Crime at Christmas: good detective fiction may help us to set our moral compass

The current craze for “cosy” crime fiction is illustrated by the massive success of writers such as Richard Osman and the Revd Richard Coles. The latter writes about a Church of England vicar whose enthusiasm for amateur detection is informed by a strong moral core. On TV, Father Brown enjoys worldwide popularity, with 13 series commissioned and sold across the globe, and a successful spin-off, Sister Boniface.

Early episodes of Father Brown were loosely based on GK Chesterton’s short stories, but the TV series is set in the 1950s, long after those stories were written. Chesterton based his detective on a priest, Mgr John O’Connor, whose humanity and wisdom made a huge impression on him. Writing about Father Brown helped Chesterton to explore his personal faith and Mgr O’Connor eventually received him into the Church.

Father Brown was a unique creation. Humble and empathetic, dressed in shapeless clothes and carrying an umbrella, this unlikely detective appeared in 53 short stories, but never in a full-length novel. Many genre commentators regarded him as second only to Sherlock Holmes. 

The secret of Father Brown’s success is his acute sense of good and evil. Whereas Holmes was an expert in forensics, the little priest relies on spiritual and psychological truths in making sense of mysterious crimes. His deep understanding of human nature – garnered from listening to confessions – enables him to solve baffling crimes.

Chesterton’s love of paradox gave him a fondness for “locked-room mysteries” to which Father Brown comes up with rational and reasoned solutions, often making a moral point in the process. In “The Hammer of God” a man’s skull is crushed, but the tiny hammer found next to the body seems incapable of being a murder weapon. When the priest solves the crime, the murderer asks if he is a devil. Father Brown replies, “I am a man and therefore have all devils in my heart.” In “The Blue Cross”, he realises a supposed priest is not genuine because the man “attacked reason”, which is “bad theology”.

Father Brown’s career coincided with a golden age of detective fiction between the two world wars. After the slaughter in the trenches and the global influenza pandemic, readers wanted to escape from the horrors of reality and have fun. The game-playing aspect of detective fiction was hugely attractive – a phenomenon repeated today, with the Murdle puzzle books topping the bestseller charts.

WH Auden admired Father Brown and argued in his essay “The Guilty Vicarage” that the priest’s motive for solving crimes was compassion: “he investigates murders… for the sake of the murderer who can save his soul if he will confess and repent”. Auden saw classic whodunits in Christian terms, noting that order is restored at the end of the story, enabling detective-fiction addicts to indulge in a sense of return to the Garden of Eden and a state of innocence.

In 1930, Chesterton was elected president of the Detection Club, the world’s first social network for crime writers, an elite group which aimed to raise the quality of writing in the genre. In the same year, founder member Agatha Christie published Murder at the Vicarage, narrated by the Reverend Leonard Clement; in a hat-tip to Christie, Coles gave his vicar-sleuth the same surname as well as a spiritual concern for those affected by murder.

Dorothy L Sayers, a High Anglican who touched on questions of faith in her Lord Peter Wimsey novel The Nine Tailors (in which death occurs in a parish church), was another Detection Club member. So were Mgr Ronald Knox, who in his role as a prominent broadcaster came up with ten satiric “Commandments” for writers – the “Detective Story Decalogue” – and Freeman Wills Crofts, a master of the “unbreakable” alibi and also author of The Four Gospels In One Story. Their faith meant that their stories were anchored to morality.

Despite the success of “hardboiled” writers like Raymond Chandler, there was a similar pattern in America. Anthony Boucher, a leading critic, was a devout Catholic whose first novel, The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937), features an obscure religious sect. Boucher also created a female, American counterpart to Father Brown: Sister Ursula, whose insight into human behaviour make her a formidable detective.

Chesterton’s influence proved enduring. William X Kienzle, a priest from Detroit, created Father Koesler, whose first case, The Rosary Murders, was filmed and launched a series. Father Brown also inspired the Thomist philosopher Ralph McInerny, whose novels became The Father Dowling Mysteries TV show.

Brother William of Baskerville, in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, is a 14th-century Franciscan friar with a nose for human fallibility, while an equally popular historical monk-detective was Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael, played on TV by Derek Jacobi. Peter Tremayne’s Irish nun Sister Fidelma has investigated historical crimes for 30 years, as has Alison Joseph’s Sister Agnes, who lives in an open order; her worldliness enables her to understand criminal motivations.

Father Brown lives on, and so do his many literary descendants. We live in an age of economic and political anxiety with troubling parallels to the interwar years. For readers who crave reassurance, the best detective stories may provide not only fictional solutions but a moral compass to help us navigate turbulent times.

Martin Edwards’s book The Golden Age  of Murder (HarperCollins) has won several awards for its study of the crime genre between the wars

The post Crime at Christmas: good detective fiction may help us to set our moral compass first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post Crime at Christmas: good detective fiction may help us to set our moral compass appeared first on Catholic Herald.