MYSTERY CULT

by James Lincoln Warren

On the surface, nothing seems more secular than detective fiction. You can’t exactly envision Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe kneeling devoutly in church, their lips moving in prayer, although I suppose you can’t imagine Miss Marple anywhere else on a Sunday morning and keeping her reputation. Wimsey, I suppose, had to read Bible lessons at his local congregation, as befits an aristocrat. But detectives are rarely spiritual creatures. There is, after all, nothing more profane than crime.

Of course, nothing is as it seems on the surface, especially in detective fiction.

My primary fictional detective, Alan Treviscoe, is a Roman Catholic. His amanuensis Africanus Hero is a Methodist. Mrs. Stavacre, my 18th century female detective, is an Anglican. My contemporary Los Angeles P.I.s, former NYPD detective Carmine Ferrari and erstwhile Texas Ranger Custer Malone, are respectively a lapsed Catholic and an indifferent Southern Baptist. One of their employees, Stanley Stowicz, is Jewish. (I am neither Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, Baptist, nor Jew; my personal religious convictions are my own and not germane to this discussion.)

I made Treviscoe a Catholic because I needed my 18th century investigator to have a gentleman’s education, and since no gentleman would willingly have involved himself in crime in that era unless as a Justice of the Peace or Judge, I needed a reason to exclude him from the usual professions available to English gentlemen, viz., the (Protestant) Church, the officer corps of the British Army and Royal Navy, and the Bar. In those days, Catholics in Britain were legally prohibited from pursuing these vocations. To further force poor Alan into his insalubrious calling, I destroyed his family’s fortune in the rebellion of 1745 and reduced him to hand-to-mouth penury so he’d have to get a job to survive.

Hero, as a former slave, could hardly be anything but a Methodist, since it was the Methodists who embodied the abolitionist movement in England at the time. Mrs. Stavacre is a London parish Searcher, a sworn officer whose duty it was to determine cause of death for entry into the parish bills of mortality, and as such could not be anything but an Anglican.

Ferrari is a Catholic because he’s Italian-American, and Malone is a Baptist because most of my friends were Baptists when I was a kid in Texas. Both are lapsed because they’ve grown cynical with humanity based on their experience bringing down criminals, although Ferrari is occasionally inspired by the bounty of nature into a moderate religious awe. Malone, who at times is something of a cipher, doesn’t ever talk about it, but he’s not a church-going man and dislikes what he perceives as sophistic posturing, even though (or maybe because) he’s more than a little prone to it himself. I included Stowicz in the mix because Cal Ops, Ferrari’s and Malone’s detective agency, is meant to be widely diverse and demographically reflective of Los Angeles.

My characters’ religious preferences were made solely on practical grounds according to what I demanded of them. None of them is exactly devout, but their religious convictions are certainly important aspects of their personae.

Mystery literature is filled with clerical detectives whose faith is central, even critical, to the stories they inhabit. G. K. Chesterton started it all with Father Brown (a true star among short fiction sleuths) back in 1900, but we also have Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi Small, Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael, Umberto Eco’s Friar William of Baskerville, Ralph McInerny’s Father Dowling (who achieved brief fame on television), and a host of others. We also have a teeming plethora of fanatic villains who justify their heinous deeds in terms of Divine Will, a practice originating (along with Holmes himself) with A Study in Scarlet (1887), but well represented to this day, especially in thriller fiction, where the fanatic is either a serial-criminal paranoiac obsessed with the Seven Deadly Sins, an Islamic terrorist, or the charismatic leader of a loathsome cult. (A few years ago, I chronicled a character whose mind had become unhinged as a consequence of advanced syphilis and mercury poisoning, who in consequence was convinced he was an instrument of the angel of death—I know, not exactly original, but it was called for by the story, and he turned out to be a red herring.)

I think there is a natural nexus between religion and detective fiction. Both are deeply concerned with mortality, morality, and justice. The biggest distinction to be made between them is that detective fiction, at least good detective fiction, completely eschews the miraculous as an acceptable explanation of phenomena. But in some measure, crime stories are still nothing more or less than sermons on evil, the very bread and butter of religious discourse. And we all know what the hallmark of a good sermon is.

A good sermon is always short.