The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama: Murderous Texts ed. by Caroline Blyth, Alison Jack

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama: Murderous Texts ed. by Caroline Blyth, Alison Jack Brandon R. Grafius caroline blyth and alison jack (eds.), The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama: Murderous Texts (LHBOTS 678; Scriptural Traces 16; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019). Pp. x + 194. £85. This consistently engaging collection of essays brings the biblical text into conversation with crime fiction, film, and television, exploring the ways that the Bible is quoted or alluded to, and provides a thematic foundation for a variety of narratives. Whether biblical references offer a clue to the identity of the murderer, or whether the Bible is used as a way to introduce “themes that reverberate throughout the biblical tradition” (p. 2) into the narrative, these essays demonstrate the surprising frequency with which the Bible becomes a significant presence in a variety of crime narratives. After a brief introduction by the editors, Matthew Collins (“On the Trail of a Biblical Serial Killer: Sherlock Holmes and the Book of Tobit”) examines a Sherlock Holmes radio broadcast from 1945 entitled “The Book of Tobit.” Holmes and Watson trail a killer named Asmodeus, who has made Diana a widow several times over through the murder of her husbands. The duo discovers that Asmodeus is a fictional creation of Diana’s, who is attempting to cover her own crimes. This solution leads Collins back to the Book of Tobit to ask whether Sarah might be the murderer, or even possibly, as suggested by the “unsolved murder” in Nineveh that occurs near the book’s beginning, whether Sarah and Tobias might [End Page 150] have been “in on it together” (p. 24). Alison Jack (“Tartan Noir and Sacred Scripture: The Bible as Artefact and Metanarrative in Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy”) engages with this series of Scottish crime novels published between 2011 and 2013. While maintaining a complicated relationship with the church and the biblical text, the trilogy frequently employs biblical references to discuss themes of salvation and vengeance. “This language,” Jack writes, “is an apparently unavoidable yet ghostly presence” (p. 39) throughout this trilogy. Moving from Scotland to Scandanavia, Caroline Blyth (“Faith in a Cold Climate: The Bible and Violence in Henning Mankell’s Before the Frost”) explores the connection between “religious fervor and the enactment of violence” (p. 46). Mankell’s novel tells the story of Erik Westin, a survivor of the Jonestown massacre who lives out a violently prophetic theology. Throughout the novel, Blyth sees that “Mankell is at pains to separate the violence of Westin’s cultic fundamentalism from mainstream Swedish Christianity” (p. 52), instead seeing Westin’s violence as a deep perversion of the Christian faith. Suzanne Bray (“‘Understanded of the People’: C. J. Sansom’s Revelation as a Contemporary Cautionary Tale”) turns to crime fiction with a historical setting. Against the backdrop of Reformation-era London, lawyer Matthew Shardlake wrestles with the dual mysteries of a teenager (Adam) who seems to have gone insane and of a serial killer. Shardlake eventually realizes that these mysteries share a similar cause: “Like Adam, the man is obsessed, inappropriately applying one tiny part of scripture, out of context, to himself” (p. 67). For Bray, this novel serves as an extended meditation on the dangers of fundamentalist appropriations of Scripture. Benjamin Bixler (“Where Have All the Good Men Gone? Male Antiheroes in the Book of Judges and American Television”) compares Samson and Breaking Bad’s Walter White. In both characters, Bixler sees a critique of “the violence of hyper-masculinity” (p. 89), suggesting that this violence leads both characters to a dead end. This violence “results in a cycle of retribution, leaving everyone empty and disillusioned” (p. 92). James Oleson (“‘Long Is the Way and Hard, That Out of Hell Leads Up to Light’: Serial Murder as Homily in Se7en”) explores the gritty 1995 film in which a serial killer is selecting victims according to the seven deadly sins and choosing methods for his murders through a lex talionis conception of justice. For Oleson, viewers should be open to the possibility that this killer is the film’s true hero, which has the potential to offer viewers “a serious moral and ontological challenge” (pp...