she got rid of several of her sleuths in such pointless ways. She apparently thought them very moving ways, but they only moved me to anger and annoyance.
Well, I don’t know what “age” in which to put Chesterton and the Fr. Brown stories (which, although I like detective tales, are one of the few things of his I haven’t devoured). But I do know that he was spectacularly brilliant, and the pure breadth and depth of his knowledge and insight about humanity and our place in the universe well equipped him to write about the primal forces at work in great crimes. In fact, many of his works take up the issue of the work of such forces in human life and society: The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill are about far, far more than anarchists and zoning laws.
Also, for what it’s worth in this discussion, Chesterton carried a sword stick, with which he said he was willing to test the conviction of any man who said that life was pointless.
Christ, who we believe is God, taught in parables. Just as we believe the Incarnation baptized created matter, we also believe Divinity sanctified story-telling, if you think about it. More than most people, we understand fiction.
What is the most common knee-jerk reaction to Brown fans when we criticize the claims of The Davinci Code? “It’s just fiction.”
The response is demeaning to Catholics. A racial minority complaining about racist material in a fiction work would never be cowled with a chorus of “it’s just fiction, get over it.”
But the response also reveals a grave misunderstanding of what fiction is. Fiction is not the same as a lie, a lack of truth, or a misleading series of facts. Fiction is (supposed to be) truth.
Lookie:
Math is a quantitative abstraction of reality that is useful only inasmuch as it represents the real in its abstraction. So long as 2 represents the second in a series of whole integers after zero, that number is useful to us. If 1+2 did not always equal 3, then math ceases to have purpose.
Similarly, the reverence we offer the Blessed Virgin is due to her because of her relationship to Christ. She is not just your average sinless woman. She is reverenced because she is the Mother of God.
This dynamic echoes in literature as well. Is it any wonder nearly the whole cannon of literature is Catholic? All good writers throughout time have been good inasmuch as they are oriented towards Truth. Turn of the century Anglican writers are esteemed by the world’s readers above turn of the century Fundamentalist writers because they are closer to the Truth. One could say they resonate more UNIVERSALLY than other writers.
Name ONE Fundamentalist writer who is widely acclaimed as a gift to the conversation carried through the centuries by literature’s greats …
My point exactly.
This does not just apply to mysteries, but to all genres. One could say the Catholic understanding of the existence of objective good and evil and the belief in the necessity and eternal significance of action in relation to the conflict between good and evil makes for better stories where the action moves the plot towards a conclusion bathed in hope.
This is an echo of the story of human Salvation through Christ. And it undeniably makes for better stories. That is why the Last Of The Really good movies ever made (LOTR) was written by a devoutly Catholic writer and movies made by quasi-gnostic and morally ambivalent creators like the Wachowski brothers always fall flat at the climax and ring with false hopelessness.
But the deeper reason is probably that Catholic writers sincerely and completely self-donate when they approach the altar of creation. They work out their relationship to the Truth with reverent fear and trembling in hope of coming away — not with fame, fortune, or a zinger answer to some on-going argument — but in hope of achieving the status of human conduit of God’s light, Love, and Truth.
I think maybe my favorite mystery (if you don’t count Brothers Kamamazov, which I don’t) is Sayers’ the Nine Tailors. But I don’t think I could say why without giving away the plot. Read it!