A quick body count suggests that this is how many of us unwind – this week alone we can tune into over forty-five hours of detective drama on terrestrial television. Six of the current top ten bestselling hardbacks, and four of the top ten paperbacks, are concerned with one form of crime or another.
But why our continued attraction to, and fascination with, the ever growing corpus of the corpse? After all, despite infinite variety in locations, characters, victims, and modes of dispatch, the essential plot remains the same each time. Regardless of whether it is Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, or Inspectors Morse or Barnaby on the case, and of whatever particular crime is committed, the culprit will eventually – and inevitably – be discovered.
The world of detective fiction is a curious blend of the horrific and the fantastic. It’s a world where violence can break out at any time, and where anyone, even the least expected (perhaps especially the least expected), may have premeditated murder. Interestingly, though, it’s also a world that displays a strange form of optimism; perhaps we could even characterise it as hope. As the acclaimed crime writer, P.D. James, once said, ‘what the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order’. The deep-seated hope that these narratives continue to articulate is that truth cannot be suppressed, that evil will be thwarted, and that things happen for a reason, a reason that, even if not always understood, can at least be explained.
Detective fiction stories therefore present a challenge to despair and hopelessness. And they continue to do so even in our post-modern society, which claims to have abandoned the idea of truth, is cynical about resolution, and has little respect for order.
Furthermore, are not the detectives of our popular viewing and reading archetypes of the contemporary pilgrim? Almost always they are maverick figures, committed to a dogged and determined pursuit of the truth, and a refusal to be distracted by simple appearances. Attentive to the clues others miss, they display a capacity for making daring leaps of logic and imagination. Perhaps we can even hear echoes of 2 Corinthians 4:18 in these characters, as they ‘fix their eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal’.
