Anglican Mysteries

If you’re on the hunt for some summer reading, my reading in the past ten years commends the remarkable niche of Anglican mystery writers. Since my son’s birth in 2014, I’ve been surprised by how captivating I’ve found the genre of the mystery novel. Before that, the last mystery I’d read may have been one of the Encyclopedia Brown short stories. As an English major, I had a haughty disdain for mysteries; after all, we had never read one in my college courses. You’d think perhaps a Sherlock Holmes story would have made an appearance in our Victorian literature class — but I don’t recall it happening.

But while staying at home with my young children, I needed a renaissance in my reading life, which had sadly dwindled over the years. In a season when my time to read was fragmented by many an interruption, I found that my desire to discover “who did it” kept me reading until the final page. I first happened upon the contemporary series Maisie Dobbs, about a young female British private detective working between the World Wars in London. After that introduction, I became curious about the origins of this genre that I had long ignored. I had read Dorothy Sayers’s essays, so I decided upon a friend’s recommendation to give her Lord Peter Wimsey series a try. I had soon devoured all her 11 novel-length mysteries and her five short story collections.

When I had exhausted Sayers’s writing, I felt forlorn and bereft without her companionship, and I cast about for another female British novelist in a similar vein. I was surprised and humbled to find Agatha Christie’s mysteries quite engaging and creative. In my hubris, I did not realize how much she had done to create the formula of the mystery, which felt trite to me largely because it had been so widely adopted. I also hadn’t appreciated the way in which she subverts or challenges some of the expectations of the formula in books like And Then There Were None or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

I was also delighted to discover Christie’s little known non-mystery books, which she wrote under a pen name after her publisher refused to publish them under her name. Her novel Absent in the Spring, written under the name Mary Westmacott, is a psychological exploration of a British woman stuck at a desert train station on her way home from Baghdad to England. While there is little outward action in the story, Christie adeptly lays bare the human heart’s capacity for both self-awareness and self-deception. Without the constraints of a whodunnit to solve, her ability to paint a complex picture of human characters in their flaws and strengths shines.

After reading about 20 of Christie’s novels, I needed a little more variety, so with a promise to the Queen of Crime that I would be back, I moved chronologically on to 20th-century mystery writer P.D. James, her 14 Adam Dalgleish novels, and her two mysteries starring the young female detective Cordelia Gray. James’s mysteries plumb the depths of her characters, their settings, and their psychology in as much detail as they give to the events that lead to solving a murder.

What all three women shared, beyond being female, British, and gifted at writing, was a common Christian faith and membership in the Church of England. All three women wrote mysteries set in church or monasteries — Sayers’s The Nine Tailors; Christie’s Murder in the Vicarage; and James’s Death in Holy Orders and A Taste for Death. While none used a heavy hand in their integration of faith and writing, their work reflects their theological commitments in a typically understated British manner. Sayers is the most overtly theological figure of the three, given she not only wrote novels but wrote theological essays.

However, in her novels she abides by her theory of how Christian should make art, which she espouses in the essay “Why Work?” — that Christians are to bring glory to God through their art, not by labeling it Christian, but by creating the best art they can. Christie again and again offers a candid presentation of the human heart, its inclinations to evil, and the damage they end up doing in the lives of one’s neighbors. James weaves references to the Anglican liturgy into her works with titles such as Devices and Desires, fashions her main character Adam Dalgleish as the son of a priest, and offers fascinating comparisons between the role of the priest and the role of the detective in society.

The mystery genre in its classic forms, as employed by all three authors, works out of philosophical commitments that are compatible with and often drawn directly from deeply Christian values — the evils of violent crime against one’s neighbor, the role of the person who pursues the criminal, the inevitability of a people’s sins “finding them out” (Num. 32:23), the role of confession in the ultimate triumph of truth, and the restoration of peace. Its anthropology begins with the dual belief in both human depravity, which leads in most mysteries to murder, and in human dignity, which spurs the detective to seek justice for the victim. At its best, the mystery genre revels not in inventing increasingly lurid tales, but in adhering to these basic commitments of the genre. Sayers, Christie, and James explored the interplay of these themes in their unique ways, but all three employ them out of their fundamentally Christian commitments.

There is yet one more way we might see the mystery as a deeply Christian genre, thanks to the insights of Dr. David Steinmetz. In his chapter in the book The Art of Reading Scripture, Steinmetz compared the Bible to a mystery novel, in the sense that it can (and must) be read both forward and backward. Pieces of information that didn’t make sense to the reader when first mentioned begin to gel into a cohesive story when the truth is revealed. In the same way, the more we read the Bible, the more we pick up on hints, clues, and foreshadowing that point forward to the time when, as the creed puts it, Christ will come to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom of peace and justice will have no end.

So if you pick up a mystery by Sayers, Christie, or James this summer, first and foremost I hope you enjoy it as simply good art, that its goodness reflects the goodness of the authors’ Creator. But perhaps you’ll also find that it reminds you of the grand story of God’s complex and cohesive work, which weaves its way through all the twists and turns of Scripture to a just, peaceful, and satisfying end.