Mysteries as Morality Tales

The oldest division in mysteries is the one between the English cozy, whose audience is supposed to be the older lady of genteel literary interests, and the American adventure story which appeals to the average, book-reading, if that’s not an oxymoron, male. The one goes back to Arthur Conan-Doyle, the other most famously to Dashiell Hammett.

While the usual distinctions are drawn between nationality, gender and class, I suspect they lie much deeper, in the differences between John Calvin and the Episcopal Church of the one hand, and Jacobus Arminius and the evangelizing churches he inspired on the other.

The most important thing about the English mysteries is that they involve someone within a closed society and assume that anyone has the capacity for evil. Calvin may have given the illusion that there were people born in the state of grace, but he also made clear no one knew who they were.

Arminius, on the other hand, argued grace was not the stingy gift God granted to a random few, but could be claimed by anyone who accepted Christ as his or her savior. As an elective status, being saved meant one could associate with only others who were likewise saved, and indeed one’s evidence of salvation became the company one kept. The rest of the world became the arena of great potential evil, xenophobia the natural result.

And so, Agatha Christie isolates members of a family or close circle of friends and leaves it to the spiritual leader, in her case Hercule Poirot, to identify the source of evil within the group. Before he succeeds, everyone is shown to be potentially guilty. However, true to both Calvin and her belief that anyone was capable of murder, she makes even her detective the villain in a book she wrote during World War II, but had published after she was dead.

In a modern American novel, a good person innocently gets mixed up with bad characters and experiences evil vicariously. It’s always another whose guilty, not the good person and his or her group of associates. Mary Roberts Rinehart most famously made the betrayer the outsider given greatest access to an inner circle, the butler.

The assumptions about the distribution of good and evil among people, and the expectation that one can decide conditions how novels end in societies where readers know lawyers can obfuscate the clearest cases of guilt. In the one, the guilty party commits suicide. In the other, especially after Mickey Spillane, the detective arranges for the death of the guilty one. The one still carries the doubt of Calvin, the other the infallibility of Arminius.

The small number of Tony Hillerman novels I’ve now read fall into the Arminian category. The wrongly suspected innocent aren’t actually characters in his book, but readers seeking a way to learn about unknown, potentially dangerous worlds, without becoming socially tainted by their curiosity.

One can quibble about style, plotting, character development, description, point of view, use of conventions, those signifiers we use to discuss literature. However, I suspect they really are only ways of verbalizing discomfort without addressing it.

In the end it’s not the difference between Hillerman’s journalistic description of Jim Chee or Joe Leaphorn and Agatha Christie’s novelistic treatment of Poirot or Jane Marple that matters. It’s the view of the moral world, and, as American Christians have known since the Presbyterians split into the old and new lights early nineteen century, there really is no bridge between Calvin and Arminius.

One either has the pessimistic or optimistic view of basic human nature. One may limit the positive to a small group of one’s friends or assume it can be universalized, but one cannot conceive of evil in oneself. Recognizing an author’s allegiance signals to the reader who the range of villains could be, what tensions will exist, and ultimately what the experience of discovery will be, what view of society will be confirmed and justified.

I think it’s that recognition that makes the books written by one type of writer so difficult for people raised in the other world to read, for they really are as foreign as medieval gestes and Japanese haiku.

Mysteries mentioned above include Agatha Christie, Curtain, 1975; Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Door, 1930; and Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury, 1947.

Michael Jackson

The deaths of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson provoke shared moments of cultural shock. We abandoned television for more intimate, interactive media like the internet and Twitter for news updates. Such collective moments of unmediated emotion beg us to ask why.

Superficially the two men were similar. Both were uniquely gifted synthesizers of swirling cultural currents in music, and each expanded the language of the acceptable in popular forms.
Both reached a point where they could do no more without alienating some of their fans. I’ve seen artists as diverse as Harry Belefonte and the Osborne Brothers who try variations on songs they’ve been forced to repeat for years greeted with disapproval by audiences who’ve so internalized their music that deviation could not be tolerated.

Yet, audiences want to see more, want to see something different, and so each could only evolve as performers. The Elvis of Vegas and the Jackson of the tin soldier suits are not the artists we were drawn to, but the products of our demands for new sensations within the confines of the claustrophobically familiar.

We can’t imagine either of them married watching their children play soccer. The hyper-sexuality of the one and the ultra-androgyny of the other could not be domesticated. Our perceptions built cages they couldn’t leave without risking our wrath.

We cut off creative individuals, used to working hard, from either pursing innovation in music or seeking normal domestic lives. To evoke F. Scott Fitzgerald, what possible second act did we permit them?

In the past, religion would have provided a model. But that avenue was closed to these two. Both were raised in strong evangelizing traditions, the Assembly of God and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and already had influenced more people everywhere in the world than any conventional missionary. Presley was perhaps luckier because he could maintain his ties to his past through gospel music.

The secular alternative pioneered by Ezra Cornell to devote one’s second life to philanthropy has been attacked by conservative politicians angered by the social changes supported by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. Both instead used late songs instead like "In the Ghetto" and "We Are the World" to do things aggressively outspoken critics would not otherwise permit.

We put them at the pinnacle of our success pyramid with no place to go. All we allowed was what we could imagine, the excesses of materialism. When they die and we see the consequences, we’re shocked because the emptiness we discover is the emptiness of our closed culture which has no options.

By chance, Presley died when we were struggling with economic problems under Jimmy Carter which we denied by following a less talented performer who could metamorphose into a politician. Jackson died in our current recession caused by the very kinds of excesses we condemned him to live.

What we intuit in their deaths is the failure of our shared world view to function when it is most needed. They become transformed into the canaries of our cultural crises that none of us can escape.