Christianity Today online has posted an article by Louis Markos entitled “The Compulsive Reader.” “What,” Markos asks, “is this mania to reach the end of the book?” Why, if a novel is gripping and well written, do we find we can’t put it down till we find out what happens?
Markos answers, in part:
What we hope to encounter at the end of the book is what the ancient Greeks called a telos: not just the chronological end, but a purposeful end toward which all the strands of life converge….Maybe as we read the last page and lower the book to our lap, the door or the window or the keyhole will open, and we will see and know how it all fits together. And no matter how many times we are disappointed, we will do it again on another night with another book when the madness grips us again.
I think this sense of glimpses of telos are one reason so many of us (including me) love to read mysteries. And why mysteries are so amenable, as a genre, to religious themes and settings. (I think first off, not only of G.K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown was the first in a series of successful priest-detectives, but of P.D. James, whose detective Adam Dalgliesh, the son of an Anglican minister, is continually finding himself solving crimes in religious settings: a monastery, a parish, a seminary, an Anglican boys school.)
Speaking of the inestimably quotable GKC, here’s my favorite of his on this subject, from an essay entitled “The Ideal Detective Story.” It was a constant inspiration to me as I worked on my own “mystery” tale:
There is one aspect of the detective story which is almost inevitably left out in considering the detective stories. That tales of this type are generally slight, sensational, and in some ways superficial, I know better than most people, for I have written them myself. If I say there is in the abstract something quite different, which may be called the Ideal Detective Story, I do not mean that I can write it. I call it the Ideal Detective Story because I cannot write it. Anyhow, I do think that such a story, while it must be sensational, need not be superficial. In theory, though not commonly in practice, it is possible to write a subtle and creative novel, of deep philosophy and delicate psychology, and yet cast it in the form of a sensational shocker.
…It is very largely a matter of the order in which things are mentioned, rather than of the nature of the things themselves. The essence of a mystery tale is that we are suddenly confronted with a truth which we have never suspected and yet can see to be true. There is no reason, in logic, why this truth should not be a profound and convincing one as much as a shallow and conventional one….
There is Shakespeare, for instance: he has created two or three extremely amiable and sympathetic murderers. Only we can watch their amiability slowly and gently merging into murder. Othello is an affectionate husband who assassinates his wife out of sheer affection, so to speak. But as we know the story from the first, we can see the connection and accept the contradiction. But suppose the story opened with Desdemona found dead, Iago or Cassio suspected, and Othello the very last person likely to be suspected. In that case, “Othello” would be a detective story. But it might be a true detective story; that is, one consistent with the true character of the hero when he finally tells the truth. Hamlet, again, is a most lovable and even peaceable person as a rule, and we pardon the nervous and slightly irritable gesture which happens to have the result of sticking an old fool like a pig behind a curtain. But suppose the curtain rises on the corpse of Polonius, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discuss the suspicion that has immediately fallen on the First Player, an immoral actor accustomed to killing people on the stage; while Horatio or some shrewd character suspects another crime of Claudius or the reckless and unscrupulous Laertes. Then “Hamlet” would be a shocker, and the guilt of Hamlet would be a shock. But it might be a shock of truth, and it is not only sex novels that are shocking. These Shakespearean characters would be none the less coherent and all of a piece because we brought the opposite ends of the character together and tied them into a knot. The story of Othello might be published with a lurid wrapper as “The Pillow Murder Case.” But it might still be the same case; a serious case and a convincing case. The death of Polonius might appear on the bookstalls as “The Vanishing Rat Mystery,” and be in form like an ordinary detective story. Yet it might be The Ideal Detective Story.
