Patrick,
Again, I won't go into your long response point by point, but
your original assertion was that religios beliefs were all
but absolutely verboten in publishing
(and, by inference, in all popular entertainment) until
recently, and you spcifically refer to several famous mystery
writers below:
"Neither Chesterton nor Kemelman were anywhere near as
successful as Earl Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, or Agatha
Christie, who mention religion only in passing."
to bolster thant point. I'm not sure what you mean by
"only in passing," but to take each writer in turn:
One of Gardner's early Perry Mason books was THE CASE OF THE
STUTTERING BISHOP, in which the central figure is an Anglican
clergyman. True, Mason's own beliefs don't come to the
forefront here, and this might only pass muster, by your
lights, as a "passing reference," but, again, that's only off
the top of my head, and I'd be surprised if there aren't
other religious references throughout Gardner's sizable
ouvre.
The two cousins who collaborated as Ellery Queen made, I
grant you, only inferential references to their own Jewish
faith, but religiosity pervades their books to a large
degree.
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT
The central situation in THE CHINESE ORANGE MYSTERY is that
everything in a crime scene has been reversed or turned
upside-down. This turns out to have been a ploy to conceal
the fact that the murder victiom is a Anglican
clergyman.
Again, I grant you, something that might be regarded as only
a passing reference, but the whole novel hinges on that
religious symbol.
END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END
Regligiosity also pervades such early work as THE EGYPTIAN
CROSS MYSTERY and THE CAT OF MANY TAILS. TEN DAYS' WONDER is
built around a series of ten crimes each meant to represent
one of the Ten Commandments, in much the same way that the
murders in SE7EN represented the Seven Deadly Sins. AND ON
THE EIGHTH DAY is about Ellery's investigation of a crime in
a peaceful desert religious cult.
I'm not as familiar with Agatha Christie's work as I am with
Gardner's or Queen's, but I do know that the first Miss
Marple novel, MURDER AT THE VICARAGE, is about a murder at,
well, a vicarage, and that the narrator who acts as Miss
Marple's "Watson" is the local Anglican vicar, who is
presented as an intelligent, and sincerely religious helpmate
to the main sleuth.
Even Conan Doyle, who you mention earlier, let some religious
comments in. You presume, for example, that Holmes must be
Anglican, but I think an argument could be made, given his
French background (and given the religion Conan Doyle was
raised in) that he was Cathlic, although likely not a
practicing one. It is known that he undertook at least two
investigations for His Holiness, the Pope, the affair of the
Vatican cameos, and the disappearance of Cardinal
Tosca.
Religion and religious beliefs may not have been as central
to the work of the writers you cite as it was for Chesterton,
Kemelman, Holton, and others, but there doesn't seem to have
been a conscious effort to avoid it in the hope that no one
would be offended, and I'm not really sure what causes you to
draw that conclusion.
Looking outside of mystery fiction, again, consider that the
O'Haras in GONE WITH THE WIND are all practicing Catholics
and one of Scarlett's sisters becomes a nun. Consider that
Gregory Peck's movie debut was as a Catholic missionary in
China in a film adaptation of a best-selling novel, A.J
Cronin's KEYS OF THE KINGDOM. Consider how many Oscars have
been given to performers playing Catholic priests or nuns
going back nearly 70 years. I honestly don't see any evidence
that publishers, or their counterparts in other media, were
making a fetish of avoiding any mention of specific religious
belief systems in order not to offend anyone.
JIM DOHERTY
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