Some Novel News & More Theology Noir

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Friday, June 02, 2006
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No, it's not news about my novel -- this is news about the novels of friends. First off, my fellow blogger Deborah Gyapong, who writes Mondays at The Master's Artist, has posted pictures of her successful book launch. Her first novel The Defilers made its debut in Ottawa to a packed house, and Deborah signed so many books she barely had time to sample the hors d'oeuvres. Deborah is the second Master's Artist blogger to have a novel debut this year -- in March, Mary DeMuth's Watching the Tree Limbs hit the shelves. Success doesn't always come to the deserving, but in this case it has. Twice.

Another novelist up to no bad is Chris Well. Back in April 2005, I interviewed Chris about his first novel, Forgiving Solomon Long. (And he grilled me about my piece in Hardluck Stories.) Now Chris is back with a second novel called Deliver Us From Evelyn -- which is not, I am happy to report, a diatribe against the beloved author of Brideshead Revisited. According to Mir, the follow-up is even better than the original and has "a big funny bone around its criminally dark heart." Today you have a chance to find out, because Chris is sponsoring an online "event" in which forty or more blogs are posting the text of the novel's first chapter. It begins ominously enough:

On his last day of this life, the Right Fair Reverend Missionary Bob Mullins checked the party dip. Just stuck his finger right in there, pulled some glop free, stuck it in his mouth and sucked.

Hmm, good dip.

To keep reading, you can follow this link, or (naturally) buy the book.

Meanwhile, Gideon Strauss is blogging about his changing taste in fiction. He still reads some science fiction, but since his mid-thirties he's been leaning toward crime novels by authors who are "strong on character and place," including George Pelecanos, Laura Lippmann and P. D. James. Back in 2003, in a piece called "Theology Noir," I speculated about the reasons so many theologically-minded people are drawn to crime fiction:

Mystery and crime novels are popular with Christian readers (and writers). The more theologically-minded among us will say that this is because the mystery plot is essentially one of a wrong being righted, of a disturbed order re-established. Perhaps this isn't the reason we enjoy mysteries, but it certainly goes a long way to justifying the pleasure. In the best crime novels, evil is more than the breaking of man's law. It is a force that has a power all its own, a compulsion that transcends reason. But it is also self-defeating, its plans brought to naught by the inadequate opposition of flawed heroes. Even ambiguous modern novels tend to portray a world in which evil is real, all men are flawed and some long, albeit hopelessly, to see a different moral standard imposed.

It's interesting to note that in Eugene Peterson's Take and Read: Spiritual Reading, An Annotated List, the only fictional genre that gets a chapter of its own is the mystery. "I soon found that [detective fiction] is a pleasure much indulged in by scholars, pastors and theologians," he writes. Why?

...one reason may be that right and wrong, so often obscured in the ambiguities of everyday living, are cleanly delineated in the murder mystery. The story gives us moral and intellectual breathing room when we are about to be suffocated in the hot air and heavy panting of relativism and subjectivism.

Of course, Peterson has in mind the "classic" detective novel -- most of today's stuff seeks to capture the "ambiguities of everyday living" to one degree or another. How to account for an interest in the genre after the Golden Age? Well, the theme of systemic corruption that runs through so much crime fiction corresponds to the theologian's sense of the fall, after which there really are no "good guys." Also, the crime novel offers a way for people accustomed to the armchair to vicariously explore moral action in the face of uncertainty, the righting of a wrong that may very well be past righting. But this is all tentantive speculation -- I'd be interested in knowing what Mr. Strauss thinks.