The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama

Murderous Texts

Caroline Blyth, Alison Jack, Caroline Blyth, Alison Jack

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780567695536
• eBook ISBN: 9780567686466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation
• Index: Literature

The Bible has always enjoyed notoriety within the genres of crime fiction and drama; numerous authors have explicitly drawn on biblical traditions as thematic foci to explore social anxieties about violence, religion, and the search for justice and truth. The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama brings together a multi-disciplinary scholarship from the fields of biblical interpretation, literary criticism, criminology, and studies in film and television to discuss international texts and media spanning the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. The volume concludes with an afterword by crime writer and academic, Liam McIvanney. These essays explore both explicit and implicit engagements between biblical texts and crime narratives, analysing the multiple layers of meaning that such engagements can produce – cross-referencing Sherlock Holmes with the murder mystery in the Book of Tobit, observing biblical violence through the eyes of Christian fundamentalists in Henning Mankell's Before the Frost, catching the thread of homily in the serial murders of Se7en, or analysing biblical sexual violence in light of television crime procedurals. The contributors also raise intriguing questions about the significance of the Bible as a religious and cultural text – its association with the culturally pervasive themes of violence, (im)morality, and redemption, and its relevance as a symbol of the (often fraught) location that religion occupies within contemporary secular culture.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Caroline Blyth and Alison Jack

For many years, religion has served as grist to the mill for creators of crime fiction and drama. Religious motifs (including characters, images, locations and themes) make regular appearances in these cultural texts, providing a framework through which audiences can think about the complex relationships between religion and violence. These motifs are drawn upon in different ways and present a spectrum of responses to religion, from outright suspicion and ‘subversive critique’ to a more benign acknowledgement of its cultural significance and (more rarely) a respectful, or even theological, engagement with its texts, traditions and beliefs.¹

While a range of religious traditions, themes and artefacts have appeared in crime fiction and drama, the Christian and Jewish Bibles have always been a particularly pervasive source of inspiration within this genre of popular culture. From the early detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Golden Age murder mysteries of Agatha Christie to the contemporary hard-boiled noir of Stieg Larsson and Ian Rankin, biblical stories, characters and motifs have popped up regularly within crime narratives. At times, these biblical allusions serve primarily as a plot device, adding a note of esoteric or arcane mystery to the narrative, or providing a vital clue through which the detective solves the crime. Thus, in Conan Doyle’s short story ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893), Sherlock Holmes is able to identify a murderer after recognizing an allusion to the David and Bathsheba story (2 Samuel 11–12) uttered by one of the other characters.² Meanwhile, the plot of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo revolves around a list of Old Testament passages that help to uncover the identity of a ritualistic serial killer.³

Elsewhere, the Bible is less a plot device than a presence in the crime narrative, which allows the author and their readers to reflect on wider culturally relevant issues pertaining to good and evil, innocence and sin, crime and punishment, justice and injustice – themes that reverberate throughout the biblical traditions themselves. Thus, in a scene from Ian Rankin’s first novel, Knots and Crosses, police inspector John Rebus sits reading the Old Testament book of Job, pondering its themes of suffering and divine justice in light of his own personal and professional traumas.⁴ Throughout the novel, Rankin’s allusions to the Bible – and Christianity more broadly – raise fascinating questions about the role of religion in contemporary Scottish culture and the continued relevance of the Bible as a source of consolation in a dark and dangerous world.

The Bible also makes a number of guest appearances in crime film and television dramas, where again its presence shapes and invites reflection on the unfolding narrative of violence. Thus, in an episode of Scottish crime drama Taggart (‘A Death Foretold’, season 21, episode 3), the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10.25-37) provides the rationale behind a seemingly unrelated series of murders. We eventually learn that the killer is systematically punishing and killing people who had ignored, or refused to help, his girlfriend after she had been fatally wounded in a knife attack. Because they had literally ‘walked by on the other side’ (Lk. 10.31-32), thereby failing to be Good Samaritans, the killer believed that they deserved to suffer themselves. This biblical allusion therefore serves as a plot device in ‘A Death Foretold’, while also inviting viewers to consider the parable’s moral implications around violence, mercy and justice within a more contemporary framework. Similarly, in an episode of ITV police drama Vera (‘A Certain Samaritan’, series 2, episode 4), viewers are offered a contemporary retelling of the Good Samaritan parable, with the biblical story and its characters being relocated within a twenty-first-century northern English context. The episode casts each of the characters – including the murderer – in multiple roles (Good Samaritan, victim, Levite and priest), exploring the different ways that people might understand and enact the parable’s ethic of care. Viewers are thus invited to re-evaluate and complicate the biblical text’s unambiguous moral imperative to ‘love your neighbour’ and consider its implications within everyday secular society.

While some crime fiction and drama texts situate the Bible explicitly within their narratives, others may afford it a more implicit presence by evoking certain tropes, themes, characters and storylines that echo those found in the biblical traditions. These echoes may or may not be intentional on the part of their contemporary creator, but in a sense, their ‘intentionality’ is a moot point. Drawing on theories of intertextuality, we can posit that all texts are interconnected, all stories are continually retold and translated within new contexts and genres. And in the retelling process, meanings can change and transform, bringing new significances that may or may not be present in the earlier text. Moreover, the reader or viewer of a text is at liberty to interpret it in ways that are not necessarily intended by the text’s creator; they may see intertextual allusions – and make sense of these allusions – regardless of whether or not the author purposefully sought to place them there. In other words, each intertextual journey builds a bridge between texts, but, as Steve Moyise explains, ‘what travels across is not limited to the author’s intentions’.⁵ Rather, these intertextual ‘bridges’ offer audiences multiple opportunities for journeying into new, surprising and mutually illuminating contexts, not all of which may have been envisioned by the texts’ creators. Accordingly, the biblical allusions that we detect in crime fiction and drama offer a valuable opportunity for new interpretive engagements between ancient and contemporary intertexts, regardless of the historical and contextual distance that lies between them.⁶ We may detect echoes and reminders of biblical personas, stories and themes within these crime-soaked contemporary texts, which compel us to rethink their religious and theological relevance within modern secular landscapes.⁷

All of these fascinating encounters between the Bible and fictional crime narratives deserve further investigation. In this volume, we therefore bring together scholars from the fields of biblical interpretation, literary criticism, theology and criminology to explore a range of crime literature, drama, film and television, spanning throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day. Authors consider both explicit and implicit engagements between biblical texts and crime fiction and drama, exploring the multiple layers of meaning that these engagements can produce. They also raise intriguing questions about the significance of the Bible as a religious and cultural text: its association with the culturally pervasive themes of violence, (im)morality, good and evil, and its relevance as a symbol of the (often fraught) location that religion occupies within contemporary secular societies the world over.

To begin the volume, we first take a look at some examples of crime fiction and drama that engage explicitly with biblical texts and traditions, considering the ways that these engagements invite interpretative reflection on both the crime narrative and its biblical intertext. Starting us off in Chapter 2, Matthew Collins investigates the Apocryphal book of Tobit, which relates the story of a young woman called Sarah and her unfortunate encounters with the husband-killing demon Asmodeus. The story lies at the heart of an episode of the 1940s US radio play series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, with Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigating a series of sinister deaths, where a woman’s three former husbands were murdered after receiving a note signed ‘Asmodeus’. Collins leads us through the various allusions to the book of Tobit in this wartime murder mystery before turning to re-examine the biblical text in light of Holmes’s own investigations. By so doing, he is able to offer a new and rather ingenious interpretation of this ancient narrative, which casts a suspicious eye on Sarah and her possible role as a mariticidal serial killer.

Continuing our exploration of explicit allusions to the Bible in crime narratives, Alison Jack turns her attention to Peter May’s Lewis trilogy. Here, the powerful influence of the Bible and a strongly Christian metanarrative are indicative of the novels’ Hebridean setting. Specific biblical texts relating to judgement and vengeance are presented as a common language which the protagonist and the reader must weigh up. The adequacy of the Bible’s truth claims are strongly interrogated, yet at the same time, tentative alternatives are offered in response to the extreme physical and psychological situations which make up the trilogy’s plot.

Just as Peter May’s Lewis trilogy appears to envelop the Bible in a specifically Scottish understanding of violence, vengeance and past traumas, Henning Mankell’s novel Before the Frost likewise invites reflection on the relationship between the Bible and violence in contemporary Swedish society. In Chapter 4, Caroline Blyth takes a close look at this novel, contemplating its complex and multifaceted engagement with religiously motivated violence. Drawing on the narrative’s repeated references to the Bible, she notes that Mankell is both critical of and sympathetic to the power of biblical faith in shaping people’s beliefs and guiding their actions. Specifically, she ponders Mankell’s articulation of the multiple roles that the Bible can serve in contemporary Swedish culture – from an obscure cultural artefact to an inspiration for heinous violence. Studying Mankell’s use of different narrative points of view throughout the novel, Blyth concludes that this technique facilitates a dialogical approach to the Bible, allowing readers to wrestle with its complicity in the face of intolerable evil.

While Mankell’s engagement with biblically inspired violence draws on his own contextual location of contemporary postsecular Sweden, English writer and historian C. J. Sansom explores this same theme within an early-sixteenth-century English milieu. In Chapter 5, Suzanne Bray guides us through an exploration of Sansom’s novel Revelation, which is set in London during the 1540s. This was a period when more people were able to access English translations of the Bible, but, as Revelation makes clear, it was also a time of religious fanaticism, biblical misinterpretation and subsequent religiously motivated violence. The novel relates events around a series of killings, which are inspired by the perpetrator’s psychopathological interpretation of the biblical book of Revelation. Bray traces the historical events of this period, particularly the impact that a more widely available Bible may have had on everyday English culture. She also considers Sansom’s presentation of religious zeal (and religious psychopathology) as a precursor to religious violence, asking how sacred scripture may function to inspire heinous acts of terror. She concludes that in Revelation, Sansom offers a timeless warning against those who practice selective readings of their sacred scriptures (whatever these may be) in order to justify the destruction of human life.

In Chapter 6, we turn from explicit articulations of the Bible in crime narratives to more implicit allusions, as Benjamin Bixler explores the intersection of violence and masculinity in the biblical story of Samson (Judges 13−16), reading it intertextually alongside the television series Breaking Bad. By examining the familiar trope of the male antihero, Bixler argues that violence plays an integral role in the construction of hegemonic masculinity, which is represented by both Samson and the protagonist of Breaking Bad, Walter White. Specifically, Bixler suggests that this hegemonic masculine ideal requires that both Samson and Walter seek retribution in order to defend their honour. Reading these two cultural texts intertextually, Bixler demonstrates that readers can gain valuable insights into the problematic nature of hegemonic masculinity (both biblical and televisual), and the cycles of violence that it can create and sustain.

In Chapter 7, James Oleson continues to dwell on implicit biblical allusions in popular culture texts, tracing the religious and biblical themes of faith and sin cast up by David Fincher’s neo-noir thriller Se7en. The serial killer in Se7en – Jonathan Doe – selects victims who exemplify Catholicism’s seven deadly sins: envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth and wrath. Oleson argues that, despite his ghastly murders, Doe may be interpreted less as a villain than a triumphant hero, who exists in a world where virtue and vice are no longer distinguishable. Highlighting the ways that Doe’s murders appear to conform to the sentiments of a number of biblical traditions, Oleson leaves us with the uneasy feeling that, with a little help from the Bible, homicide can serve as an effective homily against sin.

Moving from sin to death in Chapter 8, Yael Klangwisan considers two intertexts – the biblical book of Job and Antti Tuomainen’s Finnish crime novel The Man Who Died – reading them together as comparative literature. Tuomainen’s protagonist, Jaakko Kaunismaa, is, like Job, struck down suddenly with a series of life-changing catastrophes, which compel him to confront his own imminent mortality. Drawing on both philosophical and poetic perspectives, Klangwisan engages the theme of ‘life in the face of death’ as a bridge between these two texts. In particular, she employs Martin Heidegger’s conception of being-toward-death as an orienting hermeneutic to read The Man Who Died and the book of Job constructively alongside each other. By so doing, she offers an intertextual reading that invokes new perspectives on the mortality an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 On the Trail of a Biblical Serial Killer: Sherlock Holmes and the Book of Tobit
• Chapter 3 Tartan Noir and Sacred Scripture: The Bible as Artefact and Metanarrative in Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy
• Chapter 4 Faith in a Cold Climate: The Bible and Violence in Henning Mankell’s Before the Frost
• Chapter 5 ‘Understanded of the People’: C. J. Sansom’s Revelation as a Contemporary Cautionary Tale
• Chapter 6 Where Have All the Good Men Gone? Male Antiheroes in the Book of Judges and American Television
• Chapter 7 ‘Long Is the Way and Hard, That Out of Hell Leads Up to Light’: Serial Murder as Homily in Se7en
• Chapter 8 ‘The Man Who Died’: Reading Death in Job with Finnish Noir
• Chapter 9 The Divine Unsub: Television Crime Procedurals and Biblical Sexual Violence
• Chapter 10 Poirot, the Bourgeois Prophet: Agatha Christie’s Biblical Adaptations
• Chapter 11 ‘A Dangerous World’: The Hermeneutics of Agatha Christie’s Later Novels
• Chapter 12 Afterword
• Index of Authors
• Index of Biblical References
• Copyright Page