Browsing an Agatha Christie anthology the other night, I reread for the first time in years the Poirot story “The Apples of the Hesperides,” which ends:
In the little parlour of the Convent, Hercule Poirot told his story and restored the chalice to the Mother Superior.
She murmured: “Tell him we thank him and we will pray for him.”
Hercule Poirot said gently: “He needs your prayers.”
“Is he then an unhappy man?”
Poirot said: “So unhappy that he has forgotten what happiness means. So unhappy that he does not know he is unhappy.”
The nun said softly: “Ah, a rich man . . . ”
Hercule Poirot said nothing—for he knew there was nothing to say.
And it reminded me of an enormous list of religious-themed mysteries and detective stories I built some years ago. Christie, for instance, also has the Miss Marple story “Sanctuary” and, of course, Murder in the Vicarage.
But I thought I ‘d ask our readers what they’ve enjoyed. Leave aside G.K. Chesterton and Melville Davisson Post. Others abide our question; they are free.
What other stories and novels are your favorites in the genre?
UPDATE:
Let me give some examples, to show what I mean.
Chesterton has it all in the Fr. Brown stories: a writer who, in other works, writes on religion and here, in his mysteries, is using a religious detective solving religious-themed mysteries with distinctly religious reasoning. Post belongs here, too, although his other, non-mystery religious writing is thin.
That’s distinct from Knox and Sayers: religious writers who wrote nonreligious mysteries. And who else belongs in that camp?
Ralph McInerny and Andrew Greeley, like Eco in Name of the Rose, may be yet different. They have religious detectives, yes, but are the mysteries themselves actually religious—or just regular mysteries into which a cleric wanders?
Christie has such stories as “Sanctuary” and “Apples of the Hesperides,” but is the religion in them just background noise, the stuff present at that moment in the culture and grabbed momentarily by a busy writer, as it clearly is in, say, the Nero Wolfe mystery story “Easter Parade,” which turns on a character’s unwillingness to denounce another character on Good Friday?
And then there are the ever-popular historical mysteries, Peters et al., which require as much religion as was culturally present at the time in which they’re set. Which of those are genuinely religious, in theme and puzzle and solution, and which are only incidentally so?
In other words, you’re religious people. What mysteries do you like?
October 5th, 2010 | 12:51 pm
all the Evelyn Waugh stuff
October 5th, 2010 | 12:58 pm
Greggo–Which of Waugh’s writings are you thinking of? Which qualify as religious-themed mysteries? He’d be an interesting figure to put on the list.
October 5th, 2010 | 1:19 pm
Mr. Bottum, I don’t if you’ve read any of these, but Ellis Peters mysteries featuring Brother Cadfael are great! Cadfael is a Bendictine at the Shrewsbury abbey, and he is also (if my memory serves me right) an herbalist at the abbey. The books are set in the Middle Ages. I love to read mysteries to begin with, but give me ANYTHING that has to do with Medieval period and I am in heaven. Pure joy!
October 5th, 2010 | 1:49 pm
The Ellis Peters “Cadfael” stories (agreeing with Emina Melonic). You feel as if you are living in that era and place. I think most of them take place around the year 1100.
Some of Russell Kirk’s stories could also be squeezed into this genre category, notably “The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion.”
October 5th, 2010 | 1:50 pm
I don’t know if it rightly qualifies as a mystery, but I love Charles Williams’ War in Heaven. (It does begin with a dead body in somebody’s office.) Opening lines:
The telephone was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
A few moments later there was.
October 5th, 2010 | 2:25 pm
I forgot to mention Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose–not a series, of course, but still a mystery.
October 5th, 2010 | 3:28 pm
I *hated* “The Name of the Rose.” And I don’t think it was, actually, a religious-themed mystery, except in the sense that it exploited religion. The movie version actually, unintentionally, captured this well: everyone was dirty, often filthy, except the English monk played by Sean Connery.
Anyway…I agree about the Cadfael series. In one, Peters has a remarkable description of a Catholic procession and relates it to the nature of liturgy.
I’ll have to think..because “religious themed MYSTERIES” narrows the focus a very great deal. The temptation is to think of ANY religious themed novel.
October 5th, 2010 | 4:12 pm
It would be much easier to make up a list of science fiction works with religious themes. For some reason, sf writers, whether believers, agnostic, or atheist, seem to gravitate toward the religious theme.
October 5th, 2010 | 4:57 pm
How about The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky?
October 5th, 2010 | 5:19 pm
Craig–
Yeah, but SF is the easy route for listing religious-themed genre fiction. Mysteries, though . . .
October 5th, 2010 | 5:37 pm
Religious-themed westerns, anyone? :)
Given the addendum posted by Mr. Bottum to the original post, I am stumped. Really, the only ones I can think of are the Father Brown stories.
October 5th, 2010 | 6:39 pm
Death in Holy Orders, by P.D. James. James is an Anglican, and the book is set at St. Anselm’s, a high Anglican seminary.
October 5th, 2010 | 6:47 pm
I have to mention that if you are familar with the applicable canon law dealing with some situations in the Cadfael series — you will be less impressed with their accuracy.
October 5th, 2010 | 7:47 pm
Nine Taylors by Dorothy Sayers. The scene is an Anglican parish church in East Anglia. The author, also known for her Christian writing, grew up in the parsonage of a similar parish. The drama includes the church on a hill becoming a necessary refuge during a flood. The detective novel transcends the genre as C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet does for science fiction and Bill Buckley’s Stained Glass does for the thriller.
October 5th, 2010 | 8:03 pm
Maybe we’re setting the bar too high. There has to be any number of Christian mystery novels at the Christian bookstore in the local mall. Anyone know of them?
October 5th, 2010 | 8:20 pm
Mary–Can you point me to some place where the problems with Peters’ canon law have been written up? Or give some examples? I’d be fascinated to see that.
October 5th, 2010 | 9:34 pm
Judy – yes! My favorite of all her mysteries. It is interesting that the filmed version of that (for Mystery!) is the first one with Martin Shaw as Adam Dalgleish. I think it was a wise casting change as that is also the book in which his life begins to take a turn.
I’m afraid I can’t add to the list because the mysteries I have enjoyed most are either already listed (James, Sayers) or don’t qualify (Minette Walters).
Kamilla
October 6th, 2010 | 2:28 am
Like other people here, I thought of P.D. James’ books. Her detective, Adam Dalgleish, is the son of a rector and Dalgleish seems to respect the faith. In THE BLACK TOWER, Dalgleish has a good friend named Father Baddeley who is depicted as a kind and intelligent priest.
Agatha Christie’s “Mysterious Mr. Quin” stories have a heavy dose of the supernatural. I wonder who Mr. Quin is….
Both of Agatha Christie’s star detectives are practicing Christians. Hercule Poirot is a Catholic and Miss Marple is an Anglican. They both aver that they “disapprove of murder” and I’ve always thought they said it with “Thou shalt not kill” in mind. Familiarity with Catholic practices helps Poirot solve a murder in TAKEN AT THE FLOOD. Here is some dialog:
Hercule Poirot: Do you know that the priest, when he is buried, he is always facing his parishioners? Oui. Because when the Day of Judgment, it comes, and the dead, they all arise, he can greet them, and lead them through the Gates of Paradise. Tis a beautiful idea.
Rosaleen: He shan’t be leading me.
Hercule Poirot: You must not say that, ma chere. Despair is a sin.
Rosaleen: I’m cut off from the mercy of God.
Hercule Poirot: No. No one is cut off from the mercy of God… ever.
October 6th, 2010 | 9:11 am
I read a lot of the Cadfael mysteries a long time ago and loved them, but recently I picked up one — The Heretic’s Apprentice was the title, maybe? — and was struck by what now seems to be a drearily predictable move to sympathize with the heretic, victimized by the bad old authoritarian humanity-hating Church. One of Cadfael’s “strengths of character” seems to be that he’s able to see past all that bad old authoritarianism to the “real human situation.” He’s the mild-mannered monk quietly working away in the herb garden, thinking his own thoughts — and it’s always his own thoughts, as distinct from anything actually religious, which win the day.
Or so I recall, anyway.
October 6th, 2010 | 9:36 am
[...] Looking for mystery fiction. [...]
October 6th, 2010 | 9:39 am
I agree with Ms. Thomas. Cadfael, it seems to me, is somehow supposed to be better than the Church. Smarter than the Church, not really in sync with the Church.
October 6th, 2010 | 4:40 pm
Thomas Keneally’s early novel (possibly his first), _The Place at Whitton_, is a mystery is, if memory serves, set entirely in the remote home of a men’s religious order. I think Keneally has written only two mysteries; the second, and better in my view, _Victim of the Aurora_, takes place on a polar expedition.
I also want to mention J.C. Masterman’s _An Oxford Tragedy_, not a “religious” mystery per se, but one of the few mysteries I know to contain not a mere simulacrum but actual dread – the real thing, the religious emotion.
October 6th, 2010 | 6:46 pm
P.D. James’ Original Sin answered a religious question that had bothered me for years. Speaking about her murdered sister, the Anglican religious Sister said to Dalgleish : “Confidences? How could there be confidences when we despised each others’ God?”
It helped me see why I could not sustain a friendship with a woman whom I loved but who was so liberal that no abortion, at any stage, could not be justified or excused, or even infanticide if it involved an anencephalic infant. We despised each other’s God, and were left without a foundation for friendship.
Does that qualify the book as “religious”?
October 6th, 2010 | 10:18 pm
Agatha Christie also wrote under the name Mary Westmacott. “Absent in the Spring” isn’t quite a mystery, but it is a superb exposition of the nature of salvation. It so totally avoids religious jargon that it can only be classified as a “Christian” book if you include a “stealth” sub-category.
Not easy to find a copy, but worth the effort.
October 7th, 2010 | 10:25 am
To be terribly egotistical, those readers with not enough to do could look up my ‘On the Square’ pieces on Christie, John Buchan and Dorothy Sayers.
Christie brought a genuine Christian sensibility to her work, which can be seen best in contrast to her peers Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, whose works move in the same circles but without the same overt religious influences. To be fair to Allingham, she did produce one of the finest depictions of genuine goodness in THE TIGER IN THE SMOKE.
The idea of extra-legal justice, as practised most notably in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, appeared occasionally in Sherlock Holmes and in Edgar Wallace’s THE FOUR JUST MEN, who admittedly commit murder, but only on those who deserve it. DEXTER is not plowing any new furrows in that respect.
Sayers actually quit detective fiction as she felt she had taken it as far as she could, and wondered if the genre had not guyed people into believing that life’s problems had neat, satisfying solutions. Her decision to thereafter explore religious and theological themes gave us some interesting plays and a translation of the Inferno, so may have been no bad thing. For a practising Anglo-Catholic, her detective stories are not especially imbued with Christian motifs, although they became progressively more so.
P.D. James is becoming progressively more inclined to a form of Augustinian despair, in which distinguishing right from wrong sometimes seems a matter of luck as much as anything. Nonetheless, she is a fine writer and Christian writer to boot; THE CHILDREN OF MEN is not a detective work but increasingly looks like prophecy.
On a limited acquaintance, I would agree that Cadfael is an anachronistic 20th-Century figure marooned in the 11th Century.
Peter Erb’s MURDER, MANNERS, MYSTERY is a good book on the subject.
October 7th, 2010 | 12:15 pm
I nominate Muriel Spark’s SYMPOSIUM. Other readers have noted a consciousness of evil lurking under the surface, compared this aspect with Evelyn Waugh’s works, and attributed it to a Catholic perspective. The murder is just one of the crimes and sins recounted in the book. In her funny but alarming portrayal of an Anglican convent (filled with foul-mouthed Marxist nuns), I was reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s books.
I suppose SYMPOSIUM is a mystery book the way GOSFORD PARK is a mystery film. It is, but it is much more than that.
October 7th, 2010 | 6:09 pm
Oh, yes, lots of Muriel Spark would count, if we’re painting with a broad brush: A Far Cry from Kensington and Memento Mori come to mind. They’re not mysteries in the “whodunnit” sense, but in the “intrusion of mystery, hand-in-hand with death, into life” sense.
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