The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama: Murderous Texts 9780567677983, 9780567678003, 9780567677990

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SCRIPTURAL TRACES: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE

16 Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Matthew A. Collins, University of Chester Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge Editorial board Michael J. Gilmour, David Gunn, James Harding, Jorunn Økland

Published under LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

678 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn Editorial Board Alan Cooper, Susan Gillingham, John Goldingay, Norman K. Gottwald, James E. Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, James W. Watts,

THE BIBLE IN CRIME FICTION AND DRAMA

Murderous Texts

Edited by Caroline Blyth and Alison Jack With an Afterword by Liam McIlvanney

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK

BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Caroline Blyth, Alison Jack and Contributors, 2019 Caroline Blyth and Alison Jack have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

PB: 978-0-5676-9553-6

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CONTENTS Notes on Contributors List of Abbreviations Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION Caroline Blyth and Alison Jack Chapter 2 ON THE TRAIL OF A BIBLICAL SERIAL KILLER: SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE BOOK OF TOBIT Matthew A. Collins Chapter 3 TARTAN NOIR AND SACRED SCRIPTURE: THE BIBLE AS ARTEFACT AND METANARRATIVE IN PETER MAY’S LEWIS TRILOGY Alison Jack Chapter 4 FAITH IN A COLD CLIMATE: THE BIBLE AND VIOLENCE IN HENNING MANKELL’S BEFORE THE FROST Caroline Blyth Chapter 5 ‘UNDERSTANDED OF THE PEOPLE’: C. J. SANSOM’S REVELATION AS A CONTEMPORARY CAUTIONARY TALE Suzanne Bray Chapter 6 WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD MEN GONE? MALE ANTIHEROES IN THE BOOK OF JUDGES AND AMERICAN TELEVISION Benjamin Bixler Chapter 7 ‘LONG IS THE WAY AND HARD, THAT OUT OF HELL LEADS UP TO LIGHT’: SERIAL MURDER AS HOMILY IN SE7EN James C. Oleson

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Contents

Chapter 8 ‘THE MAN WHO DIED’: READING DEATH IN JOB WITH FINNISH NOIR Yael Klangwisan Chapter 9 THE DIVINE UNSUB: TELEVISION CRIME PROCEDURALS AND BIBLICAL SEXUAL VIOLENCE Dan W. Clanton, Jr Chapter 10 POIROT, THE BOURGEOIS PROPHET: AGATHA CHRISTIE’S BIBLICAL ADAPTATIONS Hannah M. Strømmen Chapter 11 ‘A DANGEROUS WORLD’: THE HERMENEUTICS OF AGATHA CHRISTIE’S LATER NOVELS J. C. Bernthal

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Chapter 12 AFTERWORD Liam McIlvanney

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Index of Authors Index of Biblical References

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CONTRIBUTORS is a tutor at the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, and a visiting lecturer at Middlesex University. He is the author of (2016). Benjamin Bixler eological School, studying the Bible and culture, with a focus on the Hebrew Bible. Caroline Blyth is senior lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Auckland. Her research explores the Bible in popular culture, focusing in particular on representations of gender and sexuality in biblical and contemporary narratives. Her recent publications include erlives as Femme Fatale (2017) and a three-volume co-edited series, Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion (2018). She is managing co-editor of the Bible and Critical eory journal. Suzanne Bray is professor of British Literature and Civilisation at Lille Catholic University in the North of France. She specializes in the history of religious ideas in twentieth-century Britain, focusing particularly on the expression of theological ideas in popular literature. is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Doane University, Crete, Nebraska. His research interests focus on the intersection between the Bible, religion and (popular) culture, and he has published and presented widely on this topic. He is currently co-editing the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Bible in American Popular Culture. is senior lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Chester. He is author of e Use of Sobriquets in the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls (2009) and co-editor of e First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship e Biblical World and Its Reception’ seminar for the European Association of Biblical Studies and series uence of the Bible (Bloomsbury T&T Clark). Alison Jack is senior lecturer in the Bible and Literature at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, and assistant principal of New College. Her research interests include the reception history of the Bible in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in Scottish literature in particular. Her most recent

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monograph is The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature: Five Hundred Years of Literary Homecomings (forthcoming). Yael Klangwisan is senior lecturer in Biblical Literature at Laidlaw Graduate School, Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of Jouissance:  A Cixousian Encounter with the Song of Songs (2015). She has published widely on French literary and poetic interactions with the Hebrew Bible. Liam McIlvanney is the inaugural Stuart Professor of Scottish Studies and co-director of the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He holds an Honorary Fellowship at the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow and is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (2012). His second novel, Where the Dead Men Go (2013), won the 2014 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best New Zealand Crime Novel. His latest novel, The Quaker, won the 2018 McIlvanney Prize for Best Scottish Crime book. James C.  Oleson is associate professor of Criminology at the University of Auckland. After earning his BA at St. Mary’s College of California, his MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge and his JD at the University of California, Berkeley, he served as a 2004−2005 United States Supreme Court Fellow and, later, as chief counsel for Criminal Law Policy for US Courts. He is intrigued by genius and crime, sentencing, prisons, punishment and linkages between crime and popular culture. Hannah M. Strømmen is senior lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Chichester. Her primary research interests lie in biblical reception history and critical theory. She has published on the role of the Bible in animal studies and in twentieth-century literature, and most recently on uses of the Bible by the contemporary far right.

ABBREVIATIONS AB AJSR BibSem BTB BZAW CBQ CBQMS CEJL CurBR DCLS DCLY DJD FCB FSBP Gk. IMDb JAL JBL JPS JSJSup JSNTSup JSOTSupp KJV LHBOTS LNTS LSTS MSU NKJV NRSV OBO OL RevQ STDJ Vulg. ZAW

Anchor Bible Association for Jewish Studies Review The Biblical Seminar Biblical Theology Bulletin Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Catholic Biblical Quarterly Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature Currents in Biblical Research Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Feminist Companion to the Bible Fontes et Subsidia ad Bibliam Pertinentes Greek Internet Movie Database Jewish Apocryphal Literature Series Journal of Biblical Literature Jewish Publication Society Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series King James Version Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies The Library of New Testament Studies The Library of Second Temple Studies Mitteilungen des Septuaginta-Unternehmens New King James Version New Revised Standard Version Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Old Latin Revue de Qumran Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah Vulgate Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

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Abbreviations

Ancient texts 4Q196 4Q197 4Q198 4Q199 4Q200 b. Ketub. b. Yebam.

4QpapToba ar 4QTobb ar 4QTobc ar 4QTobd ar 4QTobe Bavli Ketubbot Bavli Yevamot

Chapter 1 I N T R O DU C T IO N Caroline Blyth and Alison Jack

For many years, religion has served as grist to the mill for creators of crime fiction and drama. Religious motifs (including characters, images, locations and themes) make regular appearances in these cultural texts, providing a framework through which audiences can think about the complex relationships between religion and violence. These motifs are drawn upon in different ways and present a spectrum of responses to religion, from outright suspicion and ‘subversive critique’ to a more benign acknowledgement of its cultural significance and (more rarely) a respectful, or even theological, engagement with its texts, traditions and beliefs.1 While a range of religious traditions, themes and artefacts have appeared in crime fiction and drama, the Christian and Jewish Bibles have always been a particularly pervasive source of inspiration within this genre of popular culture. From the early detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Golden Age murder mysteries of Agatha Christie to the contemporary hard-boiled noir of Stieg Larsson and Ian Rankin, biblical stories, characters and motifs have popped up regularly within crime narratives. At times, these biblical allusions serve primarily as a plot device, adding a note of esoteric or arcane mystery to the narrative, or providing a vital clue through which the detective solves the crime. Thus, in Conan Doyle’s short story ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893), Sherlock Holmes is able to identify a murderer after recognizing an allusion to the David and Bathsheba story (2 Samuel 11–12) uttered by one of the other characters.2 Meanwhile, the plot of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel The Girl with the Dragon

1.  Kim Toft Hansen, ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, Scandinavian Studies 86, no. 1 (2014): 8. 2. ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ was originally published in the Strand magazine, number twenty in the series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A facsimile of the original publication (including gorgeous illustrations by Sidney Paget) is available online http:// www.jimelwood.net/students/holmes/adven2/crooked_man.pdf (accessed 12 May 2018).

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Tattoo revolves around a list of Old Testament passages that help to uncover the identity of a ritualistic serial killer.3 Elsewhere, the Bible is less a plot device than a presence in the crime narrative, which allows the author and their readers to reflect on wider culturally relevant issues pertaining to good and evil, innocence and sin, crime and punishment, justice and injustice – themes that reverberate throughout the biblical traditions themselves. Thus, in a scene from Ian Rankin’s first novel, Knots and Crosses, police inspector John Rebus sits reading the Old Testament book of Job, pondering its themes of suffering and divine justice in light of his own personal and professional traumas.4 Throughout the novel, Rankin’s allusions to the Bible – and Christianity more broadly – raise fascinating questions about the role of religion in contemporary Scottish culture and the continued relevance of the Bible as a source of consolation in a dark and dangerous world. The Bible also makes a number of guest appearances in crime film and television dramas, where again its presence shapes and invites reflection on the unfolding narrative of violence. Thus, in an episode of Scottish crime drama Taggart (‘A Death Foretold’, season 21, episode 3), the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10.25-37) provides the rationale behind a seemingly unrelated series of murders. We eventually learn that the killer is systematically punishing and killing people who had ignored, or refused to help, his girlfriend after she had been fatally wounded in a knife attack. Because they had literally ‘walked by on the other side’ (Lk. 10.31-32), thereby failing to be Good Samaritans, the killer believed that they deserved to suffer themselves. This biblical allusion therefore serves as a plot device in ‘A Death Foretold’, while also inviting viewers to consider the parable’s moral implications around violence, mercy and justice within a more contemporary framework. Similarly, in an episode of ITV police drama Vera (‘A Certain Samaritan’, series 2, episode 4), viewers are offered a contemporary retelling of the Good Samaritan parable, with the biblical story and its characters being relocated within a twenty-first-century northern English context. The episode casts each of the characters  – including the murderer  – in multiple roles (Good Samaritan, victim, Levite and priest), exploring the different ways that people might understand and enact the parable’s ethic of care. Viewers are thus invited to re-evaluate and complicate the biblical text’s unambiguous moral imperative to ‘love your neighbour’ and consider its implications within everyday secular society. While some crime fiction and drama texts situate the Bible explicitly within their narratives, others may afford it a more implicit presence by evoking certain tropes, themes, characters and storylines that echo those found in the biblical traditions. These echoes may or may not be intentional on the part of their contemporary

3. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, trans. Reg Keeland (London: MacLehose Press, 2008). The book was originally published in Sweden in 2005 under the title Män som hatar kvinnor (Stockholm: Månpocket, 2005). 4. Ian Rankin, Knots and Crosses (London: Orion Publishing, 1987), 127–28.

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creator, but in a sense, their ‘intentionality’ is a moot point. Drawing on theories of intertextuality, we can posit that all texts are interconnected, all stories are continually retold and translated within new contexts and genres. And in the retelling process, meanings can change and transform, bringing new significances that may or may not be present in the earlier text. Moreover, the reader or viewer of a text is at liberty to interpret it in ways that are not necessarily intended by the text’s creator; they may see intertextual allusions – and make sense of these allusions – regardless of whether or not the author purposefully sought to place them there. In other words, each intertextual journey builds a bridge between texts, but, as Steve Moyise explains, ‘what travels across is not limited to the author’s intentions’.5 Rather, these intertextual ‘bridges’ offer audiences multiple opportunities for journeying into new, surprising and mutually illuminating contexts, not all of which may have been envisioned by the texts’ creators. Accordingly, the biblical allusions that we detect in crime fiction and drama offer a valuable opportunity for new interpretive engagements between ancient and contemporary intertexts, regardless of the historical and contextual distance that lies between them.6 We may detect echoes and reminders of biblical personas, stories and themes within these crime-soaked contemporary texts, which compel us to rethink their religious and theological relevance within modern secular landscapes.7 5. Moyise is referring here to Hebrew Bible texts that are cited or alluded to in the New Testament, but his understanding of intertextuality can be applied to all texts and literary works. See Steve Moyise, ‘Intertextuality and Historical Approaches to the Use of Scripture in the New Testament’, in Reading the Bible Intertextually, ed. Richard B. Hays, Stefan Alkier and Leroy A. Huizenga (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2009), 32. For further discussion of the ways that biblical texts take on new meanings in their intertextual journeys, see J. Hillis Miller, ‘Border Crossings, Translating Theory: Ruth’, in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Stanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 207–23. 6.  For further discussion of intertextual readings of the Bible and contemporary literature, see Alison Jack, The Bible and Literature (London: SCM Press, 2012); Hays, Alkier and Huizenga (eds), Reading the Bible Intertextually. 7. For some examples of this approach, see Caroline Blyth, ‘When Raymond Met Delilah’, Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 4, no. 1 (2014):  41–63, which reads the Samson and Delilah story (Judges 16) intertextually with Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel, Farewell My Lovely; see also Caroline Blyth, Reimagining Delilah’s Afterlives as Femme Fatale: The Lost Seduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 163–78, which again uses Judges 16 as an intertext to read alongside an episode from BBC drama Sherlock, ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ (season 2, episode 1). Similarly, Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead is read alongside the parable of the Prodigal Son in Alison Jack’s ‘Barth’s Reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead: Exploring Christlikeness and Homecoming in the Novel’, Literature and Theology 32, no. 1 (2018):  100–16. In Jo Nesbø’s novel The Redeemer, we encounter both explicit and implicit allusions to the Bible being used very effectively together. Nesbø uses a biblical passage (Isa. 63.1) as the novel’s epigraph, but never makes explicit reference to it within the novel itself. This epigraph, however, serves as a lens that invites the reader to

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The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama

All of these fascinating encounters between the Bible and fictional crime narratives deserve further investigation. In this volume, we therefore bring together scholars from the fields of biblical interpretation, literary criticism, theology and criminology to explore a range of crime literature, drama, film and television, spanning throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day. Authors consider both explicit and implicit engagements between biblical texts and crime fiction and drama, exploring the multiple layers of meaning that these engagements can produce. They also raise intriguing questions about the significance of the Bible as a religious and cultural text: its association with the culturally pervasive themes of violence, (im)morality, good and evil, and its relevance as a symbol of the (often fraught) location that religion occupies within contemporary secular societies the world over. To begin the volume, we first take a look at some examples of crime fiction and drama that engage explicitly with biblical texts and traditions, considering the ways that these engagements invite interpretative reflection on both the crime narrative and its biblical intertext. Starting us off in Chapter  2, Matthew Collins investigates the Apocryphal book of Tobit, which relates the story of a young woman called Sarah and her unfortunate encounters with the husbandkilling demon Asmodeus. The story lies at the heart of an episode of the 1940s US radio play series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, with Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigating a series of sinister deaths, where a woman’s three former husbands were murdered after receiving a note signed ‘Asmodeus’. Collins leads us through the various allusions to the book of Tobit in this wartime murder mystery before turning to re-examine the biblical text in light of Holmes’s own investigations. By so doing, he is able to offer a new and rather ingenious interpretation of this ancient narrative, which casts a suspicious eye on Sarah and her possible role as a mariticidal serial killer. Continuing our exploration of explicit allusions to the Bible in crime narratives, Alison Jack turns her attention to Peter May’s Lewis trilogy. Here, the powerful influence of the Bible and a strongly Christian metanarrative are indicative of the novels’ Hebridean setting. Specific biblical texts relating to judgement and vengeance are presented as a common language which the protagonist and the reader must weigh up. The adequacy of the Bible’s truth claims are strongly interrogated, yet at the same time, tentative alternatives are offered in response to the extreme physical and psychological situations which make up the trilogy’s plot. Just as Peter May’s Lewis trilogy appears to envelop the Bible in a specifically Scottish understanding of violence, vengeance and past traumas, Henning Mankell’s novel Before the Frost likewise invites reflection on the relationship between the Bible and violence in contemporary Swedish society. In Chapter 4, Caroline Blyth takes a close look at this novel, contemplating its complex and multifaceted engagement with religiously motivated violence. Drawing on the

explore the ethics of violence, retribution and redemption within contemporary contexts. See Jo Nesbø, The Redeemer, trans. Don Bartlett (London: Vintage, 2009).

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narrative’s repeated references to the Bible, she notes that Mankell is both critical of and sympathetic to the power of biblical faith in shaping people’s beliefs and guiding their actions. Specifically, she ponders Mankell’s articulation of the multiple roles that the Bible can serve in contemporary Swedish culture – from an obscure cultural artefact to an inspiration for heinous violence. Studying Mankell’s use of different narrative points of view throughout the novel, Blyth concludes that this technique facilitates a dialogical approach to the Bible, allowing readers to wrestle with its complicity in the face of intolerable evil. While Mankell’s engagement with biblically inspired violence draws on his own contextual location of contemporary postsecular Sweden, English writer and historian C. J. Sansom explores this same theme within an early-sixteenth-century English milieu. In Chapter 5, Suzanne Bray guides us through an exploration of Sansom’s novel Revelation, which is set in London during the 1540s. This was a period when more people were able to access English translations of the Bible, but, as Revelation makes clear, it was also a time of religious fanaticism, biblical misinterpretation and subsequent religiously motivated violence. The novel relates events around a series of killings, which are inspired by the perpetrator’s psychopathological interpretation of the biblical book of Revelation. Bray traces the historical events of this period, particularly the impact that a more widely available Bible may have had on everyday English culture. She also considers Sansom’s presentation of religious zeal (and religious psychopathology) as a precursor to religious violence, asking how sacred scripture may function to inspire heinous acts of terror. She concludes that in Revelation, Sansom offers a timeless warning against those who practice selective readings of their sacred scriptures (whatever these may be) in order to justify the destruction of human life. In Chapter 6, we turn from explicit articulations of the Bible in crime narratives to more implicit allusions, as Benjamin Bixler explores the intersection of violence and masculinity in the biblical story of Samson (Judges 13−16), reading it intertextually alongside the television series Breaking Bad. By examining the familiar trope of the male antihero, Bixler argues that violence plays an integral role in the construction of hegemonic masculinity, which is represented by both Samson and the protagonist of Breaking Bad, Walter White. Specifically, Bixler suggests that this hegemonic masculine ideal requires that both Samson and Walter seek retribution in order to defend their honour. Reading these two cultural texts intertextually, Bixler demonstrates that readers can gain valuable insights into the problematic nature of hegemonic masculinity (both biblical and televisual), and the cycles of violence that it can create and sustain. In Chapter 7, James Oleson continues to dwell on implicit biblical allusions in popular culture texts, tracing the religious and biblical themes of faith and sin cast up by David Fincher’s neo-noir thriller Se7en. The serial killer in Se7en – Jonathan Doe  – selects victims who exemplify Catholicism’s seven deadly sins:  envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth and wrath. Oleson argues that, despite his ghastly murders, Doe may be interpreted less as a villain than a triumphant hero, who exists in a world where virtue and vice are no longer distinguishable. Highlighting the ways that Doe’s murders appear to conform to the sentiments of a number of

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biblical traditions, Oleson leaves us with the uneasy feeling that, with a little help from the Bible, homicide can serve as an effective homily against sin. Moving from sin to death in Chapter  8, Yael Klangwisan considers two intertexts – the biblical book of Job and Antti Tuomainen’s Finnish crime novel The Man Who Died – reading them together as comparative literature. Tuomainen’s protagonist, Jaakko Kaunismaa, is, like Job, struck down suddenly with a series of life-changing catastrophes, which compel him to confront his own imminent mortality. Drawing on both philosophical and poetic perspectives, Klangwisan engages the theme of ‘life in the face of death’ as a bridge between these two texts. In particular, she employs Martin Heidegger’s conception of being-toward-death as an orienting hermeneutic to read The Man Who Died and the book of Job constructively alongside each other. By so doing, she offers an intertextual reading that invokes new perspectives on the mortality and subjectivity of both Jaakko and Job. In Chapter 9, we return to the genre of television, as Dan Clanton contemplates the television police procedural as a medium for highlighting biblical violence. Clanton focuses on two biblical texts – Hosea 1–3 and Ezekiel 16 – both of which are notorious for their depiction of divinely sanctioned sexual violence. Noting that biblical readers often attempt to justify the violence within these traditions, he seeks to remedy this by reading them intertextually alongside episodes of police procedural Law & Order:  Special Victims Unit (hereafter SVU). Clanton argues that this allows readers to recognize the similarities between biblical violence and contemporary sexual violence, particularly domestic violence and wartime rape. Through a close analysis of two episodes of SVU, he demonstrates that the victims of sexual violence in these episodes are granted subjectivity and voice – two things typically withheld from biblical rape victims. Building on this insight, Clanton considers how intertextual engagement with procedurals such as SVU can encourage readers to respond more effectively and honestly to the presence of sexual violence within biblical literature. The chapters so far have considered both explicit and implicit allusions to the Bible in crime fiction and drama; many have also contemplated the way that these allusions reflect concerns about the Bible, religion and violence within the author’s own contemporary context. In Chapters 10 and 11, we draw these themes together, focusing on the crime fiction of Dame Agatha Christie. Particularly, these chapters reflect on Christie’s use of biblical themes and allusions (both explicit and implicit), and the ways that these are reflective of the historical milieu in which she was writing. Thus, in Chapter  10, Hannah Strømmen argues that Christie’s popular detective hero, Hercule Poirot, can be understood as a conduit through which the author attempted to adapt religion to the modern world in the aftermath of the First World War. Specifically, Strømmen suggests that Christie presents Poirot as a modern prophetic figure, whose character bridges the secular/sacred divide in his commitment to rationality, a bourgeois sensibility and a moderate form of religiosity. This prophetic Poirot allows Christie to reimagine religion as having a local and individual moral relevance, rather than an overt political or explicitly theological weight. Strømmen notes that Christie treats the Bible as an archive of

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universal archetypes, which remains relevant for understanding human nature, and for determining continuity and universality in a world that is experienced as fractured, threatening and discontinuous. Continuing our Christie theme in Chapter 11, J. C. Bernthal investigates the role of biblical interpretation in Agatha Christie’s late-career (postwar) crime fiction. Examining her crime novels published after 1960, Bernthal explores the ways in which Christie’s use of the Bible contributes to her generic and literary playfulness, and the extent to which the texts tap into key social concerns about the role of religion in daily life and contemporary, postwar ethics. Bernthal argues that, as an interwar novelist writing decades after the Second World War, Christie responds self-consciously to the absence of external and infallible authority figures, and celebrates the promise of judgement and retribution – not in this dangerous world, but in the world to come. We end this volume with a marvellous treat  – an afterword by crime writer and professor of Scottish Studies Liam McIlvanney. Reflecting on the biblical resonances regularly evoked in crime fiction, McIlvanney notes that crime narratives typically share the Bible’s quest for truth, as they attempt to make meaning amid the contemporary anxieties of violence, evil and injustice. As such, the detective becomes a redemptive figure, who guides audiences through the chaos and darkness of violence towards some sense of order and understanding. ‘The detective is the redeemer of our fallen world’, suggests McIlvanney. ‘Through the detective’s agency, evil deeds are brought to light and made manifest. The darkness is explained.’ As you read through the chapters in this volume, we hope that you enjoy for yourselves this quest to find meaning and redemption within the crime narratives encountered therein, and are reminded that that the ancient biblical search for meaning and justice in a violent and chaotic world remains just as pertinent today.

Bibliography Blyth, Caroline. ‘When Raymond Met Delilah’. Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 4, no. 1 (2014): 41–63. Blyth, Caroline. Reimagining Delilah’s Afterlives as Femme Fatale: The Lost Seduction. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Hansen, Kim Toft. ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’. Scandinavian Studies 86, no. 1 (2014): 1−28. Hays, Richard B., Stefan Alkier and Leroy A. Huizenga, eds. Reading the Bible Intertextually. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009. Jack, Alison. The Bible and Literature. London: SCM Press, 2012. Jack, Alison. ‘Barth’s Reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead: Exploring Christlikeness and Homecoming in the Novel’. Literature and Theology 32, no. 1 (2018): 100–16. Larsson, Stieg. Män som hatar kvinnor. Stockholm: Månpocket, 2005. Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Translated by Reg Keeland. London: MacLehose Press, 2008.

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Miller, J. Hillis. ‘Border Crossings, Translating Theory: Ruth’. In The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, edited by Stanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, 207–23. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Moyise, Steve. ‘Intertextuality and Historical Approaches to the Use of Scripture in the New Testament’, in Hays, Alkier and Huizenga, Reading the Bible Intertextually, 3−32. Nesbø, Jo. The Redeemer. Translated by Don Bartlett. London: Vintage, 2009. Rankin, Iain. Knots and Crosses. London: Orion Publishing, 1987. Taggart, ‘A Death Foretold’. Season 21, episode 3. Written by John Brown and Glen Chandler. Directed by James Henry. SMG Productions, 2005. Vera, ‘A Certain Samaritan’. Season 2, episode 4. Written by Paul Rutman and Ann Cleeves. Directed by Edward Bazalgette. ITV Studios, 2012.

Chapter 2 O N T H E T R A I L O F A B I B L IC A L S E R IA L KILLER: SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE BOOK OF TOBIT Matthew A. Collins

In the apocryphal/deuterocanonical book of Tobit, Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, is tormented by the demon Asmodeus. She has been married seven times, but each time, the demon kills her husband on her wedding night. In despair, she contemplates suicide and prays for deliverance. In the course of the narrative, Tobias, the son of Tobit, travels from Nineveh to Ecbatana and, with the help of the archangel Raphael, defeats the demon and marries Sarah. Between 1939 and 1946, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce starred together in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a series of radio plays broadcast in the United States. One episode, aired on 26 March 1945, was titled ‘The Book of Tobit’ and featured Holmes and Watson investigating the deaths of a woman’s previous three husbands, each of whom, prior to his death, had received a threatening letter signed ‘Asmodeus’. Though substantially different in both content and context, numerous comparisons are made throughout the case with its scriptural forebear. After briefly unpacking the plot of the book of Tobit itself, this chapter will first explore the use of and engagement with Tobit in this wartime murder mystery, before subsequently returning to re-examine the biblical text in the light of Holmes’ namesake investigation.1 By effectively transposing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated detective to ancient Ecbatana, the inherently murderous nature of the biblical tale comes into sharper focus and the peculiarities of the narrative and its folkloric origins are both reassessed and illuminated from a perspective informed by crime fiction. In doing so, this essay will further illustrate the extent to which the ‘genre lens’ through which we approach a text may govern our reading of it. 1.  Though more accurately described as an ‘apocryphal’ or ‘deuterocanonical’ work (being entirely absent from the Jewish Tanak), the book of Tobit can nevertheless be regarded ‘biblical’ in the broadest sense, having been considered such for at least the first 1,500 years of Christianity, and continuing to constitute an authoritative part of Catholic and Orthodox Bibles today. Indeed, the radio play itself twice refers to Tobit as an ‘Old Testament story’.

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Putting Sherlock Holmes on the case, a rather different interpretation of the text emerges – one in which there is a serial killer on the loose in the book of Tobit, and Sarah may not in fact be as innocent as she seems.

Murder and Death in the Book of Tobit The book of Tobit exists in two main Greek versions:  GI (the so-called ‘short recension’, preserved in Codex Vaticanus, Alexandrinus and Venetus) and GII (the ‘long recension’, preserved in Codex Sinaiticus and attested in MSS 319 and 910).2 The ‘long recension’ (GII), rediscovered in the nineteenth century, is probably the earlier of the two.3 Long-held suspicions that the Greek text reflected a translation from a Semitic original were seemingly confirmed by the discovery of fragments of one Hebrew and four Aramaic copies among the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q196–200 = 4QToba–e).4 Other extant versions include a third Greek recension (GIII), the Old Latin and Vulgate editions, medieval Semitic copies (both Hebrew and Aramaic) plus Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic and Armenian versions.5 It has been 2. Both versions can be viewed in parallel in Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Tobit, CEJL (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003); Robert Hanhart, Tobit, Septuaginta Vetus Testamentum Graecum VIII.5 (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983). They both appear consecutively in Robert J. Littman, Tobit:  The Book of Tobit in Codex Sinaiticus, Septuagint Commentary Series (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 3. Fitzmyer, Tobit, 5–6; Robert Hanhart, Text und Textgeschichte des Buches Tobit, MSU 17 (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 21–48; Carey A. Moore, Tobit:  A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 40A (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1996), 53–60; Merten Rabenau, Studien zum Buch Tobit, BZAW 220 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 3–7. GII is also the version found in more recent translations, such as the NRSV. 4.  Joseph A. Fitzmyer, ‘Tobit’, in Qumran Cave 4.XIV:  Parabiblical Texts, Part  2, ed. Magen Broshi et al., DJD 19 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1995), 1–76 and pls. I–X; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, ‘The Aramaic and Hebrew Fragments of Tobit from Qumran Cave 4’, CBQ 57 (1995):  655–75; Michaela Hallermayer, Text und Überlieferung des Buches Tobit, DCLS 3 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 33–185; Armin Schmitt, ‘Die hebräischen Textfunde zum Buch Tobit aus Qumran 4QTobe (4Q200)’, ZAW 113 (2001):  566–82. For a possible fifth Aramaic copy from Qumran (originally attributed to 4Q196), see Michaela Hallermayer and Torleif Elgvin, ‘Schøyen Ms. 5234: Ein neues Tobit-Fragment vom Toten Meer’, RevQ 22 (2006): 451–61; cf. Andrew B. Perrin, ‘An Almanac of Tobit Studies: 2000–2014’, CurBR 13 (2014):  107–42 (109). On the question of composition language, see Fitzmyer, Tobit, 18–28; Littman, Tobit, xxvi–xxvii; Moore, Tobit, 33–39; Perrin, ‘Almanac of Tobit Studies’, 111–13; Frank Zimmermann, The Book of Tobit, JAL 7 (New  York:  Harper & Brothers, 1958), 139–49. 5. Maria Cioată, ‘Medieval Hebrew Tellings of Tobit: “Versions” of the Book of Tobit or New Texts?’, in Is There a Text in This Cave? Studies in the Textuality of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honour of George J.  Brooke, ed. Ariel Feldman, Maria Cioată and Charlotte Hempel,

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speculated that the tale had its origins in folkloric traditions, gradually evolving from secular folktale to Jewish religious novella.6 Though clearly post-exilic in its present form7 and likely dating from the early second century BCE,8 the narrative itself is set in the eastern diaspora of the seventh century BCE, which resulted from the Assyrian deportation of Israel (Tob. 1.1-3; cf. 2 Kgs 15.29). Tobit, belonging to the tribe of Naphtali and living in Nineveh, has a habit of digging graves and secretly burying the corpses of any of his people who were left without a proper burial (Tob. 1.16-19; 2.3-8). After becoming blind (2.9-10) he prays for death (3.1-6). Meanwhile, in Ecbatana, Sarah (the daughter of Tobit’s kinsman, Raguel) has been married seven times but on each occasion her husband has been killed on the wedding night (3.7-9; 6.14-15; 7.11). With the demon Asmodeus (Gk. Asmodaios [GII 3.17]; cf. Asmodeos [GII 3.8]; Asmodaus [GI 3.8, 17]) seemingly responsible for the series of murders, Sarah likewise prays for death and deliverance (Tob. 3.10-15). Though both Tobit and Sarah continue to live, by the end of chapter 3 the book is already littered with dead bodies. Tobit’s son, Tobias, is dispatched by his father to collect a financial deposit from Gabael, living in Rages in Media (4.1-2; 4.20-5.3; cf. 1.14). Accompanied by the

STDJ 119 (Leiden:  Brill, 2017), 334–67; Fitzmyer, Tobit, 3–17; Littman, Tobit, xix–xxv; Benedikt Otzen, Tobit and Judith (London:  Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 60–66; Loren T. Stuckenbruck, ‘The “Fagius” Hebrew Version of Tobit:  An English Translation Based on the Constantinople Text of 1519’, in The Book of Tobit:  Text, Tradition, Theology, ed. Géza G. Xeravits and József Zsengellér, JSJSup 98 (Leiden:  Brill, 2005), 189–219; Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Stuart Weeks, ‘The Medieval Hebrew and Aramaic Texts of Tobit’, in Intertextual Studies in Ben Sira and Tobit, ed. Jeremy Corley and Vincent Skemp, CBQMS 38 (Washington, DC:  Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2005), 71–86; Stuart Weeks, ‘Some Neglected Texts of Tobit:  The Third Greek Version’, in Studies in the Book of Tobit:  A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Mark Bredin, LSTS 55 (London:  T&T Clark, 2006), 12–42; Zimmermann, Book of Tobit, 127–38. See further Christian J. Wagner, Polyglotte Tobit-Synopse: Griechisch – Lateinisch – Syrisch – Hebräisch – Aramäisch, MSU 28 (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003); Stuart Weeks, Simon Gathercole and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (eds), The Book of Tobit:  Texts from the Principal Ancient and Medieval Traditions, FSBP 3 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), especially 1–60. 6.  Otzen, Tobit and Judith, 8–20. See further, Robert H. Pfeiffer, History of New Testament Times with an Introduction to the Apocrypha (New  York:  Harper & Brothers, 1949), 269–71; Will Soll, ‘Misfortune and Exile in Tobit: The Juncture of a Fairy Tale Source and Deuteronomic Theology’, CBQ 51 (1989): 209–31; Lawrence M. Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1995), 73–76; Zimmermann, Book of Tobit, 5–12. Cf. Fitzmyer, Tobit, 36–41. 7. For example, Tob. 13.9-10 and 14.4-5 appear to show awareness of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the Babylonian exile of 587/6 BCE, as well as the return from exile and subsequent rebuilding of the temple in the latter half of the sixth century BCE. 8.  Fitzmyer, Tobit, 50–54; Littman, Tobit, xxviii; Moore, Tobit, 40–42; Otzen, Tobit and Judith, 57–59; Perrin, ‘Almanac of Tobit Studies’, 113–15.

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archangel Raphael, though unaware of his true identity (5.4-22), Tobias stops en route at Ecbatana where he is encouraged by Raphael to marry Sarah and ‘inherit her father’s possessions’ (6.10-13). Knowing of the seven previous men who have ‘died in the bridal chamber’ (6.14), Tobias is understandably reluctant, but Raphael reassures him, revealing how to dispel the demon (6.16-18; cf. 6.7-9). Tobias and Sarah are married (7.9-16) and Asmodeus is successfully driven away (8.1-3), though not before Raguel pre-emptively digs a grave for his latest son-in-law (8.912), intending to cover up as best he can an anticipated eighth murder (8.12: ‘if he is dead, let us bury him without anyone knowing it’). Tobias, however, survives the wedding night, the grave is filled in (8.18), and after much celebrating Tobias and Sarah leave Ecbatana and return to Nineveh (10.7-13). Raphael helps Tobias heal his father’s blindness (11.1-15), before revealing his true identity and departing (12.11-22). All live happily ever after (14.1-2, 12-15). Thus, the book of Tobit has at its heart a series of mysterious murders. As Amy-Jill Levine notes, ‘[C]orpses are piling up at Sarah’s house.’9 Indeed, there is throughout a conspicuously high concentration of terms such as thaptō (‘to bury’) and taphos (‘grave’), with 22 per cent of the verses in GII (53 out of 244) containing ‘some allusion to death, dying, or burial’.10 The killer in this instance is identified as the demon Asmodeus, who in Tob. 6.15 is described as being in love with Sarah (in MS 319, GI, 4Q196 and OL, though not Sinaiticus), suggesting that his motive is jealousy and perhaps further casting him in the role of a murderously possessive incubus.11

Sherlock Holmes and the Book of Tobit The epitomical detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Dr Watson were the literary creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Originally appearing in 4 novels and 56 short stories (the so-called ‘canon’), the characters have since featured in thousands of different adaptations and new works by

9. Amy-Jill Levine, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries: A New Look at “Diaspora as Metaphor: Bodies and Boundaries in the Book of Tobit” ’, in A Feminist Companion to Tobit and Judith, ed. Athalya Brenner-Idan with Helen Efthimiadis-Keith, FCB 20 (London:  T&T Clark, 2015), 3–22 (18). 10. Moore, Tobit, 130 (also 120). Moore further notes that only chapter 9 (itself just six verses long) is seemingly devoid of allusions to death and burial (129–30). 11. Beate Ego, ‘ “Denn er liebt sie” (Tob 6,15 Ms. 319): Zur Rolle des Dämons Asmodäus in der Tobit-Erzählung’, in Die Dämonen  – Demons:  Die Dämonologie der israelitischjüdischen und frühchristlichen Literatur im Kontext ihrer Umwelt, ed. Armin Lange, Hermann Lichtenberger and K. F.  Diethard Römheld (Tübingen:  Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 309–17; Beate Ego, ‘The Banishment of the Demon in Tobit: Textual Variants as a Result of Enculturation’, in Brenner-Idan with Efthimiadis-Keith, A Feminist Companion, 67–74; Fitzmyer, Tobit, 215.

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Figure 2.1 Basil Rathbone (l) and Nigel Bruce (r) recording The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939–46).

subsequent authors across a wide variety of media.12 Most notably, between 1939 and 1946, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce starred as Holmes and Watson not only in 14 feature-length films13 but also in 217 episodes of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a series of radio plays broadcast in the United States on the NBC Blue Network and Mutual Broadcasting System (and overseas via the Armed Forces Radio Service) (Figure 2.1).14

12.  These derivative and/or updated works include most recently, for instance, the awardwinning television series Sherlock (BBC, 2010–present) and Elementary (CBS, 2012–present), set in twenty-first-century London and New York respectively, over 120 years after the characters’ first appearance in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward Lock & Co., 1887). 13. The Hound of the Baskervilles (20th Century Fox, 1939); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (20th Century Fox, 1939); Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (Universal, 1942); Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (Universal, 1943); Sherlock Holmes in Washington (Universal, 1943); Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (Universal, 1943); The Spider Woman (Universal, 1944); The Scarlet Claw (Universal, 1944); The Pearl of Death (Universal, 1944); The House of Fear (Universal, 1945); The Woman in Green (Universal, 1945); Pursuit to Algiers (Universal, 1945); Terror by Night (Universal, 1946); Dressed to Kill (Universal, 1946). 14.  For a full listing of the 217 Rathbone-Bruce episodes, including original broadcast dates, see ‘The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Radio Show 1939–1946)’, in the

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One of these episodes, written by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green and first aired on 26 March 1945, was titled ‘The Book of Tobit’.15 Though markedly distinct from its scriptural forebear, it nevertheless drew both heavily and explicitly on the apocryphal/deuterocanonical work, with Holmes and Watson investigating the deaths of a woman’s previous three husbands, each of whom, prior to his death, had received a threatening letter signed ‘Asmodeus’.16 At just 30 minutes long (several minutes of which are also taken up by messages from the show’s sponsor, Petri Wine), the set-up, investigation and resolution are fast-paced and economically written, yet contain numerous references to and comparisons with the original murders of the book of Tobit. As the tale begins, Lady Diana Vennering (‘something of a femme fatale in the early 1900s’ [02:53–02:57]) has already lost two previous husbands, Señor Rossoni and Sir Wilfred Vennering, both of whom were mysteriously stabbed to death on their wedding night.17 After the second murder, Holmes and Watson attend the trial of a suspect, Major Beckwith (‘cousin of the dead man and an ardent suitor of the fair Diana’ [03:27–03:31]), but he is found not guilty and released. Leaving the courtroom (and only four minutes into the story), Holmes first highlights the scriptural connection: Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia, available online https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/ index.php?title=The_New_Adventures_of_Sherlock_Holmes_(radio_show_1939-1946). After Rathbone left in May 1946, the series continued until 1950, though with Bruce leaving in July 1947, after which time it was retitled first Sherlock Holmes (September 1947–June 1949) and then The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (September 1949–June 1950). 15. Anthony Boucher and Denis Green, ‘The Book of Tobit’, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (26 March 1945) (radio play). This episode was later released on audio cassette: Anthony Boucher and Denis Green, The Book of Tobit and Murder Beyond the Mountains, vol. 19 of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Simon & Schuster Audioworks, 1993) (audio cassette). The recordings are now in the public domain and many, including ‘The Book of Tobit’, can be readily found online, for example at http://www.rathboneandbruce.net/the-newadventures-of-sherlock-holmes-old-time-radio-show-episodes.html. 16. The radio play has twice been adapted into a short story: Carla Coupe, ‘The Book of Tobit’, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine 2.2, issue 6 (2011):  95–121; H. Paul Jeffers, The Forgotten Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:  Based on the Original Radio Plays by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green (New York:  Carroll & Graf, 2005), 91–106. Though both closely follow the original script (especially Coupe, who moreover leaves Boucher and Green entirely uncredited!), some differences and changes exist. Jeffers notes that ‘translating radio programs to be read as short stories necessitates occasional expansion of the original texts to take the place of the radio listener’s imagination, giving additional information, inserting narrative for a sound effect or musical element, and providing context’ (original emphasis) (Forgotten Adventures, 5). Thus, the version predominantly engaged with here is the original radio play (for the availability of which, see n. 15 above). 17.  Indicative time references for quotations from the radio play will be provided in brackets, and correspond to the original recording. Timings are approximate and based on the overall running time of 29:33, which includes introductory and concluding messages from the show’s sponsor.

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Holmes: Have you ever read the book of Tobit, Watson? Watson: Tobit? I don’t think so. When was it published? Holmes: Oh, a little before our time, old chap. It’s an Old Testament story. Watson: Whatever made you think of it at this moment? Holmes: Well it’s so remarkably apposite for the case of Lady Vennering. It deals with a highly peculiar series of murders. Seven of them, if I remember correctly. Watson: Who was the murderer? Holmes: A jealous demon by the name of Asmodeus, who strangled husbands on their wedding nights. Watson: Well, judging by the verdict just now, Major Beckwith isn’t the Asmodeus, or whatever you call him, in this case. (04:37–05:08)

The case is thus presented from the outset (indeed, from the title) as in some way mirroring the ‘highly peculiar series of murders’ of the book of Tobit, with Holmes and Watson on the trail of their very own ‘Asmodeus’. The two soon learn that the twice-widowed Diana Vennering intends next to marry the acquitted Major Beckwith. They are visited by the Reverend Arthur Weyland, who officiated at the previous two wedding ceremonies and who wishes to prevent the third: Weyland: May I ask you, are you familiar with the book of Tobit? Watson: The book of Tobit? Good gracious me. You were talking about that yesterday, Holmes. Holmes: I see that you’ve come to consult me about the Vennering case. Weyland: Well that’s amazing. How did you know? Has Lady Vennering been in touch with you? Holmes: Errr, no sir, but I’m familiar with the book of Tobit, and Lady Vennering’s case closely resembles that of the woman Sarah in the Old Testament story. Weyland: More closely than you realize, Mr Holmes. (07:21–07:44)

The Reverend Weyland goes on to explain that each husband, before the wedding, received a threatening note in ‘ancient Hebrew writing’ signed ‘Asmodeus’. Apparently concerned for Diana’s safety (‘Murder is stalking her, Mr Holmes’ [08:27–08:29]), he asks the detective to intervene and help deter her from marrying Beckwith. Though neither Holmes nor Watson are convinced ‘that Mr Weyland’s motives are entirely impersonal’ (09:45–09:49), they nevertheless agree to speak to her. Further suspects appear, in the form of magician’s assistant Vernon Gaultier (‘a stupid, good-looking boy who thought he was in love with me’ [11:58–21:01]) and artist Peter McComas, who angrily storms in while Holmes and Watson are with her (‘You’re planning to marry Beckwith. But I won’t stand for it. If you think you can throw me over like some silly boy, you’re very much mistaken’ [13:33–13:40]).

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Diana also discloses that Weyland translated the Asmodeus messages for her and read her the book of Tobit in its entirety, noting, ‘He’s always been particularly fond of that book’ (12:31–12:33). Shortly thereafter it is revealed that she has in fact secretly married Beckwith that very morning. As Holmes asks to speak to him, the butler comes downstairs to report that he too has been murdered (‘It’s Major Beckwith, m’lady – he’s been stabbed to death in his bath’ [15:03–15:08]). With Diana now thrice-widowed, and the police no closer to catching the killer, Holmes himself appears to become enamoured of her, spending all his time with her (and thereby incurring the ire of the Reverend Weyland). When finally confronted by Watson, Holmes reveals that he and Diana are to be married the following day. His friend is understandably concerned: ‘But Holmes, three of her husbands murdered on their wedding night! And you’re proposing to be the fourth’ (19:58– 20:02). After the wedding ceremony, this time presided over not by Weyland, but ‘a clergyman named Vernet’ (20:39–20:40), the new Mrs Holmes retires upstairs, while Holmes divulges to Watson that ‘just before the ceremony I received one of those warning notes signed by “Asmodeus” ’ (22:02–22:06). Making his own exit, he subsequently shouts for Watson who runs upstairs to join him: Watson: What on earth’s the matter, Holmes? Holmes: Follow me and lock the door behind you. [Watson shuts and locks the door.] Holmes: Allow me to introduce you to the demon Asmodeus, Watson. Unfortunately at the moment she’s in a faint. Watson: Good lord . . . it’s Diana! (23:09–23:24)

Holmes explains that she attempted to stab him as he bent over to strap up a suitcase, but that he had been expecting the attack and watching her in the mirror, revealing to Watson that he had suspected her all along (‘the problem was to find the proof ’ [23:38–23:39]). ‘Asmodeus’ is exposed as a fiction, created by the murderess in order to throw others off the scent: Holmes: These murders have been a perfect example of misdirection of motive. Watson: How do you mean, Holmes? Holmes: Well, by creating Asmodeus  – thanks to the well-meaning stories of the Reverend Mr Weyland, from whose theological libraries she must have copied the Hebrew signature  – she focused the murders on jealousy, concealing the fact that the one person with the perfect motive was herself – the widow who was to inherit! (23:45–24:07)

Holmes further reveals that the clergyman who presided over the wedding, Vernet, was in fact his brother Mycroft in disguise and that he is therefore not actually

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married. Diana is arrested, and Holmes and Watson, having solved the case, return once more to Baker Street. Though only a short radio play, ‘the book of Tobit’ is referred to by name nine times in the course of the dialogue, while there are seven further references to ‘Asmodeus’. In addition, there are several explicit conversations between characters about the nature and/or plot of the book of Tobit, drawing further links between the two works.18 Early on, Holmes even likens his own role to that of the archangel Raphael: Watson: Hmm, what are you laughing about? Holmes: I  was thinking of the book of Tobit, Watson. In that, the role of protector – the role I’ve just been asked to take – was played by the archangel Raphael. I can’t help feeling, Watson, that I’m making distinct strides in my profession!19 (09:52–10:08)

As a result (and as anticipated by the title of the episode), Holmes and Watson are effectively presented with their own Tobit case to solve, faced with a series of husbands murdered on their wedding nights and on the trail of the mysterious ‘Asmodeus’. Significantly, however, they ultimately come to the conclusion that ‘Asmodeus’ does not in fact exist and that the real murderer is none other than the widow, Diana. Thus, in this revisiting and reinterpretation of the biblical book, it is the bride herself who is the serial killer!

Reopening the Case Returning to the book of Tobit and re-examining it in the light of Sherlock Holmes’ namesake investigation opens up some intriguing interpretative possibilities.20 In

18.  In Jeffers’s short story based on the episode, this is expanded to provide even more detail about the plot of the book and its apocryphal/deuterocanonical status (e.g., Forgotten Adventures, 95). 19. Of course, Holmes’s role might also be likened to that of Tobias, especially inasmuch as he ‘marries’ Diana himself and thereby brings an end to the killing spree. Interestingly, Diana’s four husbands (Señor Rossoni, Sir Wilfred Vennering, Major Beckwith and Sherlock Holmes) plus three suitors (Vernon Gaultier, Peter McComas and Reverend Arthur Weyland) bring the total number of (potential) male victims in the story to seven (cf. Tob. 6.14; 7.11). 20.  Thus, to borrow Larry J.  Kreitzer’s phrase, ‘reversing the hermeneutical flow’. See, for instance, Larry J. Kreitzer, The New Testament in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, BibSem 17 (Sheffield:  Sheffield Academic Press, 1993); Larry J. Kreitzer, The Old Testament in Fiction and Film:  On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, BibSem 24 (Sheffield:  Sheffield Academic Press, 1994). Examining the use and

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particular, reading Tobit through the lens of crime fiction (a conceptual genre switch) creates new points of emphasis or interest in the text, and brings the inherently murderous nature of the biblical tale into sharper focus.21 The suggestion here is not that Tobit was intended as a work of crime fiction, but that approaching it as such helps highlight a number of peculiarities in the text and might unlock a rather different interpretation of the narrative. Indeed, it is this very aspect which is seized upon and accentuated in Holmes’ own extremely succinct summary of the text. At its heart, ‘[the book of Tobit] deals with a highly peculiar series of murders’ (04:53–04:56). Reconsidering the events of the book of Tobit through the eyes of Sherlock Holmes (in effect, transposing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated detective to ancient Ecbatana), cracks start to appear in the officially presented account. The deaths of Sarah’s seven previous husbands (each strangled on their wedding night)22 are blamed on the demon Asmodeus (Tob. 3.8, 17). However, despite ostensibly being the primary antagonist of the narrative, not only is he surprisingly swiftly and anticlimactically dispatched (8.2-3), on closer inspection there is no real evidence that he ever existed! He has no dialogue, the text provides us with no physical description of the demon, and there are seemingly no witnesses to his murderous actions. Indeed, there is no indication that anyone (including Tobias in the bridal chamber) has ever actually seen him.23 J. Edward Owens notes that Asmodeus is ‘absent but implied’.24 The alleged perpetrator makes no explicit

interpretation of biblical texts in contemporary culture, John Barton likewise suggests that ‘the “hermeneutical flow” can [also] be “reversed”, as these modern versions send us back to the originals with fresh eyes’. See John Barton, foreword to Kreitzer, The New Testament in Fiction and Film, 7–9 (8). 21. The genre lens through which a text is read, and the corresponding preconceptions and expectations which go with it, influence and shape its interpretation. How we understand and approach the book of Tobit will thus affect our reading of it. For example, on approaching Tobit as a work of comedy, see David McCracken, ‘Narration and Comedy in the Book of Tobit’, JBL 114 (1995):  401–18; cf. J. R. C. Cousland, ‘Tobit: A Comedy in Error?’, CBQ 65 (2003):  535–53. On the application of different genre lenses to Tobit, see further Paul Deselaers, Das Buch Tobit:  Studien zu seiner Entstehung, Komposition und Theologie, OBO 43 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), 262–79; David A. deSilva, Introducing the Apocrypha:  Message, Context, and Significance (Grand Rapids:  Baker Academic, 2002), 69–70; Moore, Tobit, 17–21. 22.  At Tob. 3.8, GI details that Sarah’s husbands meet their end via strangulation (apopnigō; similarly, OL: suffocas), while GII simply states that they were killed (apoktennō). 23.  One possible exception is the supposed (and unwitnessed) encounter between Asmodeus and Raphael in Tob. 8.3. 24. J. Edward Owens, ‘Asmodeus: A Less Than Minor Character in the Book of Tobit – A Narrative-Critical Study’, in Angels: The Concept of Celestial Beings – Origins, Development and Reception, ed. Friedrich V. Reiterer, Tobias Nicklas and Karin Schöpflin, DCLY 2007 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 277–90 (283).

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appearance, but is instead simply ‘spoken about and acted against’.25 Given the paucity of evidence against the accused (or indeed for his very existence), it seems unlikely that Sherlock Holmes would consider the case closed but would continue to seek an alternative explanation. Moreover, the name ‘Asmodeus’ appears only in the mouth of the narrator (Tob. 3.8, 17). When Tobias is encouraged by Raphael to marry Sarah, his own tentative attribution of the murders to a demon is presented as the result of mere speculation and rumour as to the possible cause: ‘I have heard that she already has been married to seven husbands and that they died in the bridal chamber. On the night when they went in to her, they would die. I have heard people saying that it was a demon that killed them’ (6.14). Significantly, however, it is not a rumour that appears to have been heard and/ or held by Sarah’s own household. When Sarah’s father, Raguel, explains ‘the true situation more fully’ to Tobias, no third party (demonic or otherwise) is mentioned: I am not at liberty to give her to any other man than yourself, because you are my nearest relative. But let me explain to you the true situation more fully, my child. I have given her to seven men of our kinsmen, and all died on the night when they went in to her. But now, my child, eat and drink, and the Lord will act on behalf of you both. (Tob. 7.10-11)

Raguel nevertheless does not expect Tobias to survive the wedding night and preemptively digs a grave in an attempt to cover-up an anticipated eighth murder (8.12:  ‘if he is dead, let us bury him without anyone knowing it’). We are not explicitly told who he thinks is responsible for the murders, or who he believes he is covering for, but the maidservants are far more forthcoming. One accuses Sarah directly (3.8): ‘You are the one who kills your husbands!’ (GII) ‘Don’t you realize that you strangle your husbands?’ (GI)26

The Vulgate continues at the end of 3.9 (and the start of 3.10) with the maidservant adding, ‘O killer of your husbands. You don’t want to kill me too, as you already killed the seven, do you?’27 The accusation, interfectrix virorum, is translated rather more pointedly by Carey A. Moore as ‘husbands-murderer’.28 The repeated emphasis on the murder of seven previous husbands (e.g. 3.8; 3.15; 6.14; 7.11) would certainly have been treated with suspicion in later rabbinic tradition,

25. Ibid., 278. 26.  The Old Latin, which generally follows GII, has ‘You are the one who suffocates [suffocas] your husbands!’ (OL). Also, see n. 22 above. See further, Fitzmyer, Tobit, 147–52; Moore, Tobit, 142. 27. Fitzmyer, Tobit, 152. 28. Moore, Tobit, 142.

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where a woman who had buried two or three husbands was labelled a qatlanit (‘murderous wife’) and prohibited from remarrying (b. Yebam. 64b; cf. b. Ketub. 65a): [She was regarded] as if there were something in her that was man-killing. Cf. Yeb. 64b: if a woman is married to one husband, and he dies; to a second, and he dies; she should not be married to a third. Such is the opinion of R. Judah. R. Simon ben Gamaliel avers, ‘She may be married to a third, but not married to a fourth’. R. Huna declares ‘The source is the cause’ i.e., such is the nature of this woman.29

The implication, inherent in the label, is that the widow herself is to blame and therefore dangerous. In this context, it is perhaps also worth noting the brief assertion in Tob. 3.9 that Sarah beats her maidservants (‘Why do you beat us?’), suggesting that she is ‘not quite the meek and mild child most commentators claim’ and potentially indicative of a violent temper.30 Reading the book of Tobit through a somewhat different lens (specifically, on the trail of a serial killer), ‘clues’ such as these, when drawn together, may raise questions about whether Sarah is really as innocent as she seems. Although the narrator of Tobit is keen to pin the murders on the elusive and unseen ‘Asmodeus’, on closer inspection the more obvious chief suspect within the world of the narrative (explicitly identified by the maid, implicitly via the actions of her father, and a qatlanit several times over in the eyes of the rabbis) would appear to be none other than Sarah herself. In Sherlock Holmes’ namesake case, the widow utilizes the fictional ‘Asmodeus’ in order to focus the murders on jealousy (cf. Tob. 6.14-15),31 while the true motive is revealed to be inheritance (‘a perfect example of misdirection of motive’ [23:47–23:49]). In the biblical tale, there is no clear indication that Sarah benefits financially from the deaths of her seven husbands; indeed, Tob. 3.15 (cf. 6.12; 8.21; 14.13) suggests that she does not directly inherit.32 We may, nevertheless, perhaps speculate that Raguel acquired a bride-price from each of them (cf. Gen. 34.12; Exod. 22.16-17; Deut. 22.28-29),33 which would then

29.  Zimmermann, Book of Tobit, 62–63. See further, Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious:  Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 262–72; Mordechai A. Friedman, ‘Tamar, A Symbol of Life: The “Killer Wife” Superstition in the Bible and Jewish Tradition’, AJSR 15 (1990): 23– 61; Isaac Sassoon, The Status of Women in Jewish Tradition (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011), 124–26. 30. Moore, Tobit, 148. 31. See n. 11 above. 32.  Though cf. Num. 27.1-11 and 36.1-13, which further share with the book of Tobit a focus on endogamous marriage. See too, Levine, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries’, 11–12; Pfeiffer, History of New Testament Times, 266. 33. See further, Gen. 24.10, 22, 30, 47-48, 51-53; cf. 29.18-20, 27-30. Also, Esther Fuchs, ‘Structure and Patriarchal Functions in the Biblical Betrothal Type-Scene: Some Preliminary

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form part of the overall fortune ultimately inherited by Tobias and Sarah (Tob. 8.21; 10.10; 14.13). We shall return to this below. However, the GI version of Tob. 3.8 (‘Don’t you realize that you strangle your husbands?’) raises an intriguing alternative possibility – that Sarah is unaware of her murderous behaviour. Such an interpretation might recast Sarah as suffering from some kind of mental illness (e.g. schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder) and thus not in control of her actions, which are being covered up by her father and household (e.g. 3.7-9; 8.9-18). Within the narrative/historical context, this could legitimately be interpreted as a case of ‘demonic possession’, with Tob. 8.2-3 (cf. 6.7-8, 17-18) thus reflecting an exorcism ritual, driving ‘the demon’ out of Sarah and so curing her from her murderous inclinations (3.17; 6.8).34 Several other retellings of the story have likewise in some way identified Sarah as the killer. For example, in James Bridie’s play Tobias and the Angel (premiered in 1930), Sarah is referred to disparagingly by her maids as ‘Sara the Strangler! Madame Asmoday!’.35 When asked by Tobias what happened to her seven previous husbands, her father, Raguel, claims, ‘We don’t exactly know’, though he confirms that ‘every one of them was strangled on his wedding night’, adding that she ‘looked each daybreak like one whose soul has been on a long journey. She remembered nothing’.36 He further notes that ‘there are stories going about. Not too pleasant ones either. It is all superstition and old wives’ tales, of course’.37 In similar fashion, the opera Tobias and the Angel (premiered in 1999) by Jonathan Dove (music) and David Lan (libretto) presents Sarah as the one who physically strangles her husbands (‘Such small hands. / Such raw weals / all over his body. / What are you?’), albeit under the control of Asmodeus, who at one point causes Sarah to start strangling herself.38 In this version, it is clear that Raguel has all along been helping to cover up the actions of his murderous daughter (‘We buried / the others / in the orchard. / It’s full’),39 while, before her

Notes’, in Women in the Hebrew Bible:  A Reader, ed. Alice Bach (New  York:  Routledge, 1999), 45–51 (esp. 49–50). 34.  Fitzmyer, Tobit, 150; Littman, Tobit, 86; Moore, Tobit, 47–48; Stuckenbruck and Weeks, ‘Medieval Hebrew’, 75. Cf. for example, Mk 1.32-34; 5.1-20; 7.24-30; 9.17-29; Lk. 4.33-35; 8.2; Jn 10.20-21; Acts 19.11-16; Josephus, Ant. 8.45-47; J.W. 7.185. See further, Amanda Witmer, Jesus, The Galilean Exorcist: His Exorcisms in Social and Political Context, LNTS 459 (London:  T&T Clark, 2012), 22–60 (esp.  44–46). Conversely, questioning the notion that the narrative presents an example of demonic possession, see Eric Eve, The Jewish Context of Jesus’ Miracles, JSNTSup 231 (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 227–29; also John P. Meier, Mentor, Message, and Miracles, vol. 2 of A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 405. 35. James Bridie, Tobias and the Angel (London: Constable & Co., 1995), 35. 36. Ibid., 46–47. 37. Ibid., 45. 38. David Lan, Tobias and the Angel (London: Oberon Books, 2006), 32–34. 39. Ibid., 33.

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wedding to Tobias, Sarah’s mother states pointedly, ‘You look so lovely / you’ll take his breath away’.40 Reopening the case in this manner and identifying Sarah as the killer also sheds light on (and is itself illuminated by) the biblical narrative’s apparent folkloric origins. Striking similarities have been noted between the plot and structure of the book of Tobit and those of numerous folktale types, especially those associated with ‘The Grateful Dead’ motif (E341)41 in which, following an act of generosity in burying a corpse, the hero is accompanied by a mysterious stranger who aids him in his quest (cf. Tob. 1.16-19; 2.3-8; 5.4-7).42 These tale types include most notably ‘The Monster in the Bridal Chamber’ (AT 507B) and ‘The Serpent Maiden’ (AT 507C). In the first (AT 507B):  a bride’s previous husbands have all died on the wedding night; the companion encourages the hero to marry her; a dragon/serpent attempts to kill the hero, but is slain by the companion; it is revealed that the bride has serpents in her body; the serpents are driven from her mouth, breaking the enchantment. In the second (AT 507C): a bride’s previous (five) husbands have all died on the wedding night; the companion encourages the hero to marry her; 40.  Ibid., 49. Other examples include Frank Yerby’s novel Tobias and the Angel (London:  William Heinemann, 1975; repr., London:  Pan Books, 1977), a retelling set in the early twentieth century, in which Sarah is depicted as suffering from dissociative identity disorder and engaged in an incestuous relationship with her bestial brother, Harold (the ‘Asmodeus’ and apparent murderer of the piece). Sarah herself, however, admits to doing ‘awful, lewd, wicked things’ when her other personality is dominant (255), and is described by her maid as ‘a murderin’ maniac’ (220). The book of Tobit has also been specifically rewritten as crime fiction by René Reouven in his French novel Tobie or Not Tobie (Paris: Denoël, 1980). Interestingly, Reouven is also known as the author of a cycle of Sherlock Holmes pastiches published between 1982 and 1989, and at one point in his Tobit novel (packed with cultural allusions) even includes Tobias (Tobie) saying to his companion (Azarias/Raphaël), ‘Elémentaire, mon cher Azarias’ (‘Elementary, my dear Azarias’)! 41.  Number classifications for ‘tale types’ follow the Aarne-Thompson index (Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale:  A Classification and Bibliography [Helsinki:  Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961]), while classifications for ‘motifs’ follow Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 6 vols, rev. and enl. edn (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1955–58). Also, Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1977), 481–500. See further, Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography – Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, 3 vols (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004). 42. Otzen, Tobit and Judith, 8–20, 39–40; Pfeiffer, History of New Testament Times, 269– 71; Thompson, The Folktale, 50–53; Wills, The Jewish Novel, 73–76; Zimmermann, Book of Tobit, 5–12. See further, Sven Liljeblad, Die Tobiasgeschichte und andere Märchen mit toten Helfern (Lund:  Ph. Lindstedt, 1927). Cf. deSilva, Introducing the Apocrypha, 70–72; Fitzmyer, Tobit, 36–41; T. Francis Glasson, ‘The Main Source of Tobit’, ZAW 71 (1959): 275– 77. An alternative approach favours the use and application of Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). See, for example, Cioată, ‘Medieval Hebrew Tellings’ and Soll, ‘Misfortune and Exile’.

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a serpent emerges from the bride’s mouth to strangle the hero, but is slain by the companion; the bride is hung upside down and a second serpent comes out of her mouth, breaking the enchantment.43 Afterwards, in both cases, the companion, who had been promised half of the spoils (cf. Tob. 12.1-5), reveals his true identity and disappears (cf. Tob. 12.6-22). Given that these folktale types appear to share some narrative foundation with the book of Tobit, it is significant that here too the bride is the killer who needs to be cured.44 Aligning Tobit with this folkloric tradition both strengthens and simultaneously helps explain the mounting case against Sarah in the biblical tale. Thus, using Holmes and Watson’s investigation of their own Tobit case as a springboard from which to reconsider the biblical murders, and re-examining the narrative from a perspective informed by crime fiction, it soon becomes apparent that there is really very little evidence for the existence of ‘Asmodeus’ beyond the say-so of the narrator, while (as with Diana in Holmes’ namesake investigation) the majority of the evidence points instead to Sarah herself as the biblical serial killer. Watson: Oh, why hasn’t she been caught before? Holmes: Because she was clever, devilishly clever. She left no clues except an indirect one that I  at once spotted  – that the likeliest person to be able to approach a bridegroom unsuspected and stab him is his bride! (24:07–24:19)

A Final Twist? There is, however, perhaps one final twist in the tale. There remains one oft-ignored yet ultimately unsolved murder in the book of Tobit, and it occurs before we even hear about Sarah and her seven husbands: ‘So Tobias went to look for some poor person of our people. When he had returned he said . . . “Look, father, one of our own people has been murdered and thrown into the market-place, and now he lies there strangled” ’ (Tob. 2.3). This particular incident is easily overlooked since, read as scripture or religious novella (or indeed, folktale), its primary purpose is simply to provide the narrative means whereby Tobit is blinded (Tob. 2.4-10). The circumstances, motive and perpetrator are thus largely irrelevant. Yet reading and approaching the text as a work of crime fiction (with the corresponding preconceptions and expectations which go with it),45 our ears would surely prick up at this first unsolved murder so 43. Note also ‘The Monster’s Bride’ (AT 507A), and association with the ‘Poison Damsel’ (F582) and ‘Serpent Damsel’ (F582.1) motifs, as well as T172–T173.2 concerning dangers in the bridal chamber (including a murderous strangling bride). See further, Liljeblad, Die Tobiasgeschichte, 33–39; Otzen, Tobit and Judith, 8–11; Pfeiffer, History of New Testament Times, 269–71; Thompson, The Folktale, 50–53. 44. Cf. Tob. 6.18 (‘You will save her’). 45. See n. 21 above.

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early in the book and we would anticipate some resolution by the end of the tale. This expectation would only be heightened upon realizing that it is the same modus operandi (strangulation) as employed by the killer on the loose in Ecbatana.46 Reading through this particular lens, we would be unlikely to consider this either coincidence or insignificant. Sherlock Holmes, we may be sure, would not ignore this initial corpse and would seek a solution that encompasses or explains all the murder victims of the book of Tobit.47 It is noteworthy, however, that this initial murder takes place in Nineveh rather than Ecbatana. Moreover, it is Tobias who (unwitnessed) discovers the body, having left the house alone sometime previously (2.2-3). We are not told who the victim is (beyond being ‘one of our own people’) and so have no clear sense of motive, but it is perhaps interesting that this results in yet another body hurriedly and furtively buried by a worried father (2.4-7; cf. 8.9-12). Assuming Sarah has not made a murderous nocturnal visit to Nineveh, this might open up another (somewhat fanciful) interpretative possibility – that Tobias and Sarah are in on it together! If so, we can dispense with the notion that Tobias miraculously ‘cures’ her of her murderous inclinations and it becomes clear why she does not also kill him. In Sherlock Holmes’ namesake case, Diana’s motive was inheritance. In this light, it is a perhaps not insignificant detail that, with seven previous husbands in the ground and her parents delighted to have finally married her off, Sarah and Tobias return to Nineveh extremely well off (10.10; also 8.21; 14.13).48

Conclusion As Sherlock Holmes himself notes, whatever else it may be, at its heart ‘[the book of Tobit] deals with a highly peculiar series of murders’ (04:53–04:56). There is a serial killer on the loose and a growing number of bodies buried in the backyard.

46. Joseph Fitzmyer notes that, in this instance, strangulation ‘may imply some kind of execution’, though ‘nothing indicates that the Jew was slain by the Assyrian king, as in 1:18’ (Tobit, 134). See further, Littman, Tobit, 65; Zimmermann, Book of Tobit, 55. Cf. variations in 4Q196, Vulg. and OL. 47. In this context, note that when the popular British television series Midsomer Murders (Bentley Productions, 1997–present), notorious for its high body count, infamously failed/ forgot in one episode to explain one of the many deaths (‘Electric Vendetta’, season 4, episode 3; first aired, 2 September 2001), reviews were predominantly negative with viewers keenly alert to the omission. For example, ‘You can’t have a multiple murder mystery & leave one of the death’s [sic] unsolved especially in such bizarre circumstances’ (Paul Andrews, ‘The worst Midsomer Murders episode ever? Maybe’, IMDb, 7 December 2007, http://www. imdb.com/title/tt0647505/reviews). Read as crime fiction, that same comment could apply just as appropriately to the book of Tobit. 48. See also n. 33 above.

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Recognizing this allowed Anthony Boucher and Denis Green to create a Sherlock Holmes pastiche in which he and Dr Watson are given their own Tobit case to solve and put on the trail of the mysterious ‘Asmodeus’. As well as drawing both extensively and intriguingly upon the biblical tale, however, this wartime murder mystery further highlights the murderous nature of the source material itself and thus encourages a return to the text with an eye to this particular literary dimension. Reassessed from a perspective informed by crime fiction, this murderous nature comes to the fore, with a series of strangled and hastily buried bodies stretching from Nineveh to Ecbatana, and with the tale’s reimagining in the radio play allowing Boucher and Green to cast their own verdict on the identity of the guilty party. Specifically, reopening the case and reading the text through this new genre lens provides a rather different interpretation of events, one in which Sarah moves from innocent victim to probable serial killer. Re-examining the case through the critical eyes of Sherlock Holmes, we appear to have an unreliable narrator who wishes to pin the blame on the elusive ‘Asmodeus’, while the majority of the evidence points solidly in the direction of Sarah (with or without an accomplice in the form of Tobias). This particular interpretation, moreover, makes sense of some of the many peculiarities of the narrative (e.g., the apparent ‘absence’ of Asmodeus, and the actions of Sarah’s household) and is coherent with its folkloric origins. Unlike Diana, Sarah appears to get away with it and she and Tobias live happily ever after. However, transposing Sherlock Holmes to ancient Ecbatana and putting him on the case, the outcome of the book of Tobit would likely have been quite different. Watson: You mean you suspected her all along? Holmes: Of course I did, old fellow. (23:34–23:37)

It’s elementary, dear reader, elementary.

Bibliography Aarne, Antti, and Stith Thompson. The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. Andrews, Paul. ‘The Worst Midsomer Murders Episode Ever? Maybe’. IMDb, 7 December 2007. Available online http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647505/reviews. Barton, John. Foreword to Larry J. Kreitzer, The New Testament in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, BibSem 17. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993, 7–9. Boucher, Anthony, and Denis Green. ‘The Book of Tobit’. The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 26 March 1945. Radio play. Available online http://www.rathboneandbruce. net/the-new-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes-old-time-radio-show-episodes.html. Boucher, Anthony, and Denis Green. ‘The Book of Tobit and Murder Beyond the Mountains’. Volume 19 of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Audio cassette. New York: Simon & Schuster Audioworks, 1993.

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Bridie, James. Tobias and the Angel. London: Constable & Co., 1995. Cioată, Maria. ‘Medieval Hebrew Tellings of Tobit: “Versions” of the Book of Tobit or New Texts?’ In Is There a Text in this Cave? Studies in the Textuality of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honour of George J. Brooke, edited by Ariel Feldman, Maria Cioată and Charlotte Hempel, 334–67. STDJ 119. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Coupe, Carla. ‘The Book of Tobit’. Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine 2.2, issue 6 (2011): 95–121. Cousland, J. R. C. ‘Tobit: A Comedy in Error?’ CBQ 65 (2003): 535–53. Deselaers, Paul. Das Buch Tobit: Studien zu seiner Entstehung, Komposition und Theologie. OBO 43. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982. deSilva, David A. Introducing the Apocrypha: Message, Context, and Significance. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002. Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. London: Ward Lock & Co., 1887. Ego, Beate. ‘The Banishment of the Demon in Tobit: Textual Variants as a Result of Enculturation’. In A Feminist Companion to Tobit and Judith, edited by Athalya Brenner-Idan with Helen Efthimiadis-Keith, 67–74. FCB 20. London: T&T Clark, 2015. Ego, Beate. ‘ “Denn er liebt sie” (Tob 6,15 Ms. 319): Zur Rolle des Dämons Asmodäus in der Tobit-Erzählung’. In Die Dämonen – Demons: Die Dämonologie der israelitisch-jüdischen und frühchristlichen Literatur im Kontext ihrer Umwelt, edited by Armin Lange, Hermann Lichtenberger and K.F. Diethard Römheld, 309–17. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Eve, Eric. The Jewish Context of Jesus’ Miracles. JSNTSup 231. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. ‘The Aramaic and Hebrew Fragments of Tobit from Qumran Cave 4’. CBQ 57 (1995): 655–75. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. ‘Tobit’. In Qumran Cave 4.XIV: Parabiblical Texts, Part 2, edited by Magen Broshi, Esther Eshel, Joseph Fitzmyer, Erik Larson, Carol Newsom, Lawrence Schiffman, Mark Smith, Michael Stone, John Strugnell and Ada Yardeni with James VanderKam, 1–76, and pls. I–X. DJD 19. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Tobit. CEJL. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. Friedman, Mordechai A. ‘Tamar, a Symbol of Life: The “Killer Wife” Superstition in the Bible and Jewish Tradition’. AJSR 15 (1990): 23–61. Fuchs, Esther. ‘Structure and Patriarchal Functions in the Biblical Betrothal TypeScene: Some Preliminary Notes’. In Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader, edited by Alice Bach, 45–51. New York: Routledge, 1999. Glasson, T. Francis. ‘The Main Source of Tobit’. ZAW 71 (1959): 275–77. Grossman, Avraham. Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe. Translated by Jonathan Chipman. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004. Hallermayer, Michaela. Text und Überlieferung des Buches Tobit. DCLS 3. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Hallermayer, Michaela, and Torleif Elgvin. ‘Schøyen Ms. 5234: Ein neues Tobit-Fragment vom Toten Meer’. RevQ 22 (2006): 451–61. Hanhart, Robert. Tobit. Septuaginta Vetus Testamentum Graecum VIII.5. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983. Hanhart, Robert. Text und Textgeschichte des Buches Tobit. MSU 17. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984. Jeffers, H. Paul. The Forgotten Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Based on the Original Radio Plays by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.

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Kreitzer, Larry J. The New Testament in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow. BibSem 17. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993. Kreitzer, Larry J. The Old Testament in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow. BibSem 24. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994. Lan, David. Tobias and the Angel. London: Oberon Books, 2006. Levine, Amy-Jill. ‘Redrawing the Boundaries: A New Look at “Diaspora as Metaphor: Bodies and Boundaries in the Book of Tobit” ’. In A Feminist Companion to Tobit and Judith, edited by Athalya Brenner-Idan with Helen Efthimiadis-Keith, 3–22. FCB 20. London: T&T Clark, 2015. Liljeblad, Sven. Die Tobiasgeschichte und andere Märchen mit toten Helfern. Lund: Ph. Lindstedt, 1927. Littman, Robert J. Tobit: The Book of Tobit in Codex Sinaiticus. Septuagint Commentary Series. Leiden: Brill, 2008. McCracken, David. ‘Narration and Comedy in the Book of Tobit’. JBL 114 (1995): 401–18. Meier, John P. Mentor, Message, and Miracles, vol. 2 of A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Moore, Carey A. Tobit: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. AB 40A. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Otzen, Benedikt. Tobit and Judith. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Owens, J. Edward. ‘Asmodeus: A Less Than Minor Character in the Book of Tobit – A Narrative-Critical Study’. In Angels: The Concept of Celestial Beings – Origins, Development and Reception, edited by Friedrich V. Reiterer, Tobias Nicklas and Karin Schöpflin, 277–90. DCLY 2007. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Perrin, Andrew B. ‘An Almanac of Tobit Studies: 2000–2014’. CurBR 13 (2014): 107–42. Pfeiffer, Robert H. History of New Testament Times with an Introduction to the Apocrypha. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott. 2nd rev. edn. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. Rabenau, Merten. Studien zum Buch Tobit. BZAW 220. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994. Reouven, René. Tobie or Not Tobie. Paris: Denoël, 1980. Sassoon, Isaac. The Status of Women in Jewish Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Schmitt, Armin. ‘Die hebräischen Textfunde zum Buch Tobit aus Qumran 4QTobe (4Q200)’. ZAW 113 (2001): 566–82. Soll, Will. ‘Misfortune and Exile in Tobit: The Juncture of a Fairy Tale Source and Deuteronomic Theology’. CBQ 51 (1989): 209–31. Stuckenbruck, Loren T. ‘The “Fagius” Hebrew Version of Tobit: An English Translation Based on the Constantinople Text of 1519’. In The Book of Tobit: Text, Tradition, Theology, edited by Géza G. Xeravits and József Zsengellér, 189–219. JSJSup 98. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Stuckenbruck, Loren T., and Stuart Weeks. ‘The Medieval Hebrew and Aramaic Texts of Tobit’. In Intertextual Studies in Ben Sira and Tobit, edited by Jeremy Corley and Vincent Skemp, 71–86. CBQMS 38. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2005. Thompson, Stith. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. 6 vols, rev. and enl. edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–58. Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1977.

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Uther, Hans-Jörg. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography – Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. 3 vols. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004. Wagner, Christian J. Polyglotte Tobit-Synopse: Griechisch – Lateinisch – Syrisch – Hebräisch – Aramäisch, MSU 28. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003. Weeks, Stuart. ‘Some Neglected Texts of Tobit: The Third Greek Version’. In Studies in the Book of Tobit: A Multidisciplinary Approach, edited by Mark Bredin, 12–42. LSTS 55. London: T&T Clark, 2006. Weeks, Stuart, Simon Gathercole and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, eds. The Book of Tobit: Texts from the Principal Ancient and Medieval Traditions. FSBP 3. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. Wills, Lawrence M. The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Witmer, Amanda. Jesus, the Galilean Exorcist: His Exorcisms in Social and Political Context. LNTS 459. London: T&T Clark, 2012. Yerby, Frank. Tobias and the Angel. London: William Heinemann, London: Pan Books, [1975] 1977. Zimmermann, Frank. The Book of Tobit. JAL 7. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958.

Chapter 3 T A RTA N N O I R A N D S AC R E D S C R I P T U R E :   T H E B I B L E A S A RT E FAC T A N D M E TA NA R R AT I V E I N P E T E R M AY ’ S L EW I S T R I LO G Y Alison Jack

In her 2014 article for the New Statesman, ‘Living the Tartan Noir’, Scottish crime writer Val McDermid comments on the differences between the Scottish crime writing tradition and the English clue-and-puzzle convention, exemplified by writers such as Agatha Christie. The Scottish tradition, often referred to as ‘Tartan Noir’, has a particular literary heritage, going back to the dark and psychologically complex narratives of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1832), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories (1887–1927). McDermid suggests this heritage has led to Scottish crime fiction having more in common with the American ‘hard-boiled’ style of crime writing. In both of these traditions, violence explodes out of nowhere, and there is an emphasis on intellect, psychological bleakness and black humour. ‘Like us’, she writes, the Americans ‘prefer the dark night of the soul to tea with the vicar’.1 In Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy, however, it is the vicar himself, among others, who experiences the dark night of the soul. In this chapter I argue that, within this trilogy, the distinctively Scottish aspects of the crime fiction genre are encapsulated in the Bible and its interpretation, and carried out in the most extreme physical and psychological contexts. I  first introduce the trilogy (spoiler alert) and then situate the novels in the Tartan Noir tradition, before laying out the ways in which the Bible features in each novel.

1. Val McDermid, ‘Living the Tartan Noir’, New Statesman 143, no. 5199 (28 February–6 March 2014):  44, available online https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/docv iew/1503781918?accountid=10673&rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo (accessed 27 October 2017).

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Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy consists of The Blackhouse (2011), The Lewis Man (2012) and The Chessmen (2013).2 All are mainly set on the Outer Hebridean islands of Lewis, Harris, South and North Uist and Eriskay, and the main character in all of them is Fin Macleod. In the first novel, he is a police detective; in the second and third, he has come out of the police force, but is drawn into the investigation of murder on the islands by personal connections with either the deceased or the suspect. He depends on his contact in the police force, Detective Sergeant George Gunn, to feed him information. In such a tight-knit community, the characters involved have long histories with each other, which the narrative gradually unpicks. Fin is both an insider, having grown up on Lewis, and an incomer, as someone who has left and made a life for himself on the mainland. The church in all its denominational complexity features as a brooding presence in all of the novels, presented to readers through Fin’s perspective and through the developing narrative of the minister of Crobost Free Church, Donald Murray. Donald had been a rebellious youth, a contemporary of Fin’s, and now represents everything Fin despises about church life on the island. The Lewis Trilogy novels have proved to be worldwide bestsellers, and have spawned a tourist trail of their own on the islands, as well as a spin-off book of Hebridean photographs.3 As with Ian Rankin’s Rebus books and the Edinburgh of their setting, the Hebrides might well be described as a character in their own right in these novels. In the first novel, The Blackhouse, the bizarre murder of another of Fin’s contemporaries, Angel Macritchie, is the crime to be solved. The motivation for the murder, it turns out, goes back to events in their teenage years and, in particular, the apparently accidental death of Mr Macinnes, the father-in-law of Fin’s childhood sweetheart, Marsaili. Macinnes’ death had happened many years before on the annual killing of guga birds on the An Sgeir rock, where the Blackhouse of the title is found. In the course of the novel, we discover that Fin, rather than Marsaili’s husband, Artair Macinnes, is the father of Marsaili’s son, Fionnlagh. In the second novel, The Lewis Man, the plot concerns the body of a man found buried in the island’s peat marshes, and the discovery of the relationship between this man and Marsaili’s father, Tormod. The body in the peat is the ‘Lewis Man’ of the book’s title. The investigation into his death unearths deep division and tension in Scotland between Protestants and Catholics. The novel ends with Donald shooting a gunman, Kelly, who has arrived on the island to avenge Tormod’s killing of Kelly’s brother many years ago. Donald shoots Kelly to defend his daughter and granddaughter, whom Kelly has taken hostage and is threatening to kill.

2.  Throughout the chapter, relevant page references to the Trilogy novels will be given in brackets within the main text. Full publication details for these novels are listed in the bibliography. 3. Peter May, Hebrides (London: riverrun, 2013).

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In the third novel, The Chessmen, Fin and Whistler, another friend from school, discover a body in a plane that has been hidden for many years in a loch. The unravelling of the story takes them back to their student days, while a subplot involves the church trial of Donald for breaking the sixth commandment (Exod. 20.13; Deut. 5.17:  ‘You shall not kill’) and bringing the church into disrepute through the events described in The Lewis Man. This trilogy of crime novels sits firmly in the tradition of Tartan Noir, which has been described by David Goldie as concerned with ‘the rootedness of Scottish crime in a long and unhappy history of economic inequality, sexual discrimination and religious and class prejudice’.4 Stefania Ciocia and others have also noted the key ingredients of this literary tradition as ‘a gloomy outlook on human nature and a keen interest in the roots of moral deviancy . . . a dour, northern setting and Calvinist sense of morality’.5 The novels of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid perhaps best typify Tartan Noir, but Peter May’s trilogy participates in and adds to the genre in its island setting (as opposed to the generally urban locations of Rankin and McDermid) and, as I  will argue, in its reflection on the significance of the Bible in the communication of meaning. The Calvinist sense of morality, which Ciocia identifies in these books, is mediated in the trilogy through the biblical interpretation offered by its characters. Of course, the connection between biblical interpretation and crime fiction extends more widely than the picking out of biblical themes in specific crime novels. Peter May’s trilogy enters this wider debate, too, in a way that reflects a distinctively Scottish literary tradition. Writing about G. K. Chesterton, Michael Cook suggests that reading scripture (particularly biblical parables), as with reading crime detection, involves the elucidation of mystery:  ‘detective fiction mirrors the effect of the parable; both use the convention of plain storytelling to relay meaning by textual revelation’.6 Both parables (and indeed, other genres of biblical narrative) and detective fiction depend on the interpretation of the reader to complete them in a quest for truth and the triumph of good over evil. The mysterium of faith, particularly with regard to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is, for Cook, secularized in the ‘enactment of the crime and its revelation that preoccupies the text’ of detective fiction.7 He goes further to suggest that both Christian theology and detective fiction mitigate the effect of death:  in Christianity, redemption comes through the death and resurrection of Christ,

4.  David Goldie, ‘Popular Fiction:  Detective Novels and Thrillers from Holmes to Rebus’, in The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 197. 5. Stefania Ciocia, ‘Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Crime Writing’, in The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction, ed. Christine Berberich (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 117–18. 6. Michael Cook, Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction: The Locked Room Mystery (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 64. 7. Ibid., 66–67.

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while in detective fiction, the resolution of the narrative to some extent redeems the evil of the act of murder: ‘The act of retrospective construction and the idea of the detective going back over past events reinforces the idea that the detective story can be read as a narrative which seeks to purge crime in the same way that Christianity redeems sin.’8 It is important to note that Cook’s reflections on the relationship between biblical narrative and detective fiction relate to the work of the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton. As Cook argues, Chesterton had a liberal view of orthodoxy which affirmed humanity’s capacity for debate while holding firm to the belief in an ultimate and transcendent truth guaranteeing order and reason. The Catholic Church, for Chesterton, was to be viewed as the ‘arbiter of reason and restorer of order’,9 and the murderer’s capture can become the vehicle for discussion about wider issues around the nature of truth. Chesterton ‘found in the detective story a medium that represented Catholicism as a stable, natural faith that could be aligned with the most logical processes that mankind could undertake’.10 In contrast, May severely questions this confidence in the stable and logical influence of the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant, and in the univocality of its guiding biblical narrative. The physical presence of the church in May’s trilogy is constantly stated, and mirrors the physical presence of the Bible throughout these novels. There is also an overarching narrative of salvation, particularly in The Blackhouse, and mention of specific biblical texts in The Lewis Man and The Chessmen. However, this biblical and ecclesial presence is a far cry from the stable truth which, as Cook interprets it, underlies and guarantees Chesterton’s work. A survey of the ubiquitous presence of the church in The Blackhouse, and the underlying biblical narrative through which events are read in the novel, exemplifies this point. In this text, the narrative switches between third-person description, with Fin almost always as the central subject and with events described from his perspective, to Fin’s first-person reminiscences. In both narrative strands, the physical witness of the churches on the island is emphasized. In the third-person narrative, descriptions of these churches include both their distinctive physical features (‘massively impressive, built of great blocks of stone hewn out of local rock’) and critical judgement on their effect (‘Tall, plain windows. No colourful stained glass in this austere Calvinistic culture. No imagery. No crosses. No joy’ [The Blackhouse, 83]). Earlier, the narrator, easily conflated with Fin, had asserted that ‘each [church] was a division of the one before. Each one a testimony to the inability of man to agree with man’ (53). May’s presentation of the physical church in this context is uniformly negative. Meanwhile, Fin’s first-person narrative highlights the religious life enacted on the pivotal guga hunting trip of his past, and in the Blackhouse in particular. He

8. Ibid., 67. 9. Ibid., 71. 10. Ibid., 72.

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recreates a religious atmosphere without the need for a church building, with the Bible and biblical categories as focal points. The physical landscape is ecclesial: ‘Just beyond our landing point, the rock folded away into one of its cathedral caves’ (The Blackhouse, 206). There is a liturgical rhythm to the passing of time, with Gigs’s reading from his Bible (‘a well-worn tome scarred and tashed from constant use’) emphasized before every evening meal (213). Gigs is the leader of the expedition, Moses-like in his communication of the law to the community on the island. Moreover, a connection is made between the ritual act of scripture reading and the guga itself: ‘The only constant at every meal was the diet of scripture and psalms served up from Gigs’s bible. So the guga was manna from heaven, a reward perhaps for all our piety’ (223). In Fin’s memory, Gigs had also given the trip biblical significance by telling him, ‘We are not twelve individuals out there . . . We are twelve together . . . You’ll feel that connection we all feel with every one of those men who’ve been out there before us . . . joining hands with our ancestors’ (200). Here is a clear association both with the calling of Jesus’s disciples and with the cloud of witnesses described in Heb. 12.1: ‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us’ (NRSV). It is the uniqueness of the hunt which Gigs offers as an explanation for the ongoing tradition: ‘ “Because nobody else does it, anywhere in the world, just us.” Which, I supposed [Fin continues] made “us” special in some way. Unique’ (The Blackhouse, 216). Continuing the biblical motif of being chosen people, like the twelve disciples, Fin makes a similar observation about his memory of the psalm singing from his childhood: A strange, unaccompanied tribal chanting which could seem chaotic to the untrained ear . . . something of the land and the landscape, of the struggle for existence against overwhelming odds. Something of the people amongst whom he had grown up. Good people, most of them, finding something unique in themselves, in the way they sang their praise to the Lord, an expression of gratitude for hard lives in which they had found meaning. (84)

It is on this trip that Artair’s father, known only as Mr Macinnes, dies, having saved Fin by pulling him up from the ledge onto which he had fallen. Mr Macinnes himself tumbles over the edge of the cliff, landing on rocks and looking, in Fin’s mind, ‘like a parody of Christ on the cross’ (229). The resolution to the memory is held back until the next chapter, when Fin describes ‘the first things’ he remembered when he regained consciousness after his own accident: the face of a nurse ‘hovering over him like an angel’, and a belief that ‘he had died and gone to Heaven’ (245). Fin’s re-creation of events is clearly set up in terms of a biblical narrative of salvation which defines his memory. The physical presence of the church on the landscape may provoke negative comment in the novel, but Fin makes sense of events in the past by relating the key incident of his near-death experience to biblical categories, including that of the redemptive death of his saviour.

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The biblical metanarrative in The Blackhouse may be compared to narrative overlays in other Scottish crime novels. In his book Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, Michael Cook argues that the ‘ghost’ of Edinburgh haunts Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels, ‘through the history of its construction, its vast reservoir of real life crimes and its literary tradition’.11 This ghostly presence operates as a palimpsest on the narrative, with earlier crimes and texts relating to Edinburgh, including those of Jekyll, Hyde, Burke and Hare, retaining their identity within the new texts. For Cook, this overwriting ‘sets up a direct relationship between the past and the present: it is an act of juxtaposition where a former text may be used to read another. The natural consequence of this is that the former text inhabits the latter, and its presence is something we are constantly aware of ’.12 The interconnectedness and presence of the past in the present and the present in the past is completely appropriate in detective fiction, in which the murder – an act from the past – has to be kept in view in order to make sense of the world of the present, and vice versa. For Rankin’s Rebus, the palimpsest of Jekyll and Hyde is both explicitly and implicitly present in several of the novels, not least in the character of Edinburgh crime boss ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty, who operates as Hyde to Rebus’s Jekyll. In The Blackhouse, May has set up a distinctively Hebridean Christian metanarrative as a palimpsest to his novel. The influence of the church, as a building and as an edifice against error, is established as a historical marker on the landscape, although not uncritically. In Fin’s first-person memory of the events on An Sgeir, the community of men is defined as a group of disciples, with Gigs, prophet-like, introducing the Word of God into the midst of them and enabling them to understand their experience in biblical terms (such as the guga being ‘manna from heaven’). One of their number dies while saving Fin, bringing Fin to a moment of apparent redemption. An Sgeir represents all that distinguishes these island people from others, its extremity connecting the participants to each other and a community of saints (‘joining hands with our ancestors’). Fin’s memory makes sense of his experience, which becomes our experience as readers, through the ghost of his memory of the biblical story of salvation. This palimpsest, however, is offered only to be shown up as inadequate, just as the physical presence of the church on the island is a signal of division rather than unified truth. Fin and the reader have to be brought to a point where they are able to go beyond the familiar Christian narrative to make sense of what has happened and, by that means, both to understand and solve the original murder. Like Fin, the reader must revisit An Sgeir with new knowledge of the truth, in order to ‘save’ Fin’s son. As Fin realizes almost too late, Artair Macinnes believes Fin was responsible for his father’s death many years before, and intends to kill Fin’s son on An Sgeir as revenge. In fact, Mr Macinnes had committed suicide, having been revealed as the abuser of both Fin and Artair. Macinnes is neither Fin’s saviour nor in need of Artair’s act of revenge.

11. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 128. 12. Ibid.

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Hints have been offered throughout the novel to signal the inadequacy of Fin’s original biblical overwriting. As he looks at the pile of dead birds on his first visit to the island, Fin himself wonders ‘if there was not, perhaps, some better way to be special’ (The Blackhouse, 216). Donald, the minister, comments from his prison cell (where he is being held, mistakenly, on suspicion of murder) that ‘someone had misplaced the Bible’ (320), although there was the offer of a Koran and a prayer mat. Donald’s reaction is one of ‘contempt’. The episode, however, leads Fin to muse about the place of ‘truth and honesty’ (320) in the present and in the past, if the Bible and all it stands for is ‘misplaced’. In the present context of this ‘misplaced Bible’, it is the contribution of forensic science which brings illumination to Fin, and challenges his previous, biblically informed view of past events. The identification of a pill found in vomit present at the scene of the original murder of Angel Macritchie offers Fin a new understanding of a comment by Donald’s wife that Artair was ‘taking out the sins of the father on the son’. The pill is medication for asthma, and this associates the murderer with the asthmatic Artair. Artair’s motive for murdering Angel is to bring Fin to the island. Donald’s wife’s words are a paraphrase of a verse which reappears throughout the Bible, in different contexts and with contrasting meanings (cf. Exod. 20.5; Deut. 5.9, 24.16; Ezek. 18.20).13 When the significance of the biblical verse is unlocked by the forensic result, Fin realizes that Artair plans to hurt Fin’s son in order to avenge the sin Artair believes Fin had perpetrated against his father, Mr Macinnes. Fin’s return to An Sgeir to save his son, who is taking part in another guga hunt, allows for a new narrative explaining the past to emerge. This is a narrative of abuse at the hands of Artair’s father, which had been hidden within Fin’s memory. Its emergence allows Fin to experience a release from the guilt that he had felt about being the cause of Mr Macinnes’ death. This new understanding leads to him saving the life of his own son, and to the suicide of Artair, who dies believing (wrongly) that Fionnlagh was his son after all. This is particularly shocking to Artair, as he had been beating Fionnlagh in the belief he was (literally) taking out the sins of the father (Fin) on the son. The biblical text is an ironic commentary on the unfolding story, leading Fin, Artair and the reader in different directions as the narrative unfolds. The sins of the father, Mr Macinnes, are taken out in a shocking way on the son Artair, in contrast to Artair’s belief he was taking out Fin’s sins on his son. The biblical text is a flawed explanation of or justification for Artair’s actions and death, and its use by Donald’s wife is only understood when extra-biblical evidence is introduced. Just as the phrase ‘taking out the sins of the father on the son’ is used ambiguously through the Bible, here its hermeneutical openness makes it an inadequate key by itself for either the characters or the reader. Finally, alongside Fin, the reader is able to make sense of the ghost with which The Blackhouse starts, the man who haunts Fin’s dream and brings him a sense of

13.  The issue raised by this verse is also debated in John 9 during Jesus’s healing of the man who is born blind.

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horror but no comprehension. This subconscious marker of the narrative of abuse is ‘solved’ only by Fin retracing the original story, leading him, and the reader, to the realization that the figure in the dream is his abuser, Artair’s father Mr Macinnes. The reading process of the novel parallels a reader’s experience of the Gospels. The beginning of each Gospel makes most sense from the perspective of the resurrection at the end, and from a position of faith which accepts the retracing of the story of Jesus as having personal significance. While this comparison is not made explicitly in the novel, this parallel between May’s text and the Gospels adds to the notion of the Gospel narrative acting as a ‘ghost story’ behind the novel. I have argued that the Gospel narrative of salvation is strongly alluded to in the novel, as a palimpsest which potentially brings meaning. This redemptive narrative, however, is finally rejected in the novel as insufficient: the Bible has been ‘misplaced’, and the structural demands of the novel, of rereading the beginning from the perspective of the end, may be read as a parody of the Gospel narrative, rather than as a confirmation of it. If an overarching Christian narrative of redemption and a multipurpose reference to a contested biblical allusion (taking out the sins of the father on the son) operate as a shifting palimpsest in The Blackhouse, a more specific biblical verse interrogates the text of The Lewis Man: ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord’ (Rom. 12.19, itself a reuse of Deut. 32.35). Donald is the Free Church minister of Crobost Church, the son of a previous minister, who has converted after his rebellious teenage years. Donald’s daughter, Donna, and Fin’s son, Fionnlagh, are in a relationship and have had a daughter together while still at school. In a dramatic scene, Donald hits Fin in an altercation over where and how Donna and Fionnlagh will bring up their daughter. This scene, and its aftermath the next day (The Lewis Man, chapters  22 and 23), set up an interpretation of this biblical verse and others relating to it (drawing particularly on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7), which the ending of the novel literally blows apart. Donald expresses his remorse for having hit Fin by citing the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Whoever shall strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other’ (Matt. 5.39) (The Lewis Man, 228). Fin suggests it was he who turned the other cheek, and challenges Donald’s belief in non-violent resistance to provocation, which Donald has failed to live up to on this occasion. Fin asks Donald, ‘Whatever happened to an eye for an eye?’ (228), referring to the biblical legislation of lex talionis, which Jesus is refuting here (Matt. 5.38; cf. Lev. 24.20; Deut. 19.21). Donald responds with an extra-biblical quotation from Gandhi: ‘An eye for an eye and we’d all be blind’ (The Lewis Man, 228). Fin is unwilling or unable to assent to this view, but Donald quotes the verse about vengeance belonging to God rather than to humanity and goes on to explain that if his daughter were threatened with violence, he would ‘have to believe that somehow, somewhere, justice would be done. Even if it was in the next life’ (245). The hermeneutic Fin brings to these issues of vengeance and justice is coloured by the unsolved death of his son in a hit-and-run incident just before the events of the first book in the trilogy. His son’s death, as he explains to Donald, means that ‘hell is very real’ to him and he is unable to find meaning from within such

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a tortured perspective (The Lewis Man, 123). Fin separates the Old and New Testaments here, asking Donald, ‘How can you reconcile the cruelty and violence practiced by one with the peace and love preached by the other? You pick and choose the bits you like, and ignore the bits you don’t’ (229). While many biblical interpreters would question this oversimplified description of the two testaments, Fin’s words highlight the restricted, contested view of the Bible which the novel presents. At the end of The Lewis Man, Donald shoots Kelly (his daughter’s attacker), suggesting that he does indeed apply different hermeneutics to different situations. He has finally aligned himself with Kelly, who had explicitly asserted that ‘[i]n the end, an eye for an eye’ll suit me just fine’ to justify taking Donna and her baby hostage to avenge his brother’s murder (368). The murderer, Tormod, had killed Kelly’s brother in retaliation for the killing of his own brother, Peter. Peter’s murder had itself been an act of vengeance by the Kelly family for what they assumed was Peter’s involvement in the earlier death of another Kelly brother. Ceit, who witnessed that first death and is at the scene with Donna, Kelly and Donald, asserts amid the violence that it had not been Peter’s fault. Ceit thus undercuts any confidence in the spiralling sequence of revenge killings, in which both Kelly and now Donald have chosen to participate. A biblical ethic has been established (‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord’), undermined in dramatic fashion, and then reasserted tentatively as an alternative to the bloodshed that ensued after this ethic was ignored. Donald’s prayer, ‘God forgive me’ (370), suggests that he is well aware of this. The Prologue to the third book, The Chessmen, operates in the same way as the dream in The Blackhouse, and is only comprehensible by the end of the book. The anonymous suicide note which makes up the Prologue will bring closure but no comfort to Fin and his wife, as it is an admission of guilt by the driver who killed their son (The Chessmen, 381–82). While solving the murder of the pilot found in the submerged plane wreck is the main plot line of this novel, the subplot is the church trial of Donald for his shooting of Kelly. The drive towards closure of all three of these plots is overlaid retrospectively by the biblical text Fin ‘preaches’ at the jury in Donald’s trial: ‘He who among you is without sin, let him cast the first stone’ (383). There is no indication that Fin is aware this verse comes from a disputed pericope in John’s Gospel (Jn 8.1-11) – the story of the woman caught in adultery – as it operates successfully only to interrogate the legitimacy of those who would judge others. It fits as an anchor point for all three plots within this novel, as each works towards determining who is justified to judge others, before the whole story is known. If the focus of The Lewis Man is revenge, the focus of The Chessmen has shifted to judgement, both of which are profoundly biblical themes. Ciocia had noted the characteristics of Tartan Noir are ‘a gloomy outlook on human nature and a keen interest in the roots of moral deviancy . . . a dour, northern setting and Calvinist sense of morality’.14 These characteristics are clearly to be found in May’s Lewis Trilogy, but in the final novel another biblical theme

14. Ciocia, ‘Rules Are Meant to Be Broken’, 117–18.

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dominates, which also shares features with other Scottish detective novels:  the possibility of a supernatural or spiritual presence. As Michael Cook has observed, Rankin’s Rebus novels have a ‘haunted atmosphere’,15 in which Edinburgh’s past breaks through into its present. Rebus is haunted by his past and physically ‘haunts’ the streets of Edinburgh as he pursues the resolution of the crimes committed. In The Chessmen, the religious past of the islands continues to make its presence felt: as Fin observes, ‘The Church dominated life then, and in many ways still does’ (85). More significantly, the presence of the narrative of the Iolaire shipwreck haunts the book, explaining Whistler’s protection of Fin and Fin’s determination to solve Whistler’s murder. Whistler, like Donald, is another of Fin’s friends from his teenage years. The true story of the shipwreck of the Iolaire interacts with the plot of the novel. In this disaster, over 205 soldiers returning from the First World War lost their lives when the ship went down near the mouth of Stornoway Harbour. When teenage Whistler and Fin go to visit a survivor of the shipwreck, Fin describes the scene as being ‘as if I were sitting in the presence of God Himself and He was pointing a finger at me’ (110). The man explains that Whistler’s greatgrandfather had saved the life of Fin’s grandfather during the shipwreck and, as a result, Whistler immediately assumes responsibility for Fin’s ongoing safety. The old man remains a shadowy and unexplained figure in the novel, leaving open the possibility of an extraordinary presence influencing events. This possibility is hinted at by the earlier description of the wrecked plane, revealed when the water of the loch dries up. The plane is described as looking ‘almost as if it had been placed there by the delicate hand of God’ (12). The ghost of Angel Macritchie also continues to haunt the narrative (172), identified as the reason Fin returned to the island in The Blackhouse. Fin, however, is presented as understanding himself to be resolutely outside of this presence-filled environment. He dispassionately compares Donald’s assessment of him (‘alone in [his] grief and [his] hatred’) with the minister’s apparent experience of faith, which he describes as ‘the feeling that you’re never alone’ (The Chessmen, 123). While Fin wonders if life is a ‘meaningless cycle of birth, life, death’ (176), The Chessmen offers a biblical alternative filled with meaningful presence in the singing of the twenty-third Psalm in Gaelic at Roddy’s ‘funeral’: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me’ (294; see Ps. 23.4). However, once again, this biblical witness is undermined in several ways. The singer of the Psalm, Mairead, has been shown to be a powerful dissembler, telling the story that needs to be told in the moment. When they were younger, she had dissuaded a man from jumping off a bridge. As she had explained then, ‘The situation called for a story, so I gave him one’ (156); she had spun the man a fictitious yarn about her own life in order to persuade him not to end his life. Moreover, Mairead knows that the body in the coffin at this funeral is not that of Roddy, and that this is the second time a ‘funeral’ has taken place for him despite

15. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 29.

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his still being alive and living in Spain; her knowledge of this deception also empties the Psalm of its presence-filled meaning. Donald dies in a dramatic shooting as he leaves the church trial, still believing in the presence of a judgemental God (‘I think God just delivered his own verdict’, he tells Finn; The Chessmen, 378). A secular alternative to a meaningful presence, however, is offered in the novel in the human relationships Fin is now drawn towards. He views the ‘rest of his life’ as a ‘big, blank, unwritten chapter’ (382): literally true, of course, as this is the last page of the third book of the trilogy, but also an image without overwriting or palimpsest. He does, nevertheless, have a role to play, in the guidance of his son Fionnlagh and the supportive oversight of Anna, Whistler’s daughter, ‘the last living trace on earth of the man who had been his friend and saviour. A tortured, orphaned little girl who had need of someone to stand up and speak for her’ (382). The novel has explored biblical and religious possibilities as ongoing presences in the context of the island, but resolution comes when the page is understood to be blank and meaning is found in the connection with others, rather than in the words of sacred scripture or religious tradition. This is not redemptive in Chesterton’s terms, and there is no suggestion that there has been a truth to be discovered, guaranteed by a higher power. Rather, the trilogy has participated in the American hard-boiled tradition of the troubled detective, who is the compromised protagonist of his investigations, which expose his flaws and weaknesses together with the moral murkiness and the treacherousness of the modern . . . environment. In this, as in the focalization through the detective’s subjective perspective, the genre partakes of the epistemological insecurity and aesthetic sensitivity of modernist writing with which it also shares a doomed yearning for redemption and meaning.16

May’s trilogy, however, has also participated in the peculiarly Scottish detective tradition, defined by Val McDermid as ‘the literary form that engages who we are and who we want to become’.17 In the Lewis novels, this engagement with an understanding of Scotland points resolutely away from the metanarrative of the Bible and speaks instead to a post-Christian nation. But it is the language of the Bible which remains current, although redefined and undermined, to speak of vengeance, judgement and justice. The Scotland of May’s trilogy, and the Hebrides in particular, remain indebted to the words, images and often-preached passages of scripture as ways to name those difficult and universal concepts which are the stuff of detective fiction. This language is an apparently unavoidable yet ghostly presence, demanding interpretation by the characters involved in extreme

16. Ciocia, ‘Rules Are Meant to Be Broken’, 112. 17.  McDermid, ‘Living the Tartan Noir’, New Statesman 143, no. 5199 (28 February–6 March 2014): 44 https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/docview/1503781918?ac countid=10673&rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo (accessed 27 October 2017).

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moments of violent crisis. But it no longer offers a redemptive framework of meaning:  the yearning for that is ‘doomed’ in a Scotland which is presented as moving in a very different direction, based on the demands and rewards of human rather than divine relationships.

Bibliography Ciocia, Stefania. ‘Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Crime Writing’. In The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction, edited by Christine Berberich, 108–28. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Cook, Michael. Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction: The Locked Room Mystery. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Cook, Michael. Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story: The Haunted Text. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Goldie, David. ‘Popular Fiction: Detective Novels and Thrillers from Holmes to Rebus’. In The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature, edited by Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney, 188–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. May, Peter. The Black House. Quercus: London, 2011. May, Peter. The Chessmen. London: Quercus, 2013. May, Peter. Hebrides. London: riverrun, 2013. May, Peter. The Lewis Man. Quercus: London, 2012. McDermid, Val. ‘Living the Tartan Noir’. New Statesman 143, no. 5199 (28 February–6 March 2014): 44. Available online https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/doc view/1503781918?accountid=10673&rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo (accessed 27 October 2017).

Chapter 4 F A I T H I N A C O L D C L I M AT E :   T H E B I B L E A N D V IO L E N C E I N H E N N I N G M A N K E L L’ S B E F OR E T H E F R O ST Caroline Blyth

Like other subgenres of Western crime fiction, Scandinavian crime literature preoccupies itself with the social contexts of contemporary crime and violence. Since the 1960s, it has become renowned as a space where authors cast a critical eye on the Social Democratic welfare state, which, after the Second World War, had promised to build a modern Scandinavian society rooted in social justice and participatory democracy.1 With the growing sense that these promises have not been kept, Scandinavian authors such as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Gunnar Staalesen, Henning Mankell and Arne Dahl have used the police procedural format to offer a leftist critique of a ‘woefully inadequate’ modern welfare state, which has failed to tackle class inequality and protect society’s most vulnerable members.2 Conjuring up hard-boiled cityscapes that are crammed with urban anxiety, disappointment and insecurity, they fix a harsh spotlight on the ‘surplus of evil’ within Scandinavian society.3 Violent crime betrays the failures of welfare 1.  For further discussion of the political flavours of Scandinavian crime fiction, particularly its critique of the Scandinavian postwar welfare state, see Jakob StougaardNielsen, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, 20th Century Genre Fiction (London:  Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas (eds), Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 2011); Jean Gregorek, ‘The Man Who Refused to Smile:  Henning Mankell’s Wallander Series and Postmodern Cynicism’, Genre 50, no. 2 (2017):  153−76; Risto Saarinen. ‘The Surplus of Evil in Welfare Society:  Contemporary Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 42, no. 2 (2003):  131−35; Kim Toft Hansen, ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, Scandinavian Studies 86, no. 1 (2014): 3−8. 2. Gregorek, ‘The Man Who Refused to Smile’, 153. 3.  Saarinen, ‘Surplus of Evil’, 131. See also Kerstin Bergman, ‘From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction’, in Crime Fiction in the City:  Capital Crimes, ed. Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps (Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 2013), 65−84. Bergman highlights the centrality of the cityscape in

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modernity, reflecting social uncertainty and dystopia in the face of neo-liberal ideologies and consumer capitalism.4 As Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen observes, ‘The crimes recorded in Scandinavian crime fiction are symptoms of an age of uncertainty where the comforts of the welfare state have ceased to provide the ointment that may relieve the collective itch’.5 Amid this focus on social injustice and political critique, the topic of religion has traditionally taken a back seat in Scandinavian crime fiction. Where it does make an appearance, it has more typically been looked at askance – as an archaic hangover from a premodern era, or an unwelcome and irrational presence in an increasingly secular, rational world.6 Religions may be portrayed as sites of intolerance and injustice, or even as corruptive catalysts for deplorable acts of violence.7 And at times, intense religiosity becomes an obvious marker of criminality among the novel’s cast members, ‘an “easy” mode of portrayal of a character for which the reader should be on the alert’.8 And yet, as Kim Toft Hansen notes, postmillennial Scandinavian crime fiction bears witness to a ‘postsecular turn’ in its engagement with religion.9 Specifically, Hansen traces a renewed openness among crime writers to explore Scandinavian crime fiction, focusing in this chapter on crime literature set in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. 4. Gregorek, ‘The Man Who Refused to Smile’, 153−54; Kim Toft Hansen, ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, Scandinavian Studies 86, no. 1 (2014): 4−7; Paula Arvas and Andrew Nestingen, ‘Introduction’, in Nestingen and Arvas, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, 4. 5. Stougaard-Nielsen, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, 5. 6.  Hansen, ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, 6.  See also Peter C. Erb, Murders, Manners, Mystery:  Reflections on Faith in Contemporary Detective Fiction (London: SCM Press, 2007), 19, who describes the broader Western genre of crime fiction as presenting ‘a world of facts, or knowledge, of certitude based on sensual data, rationalized as necessary and when unnecessary, dispensable’ (cited in Hansen, ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, 3). 7. Hansen, ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, 9−13. 8. Ibid., 9. An excellent example of this ‘easy’ trope outlined by Hansen is Stieg Larsson’s global bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, trans. Reg Keeland (London: MacLehose Press/Quercus 2008), which was published in Sweden under the title Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women; Stockholm:  Månpocket, 2005). Within this novel, protagonists Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blonkvist track down a psychopathic serial killer who has loosely based his murders around a series of verses from the Old Testament book of Leviticus. For further discussion of the biblical themes in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, see Caroline Blyth, ‘Lisbeth and Leviticus: Biblical Literacy and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, in Rethinking Biblical Literacy, ed. Katie B. Edwards (London:  Bloomsbury, 2015), 165–86. 9.  Hansen, ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, 1−28. Hansen defines postsecularism as ‘a renewed openness toward questions of spirituality, while maintaining the practice of critical scrutiny’ (ibid., 2). He also offers a good definition of postsecularism by John A. McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison

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religion and spirituality within contemporary culture, albeit while retaining a critical scrutiny of the relationship between religion and violence. The result is an increasingly diverse (and more tolerant) spectrum of dialogical engagements, from the ‘subversive critique’ of religion to a more ‘affirmative openness’ towards the spiritual and cultural functions played by religion within contemporary society.10 This expanded spectrum, argues Hansen, reveals a ‘quiet reformation’ within Scandinavian societies, which queries past definitions of social secularism and acknowledges the ongoing cultural presence and significance of religion in this postsecular age.11 As he explains, ‘Secularity no longer signals a specific social loss of religion, but the fact that religiosity is now a possible perspective among a multitude of others.’12 Throughout the rest of the chapter, I reflect on this ‘quiet reformation’, considering the dialogical and critical engagement with religion offered within one particular work from the Scandinavian crime fiction canon: Henning Mankell’s 2004 novel Before the Frost (published in Sweden in 2002 under the title Innan Frosten). What particularly fascinates me about this work is Mankell’s exploration of the complex and multifaceted relationship between religion, the Bible and violence – an exploration that is both critical of and sympathetic to the power of biblical faith to shape people’s beliefs and guide their actions. Specifically, I consider Mankell’s reflections on the multiple roles that the Bible can serve in contemporary Swedish culture  – as a relatively obscure cultural artefact, a source of academic inquiry and – in damaged hands – a text that may be used (or perhaps misused) to justify the most heinous acts of violence. I argue that Mankell’s dialogical approach to religion and the Bible within this novel offers readers a ‘secular theodicy’,13 which attempts to wrestle with the Bible’s complicity in the face of intolerable evil.

The Chilly Art of Biblical Violence Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell (1948−2015) is best known for his hugely popular crime fiction series set in the Swedish city of Ystad, featuring the taciturn police inspector Kurt Wallander. The thirteen novels and novellas within the Wallander series were published in Sweden between 1991 and 2009, and have subsequently been translated into forty-one languages, selling over forty million copies around the world.14 Like his predecessors, Mankell uses the crime fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), ix, as ‘a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity’. 10. Hansen, ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, 2. 11. Ibid., 22−24. 12.  Ibid., 23, citing Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 20−22. 13. I borrow this term from Saarinen, ‘Surplus of Evil’, 132. 14. Gregorek, ‘The Man Who Refused to Smile’, 153. The Wallander novels have also been dramatized in two separate transnationally produced television series, one in

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genre to explore the social and political milieu of contemporary Sweden, situating Wallander as a mouthpiece to express disillusionment at the failures of the Swedish welfare state to preserve and protect social justice.15 As Jean Gregorek notes, Mankell’s novels are ‘disintegrative’, pervaded by a hard-boiled ‘moral ambiguity or scepticism about the means through which justice is achieved, and even of the very possibility of justice’.16 Similarly, Andrew Nestingen observes that Mankell’s crime novels ‘demand consideration of the relationships that underpin socioeconomic and cultural difference in times of globalization, while urging stronger alliances for responding to socioeconomic gaps and cultural miscomprehension’.17 As such, they hint at a loss of faith in traditional law enforcement and evoke a sharp frustration that so much local and international crime remains untouched and unpunished.18 In Before the Frost, Mankell’s focus is less on the failings of the welfare state than on the complex space occupied by religion and religious faith within contemporary Swedish society. At the same time, however, the same sense of frustration about the

Swedish, the other in English, which aired in 2005−13 and 2008−16 respectively. For more detailed discussion about the English series, starring Kenneth Branagh as Wallander, see Michael Tapper, ‘ “More Than ABBA and Skinny-Dipping in Mountain Lakes”:  Swedish Dystopia, Henning Mankell and the British Wallander Series’, Film International 7, no. 2 (2009): 60−9. For further discussion of Scandinavian crime drama in film and television, see Ib Bondebjerg, Eva Novrup Redvall, Rasmus Helles, Signe Sophus Lai, Henrik Søndergaard and Cecilie Astrupgaard, Transnational European Television Drama: Production, Genres and Audiences, Palgrave European Media Studies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 223−56. 15.  Gregorek, ‘The Man Who Refused to Smile’, 155. Here, Gregorek quotes Henning Mankell, who describes his crime fiction novels as ‘variations on a single theme: What is happening to the Swedish welfare state in the 1990s? How will democracy survive if the foundation of the welfare state is no longer intact?’. The quotation is originally taken from Henning Mankell, The Pyramid, trans. Laurie Thompson (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 1. For further discussion of Mankell’s engagement with Swedish society and crime in his Wallander novels, see also Tapper, ‘More Than ABBA and Skinny-Dipping’, 60−5; Shane McCorristine, ‘The Place of Pessimism in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander Series’, in Scandinavian Crime Fiction, ed. Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas (Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 2011), 77−88; Stougaard-Nielsen, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, 80−1, 89−100, 122−7. 16.  Gregorek, ‘The Man Who Refused to Smile’, 159. According to Risto Saarinen, Mankell’s novels ‘should have as their subtitle:  tales of Swedish uneasiness’ (‘Surplus of Evil’, 132). 17.  Andrew K. Nestingen, Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Film, Fiction, and Social Change, New Directions in Scandinavian Studies (Seattle:  University of Washington Press, 2008), 226. Nestingen’s chapter on the character of Kurt Wallander as a ‘burned-out policeman’ offers some valuable insights into this novel series (ibid., 223−54). 18.  Ibid., 227−32; Gregorek, ‘The Man Who Refused to Smile’, 156; McCorristine, ‘The Place of Pessimism’, 78.

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need to dig down and unearth the radical roots of crime remains keen. The novel offers a ‘spin-off ’ of sorts to the Wallander series, in that its primary protagonist is not Kurt Wallander but his daughter Linda.19 At the start of the narrative, Linda has just completed her training as a police officer, and is killing time in Ystad, waiting impatiently to start her new job at her father’s police station. She becomes preoccupied with the apparent disappearance of her close friend, Anna Westin, and her concerns deepen as she begins to suspect that Anna is connected to a series of violent crimes that Wallander is currently investigating. A  little grudgingly, Linda’s father allows her to become involved in the investigation, and, with Linda’s help, Anna’s complicity is gradually uncovered. We learn that the crimes – which include abduction, arson and murder – revolve around Anna’s father, Erik Westin, a charismatic cult leader whose interpretations of Christian faith and biblical scripture guide both him and his followers to commit a number of increasingly disturbing and violent acts. Throughout the novel, Mankell focalizes these acts through the eyes of various characters, including Linda, Wallander, Westin and one of his cult members, Torgeir Langaas. By including these different points of view, Mankell presents readers with multiple perspectives on the capacity of religion to inspire and justify horrific acts of violence. The novel opens with a prologue, set in Jonestown, November 1978. Recounted through the eyes of an eyewitness, we are offered a traumatizing account of the real-life mass murder/suicide that took place at the People’s Temple Agricultural Project (known as ‘Jonestown’) in north Guyana, under the leadership of American cult leader Jim Jones.20 The identity of the person through whose eyes we observe these horrific events is not yet revealed; all we know is that he survives, although his partner and daughter are killed in the ensuing violence. This short prologue is gut wrenching in its depiction of mass slaughter, which was inspired by Jones’s vision of a ‘path laid out by God’ (5).21 This path would lead cult members towards the Day of Judgment – a common enough motif within Jewish and Christian theological traditions that heralds both tribulation and triumph for the faithful.22 And yet, as 19. Mankell had initially planned to make Before the Frost the first in a trilogy of Linda Wallander novels. But he abandoned this plan following the suicide of Johanna Sällström, the actor who played Linda in the Swedish Wallander television series. 20. Jim Jones founded the People’s Temple in 1955. He moved his church and followers to Guyana in 1977, having secured a large tract of land from the Guyanese government in order to set up a religious and agricultural mission. For further details of Jonestown and the massacre that took place there, see David Chidester, Salvation and Suicide:  An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2003). 21.  Page references in parentheses always refer to Henning Mankell, Before the Frost, trans. Ebba Segerberg (London: Vintage, 2005). 22.  For a brief overview of the theological and biblical underpinnings of the Day of Judgment (also referred to as the Day of the Lord), see Greg A. King, ‘Day of the Lord’, in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, ed. David Noel Freedman (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 324−5.

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the anonymous protagonist of the prologue attests, Jones’s understanding of the Day of Judgment went far beyond traditional interpretations; the eschatological path along which he drove his community was paved with cyanide and bullets. The prologue thus draws unequivocal connections between religious fervour and the enactment of violence, providing a lens through which Mankell invites us to read the rest of the novel. We discover that the unnamed Jonestown survivor is Erik Westin, who has moved back to Sweden after years of self-imposed exile and has begun his own religious cult. While he initially decries Jim Jones as a ‘false prophet’ (171), Westin seems fated to follow in his footsteps, as a religious leader who is willing to use violence to guarantee his followers’ loyalty. Yet the Jonestown setting of this prologue complicates our response to Westin’s actions, introducing him as a traumatized victim of religious violence, as well as a subsequent perpetrator of such violence. As such, we are invited to consider him less as an irrational and religiously motivated psychopath than as a damaged soul, whose actions are driven by his own pain of loss and his desperate need for redemption.23 Nevertheless, Mankell’s characterization of Westin throughout the novel is not explicitly or univocally sympathetic – far from it, in fact. Rather, we are invited to dwell on the complex web of experiences, behaviours and beliefs which come together to give shape and voice to his violent faith. Specifically, Mankell focuses on Westin’s engagement with the Christian Bible in order to explore the cult leader’s justification of religious violence; he also offers insights into other characters’ own understandings of the Bible and its continued relevance (or perceived lack of relevance) within contemporary Swedish culture. By so doing, Mankell invites a dialogue around the complex relationship between the Bible, religion and violence, stressing that, in order to end the violence perpetrated in the name of faith, we first need to understand it.

‘I Don’t Know My Way around This Thing’: Biblical Illiteracy as a Cultural Norm Before becoming aware of the full religious significance of Westin’s actions, Linda, her father and their police colleagues initially make sense of them through the secular lens of criminal psychopathology. Seen through their eyes, the violence perpetrated by Westin’s cult is stripped of its theological and biblical significance, becoming nothing more than the work of a deranged sadist whose motives are incomprehensible within the rational, secular world of modern policing. One of the first crimes they encounter is the murder of some wild

23.  Interestingly, Andrew Nestingen notes that trauma is a prominent theme in the Wallander novels, with Mankell regularly reflecting on Wallander’s own traumatic past as a means of positioning the reader as ‘witness to Wallander’s suffering’ and encouraging a ‘solidaristic response’ towards the detective (Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia, 235−6).

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swans, whom an unknown perpetrator (later identified as Torgeir Langaas) has doused with petrol and set on fire. Unaware of the religious motivations behind this crime, Linda asks her father, ‘Who would do a thing like that?’ to which her father responds, ‘A sadist. Someone who hates birds’ (56). A little later, Langaas murders a farmer’s calf by likewise burning it alive. Focalized by Wallander, Linda and the farmer, this is an act of sadistic and meaningless cruelty. The calf ’s small charred body is laid out for readers to see and mourn over (59), while its owner echoes Linda’s earlier question, repeatedly asking Wallander, ‘Who would do a thing like this?’ (57–58). Wallander, his colleagues and the farmer interpret the crime in terms of the perpetrator’s perceived psychopathology; he is ‘a sadistic pervert’, ‘insane . . . a fucking lunatic’ and a ‘crazy bastard lunatic’ (58–59). For them, there is no perceptible meaning behind the act  – no higher or justified logic. Again, after Langaas bombs a pet store killing all the animals inside, a police officer present at the scene is reported as saying, ‘Only a sick person could do something like this, a sick person with sadistic tendencies’ (291). Denuded of its religious significance, these actions are regarded as cruel, hate-filled and irrational, completely alien to the moral landscape of contemporary Swedish society. As the novel progresses, however, Linda and Wallander get their first inkling that this series of crimes may have religious connotations. The dismembered body of cultural geographer Birgitta Medberg is discovered (another of Langaas’s victims), her severed hands posed in prayer next to a Bible. Initially, Wallander and his colleagues struggle to understand the implications of this, betraying their own biblical illiteracy and accentuating the diminished cultural significance of the Bible within contemporary Swedish society. On examining the scene, forensics expert Nyberg hands the Bible to Wallander, who fails to even recognize it, asking, ‘What’s this?’ (131). Nyberg has discovered notes scribbled on some of its pages, and so tells Wallander to ‘open it to the Book of Revelations’ (where the notes are located), to which Wallander responds ‘I don’t know my way around this thing. Just tell me what’s in there’ (131). Wallander’s utter lack of biblical literacy passes without comment or censure among his colleagues – it is simply part and parcel of secular Scandinavian culture. Even Nyberg’s knowledge of the sacred scriptures is limited. He describes the book of Revelation as an ‘important’ text in the Christian tradition, but does not explain why  – at this point in the investigation, its significance and meaning is deemed irrelevant and the text is only worth looking at because it may bear the handwriting of a killer. Nyberg is even unsure if he should refer to Revelation as a ‘book’ or a ‘chapter’, asking Linda, ‘Do you know? In the Bible, is it called a chapter?’, to which she replies, ‘No idea’ (132). ‘You see’, says Nyberg to Wallander, ‘the young are no better than we’ (132). Like Wallander, Nyberg betrays no sense of shame at his lack of biblical knowledge – across the generational gap, biblical illiteracy has become the cultural norm in Sweden, and nobody ‘knows their Bible any more’ (132). For Nyberg, Wallander and Linda, the presence of the Bible next to Birgitta Medberg’s dismembered hands therefore exerts little curiosity beyond its relevance as a piece of evidence found at a crime scene. For these upholders of law, order and

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justice, the Bible has no place beyond this in the empirical, rational world of forensics and police procedure. And thus, like the earlier animal killings, this crime remains meaningless, a repulsive act perpetrated by ‘a lunatic’ who is ‘truly fucked up’ (132–34).24

‘Everything Was Spelled Out in the Holy Book’: The Bible as Mandate for Violence While we watch Linda, Wallander and their colleagues struggle to make sense of these grim acts of violence, Mankell also grants readers access to the perpetrators’ points of view. For Westin and Langaas, the animal killings are far from sadistic or meaningless; rather, they are rooted in a sacrificial logic, mandated and justified by biblical and Christian tradition. This is apparent from the outset, as both men draw on religious and biblical language to frame their violent deeds. For Langaas, killing the wild swans is a ritual act of ‘sacrifice’ (13–14); doused in petrol and set alight, the birds become a burnt offering, made to propitiate the divine realm. Instead of being the random act of a ‘lunatic’ or ‘sadist’, the crime is enacted by Langaas as an orderly, even priestly, ritual, carried out ‘according to plan’ (14) at the correct time and place; it thereby emulates the carefully legislated burnt offerings made by Israel’s priests during the time of the Jerusalem temple cult (cf. Leviticus 1). Similarly, Langaas and Westin describe their subsequent acts of arson and murder using this same sacrificial logic. These are not crimes but ‘ceremonies’ (255), ‘rituals’ (261) and ‘sacrifices’ (259), cleansing actions that will sweep away sin and corruption and herald in a new, purer Christian faith. Moreover, Westin insists that their actions are dictated by God through the sacred scriptures; he reminds Langaas that ‘everything was there in the Bible. It was their map, their guide’ (259). When Langaas prepares to set fire to the pet store, Westin instructs him to repeat the words, ‘The Lord’s will be done’ (260), thus reiterating what he perceives to be the biblical mandate for this ghastly criminal act. Watching the arson attack from a distance, Westin reflects that this event serves to further his ultimate religious goal: ‘We are reviving the Christian faith, the Christian dictates of a righteous life’ (262). For Westin, this revival involves restoring Christianity

24.  Mankell revisits this theme of biblical illiteracy when Linda goes to speak to her friend Anna’s flatmate, Margerita. The young woman complains to Linda that Anna is always ‘lecturing’ her about Christianity, and spouting off ‘naïve and worthless sermons’ that make little or no sense to her. While Margerita appears genuinely interested in religion (she has tried to speak to Anna about her faith, and also about Islam), she demonstrates little or no knowledge of the Bible, recalling that Anna had mentioned ‘some earthly angel named Gabriel. I think it was an angel. I can’t remember exactly’ (200−201). Margerita’s lack of familiarity with this biblical tradition is, again, passed over as being entirely natural, even expected, rather than a marker of her ignorance.

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to its earliest, purest form, before it became adulterated through false teachings. He is guided in this mission by a growing belief that he can communicate with God through his prayers and dreams. As a conduit between his followers and the deity, he repeatedly insists to both himself and the group that he is privy to divine and biblical revelations (e.g. 309, 313, 344, 345, 350). As such, the violence that he demands they perpetrate becomes a divinely justified means to a higher end. Westin’s use of the Bible to rationalize violence is particularly apparent when he orchestrates the murder of one of his followers, Harriet Bolson. Harriet is strangled to death in a church by her fellow cult members; Westin instructs them to leave her body before the altar like a sacrifice offered to God, before setting the church alight. Harriet is ‘sacrificed’ because, in Westin’s eyes, she is a sinner, having had an abortion prior to joining the group. Her death, and the burning of the church, are therefore justified – means by which the Christian faith (and indeed the world) may be cleansed. As Westin explains to the group just prior to Harriet’s death, ‘We are bound by our loyalty to God and our task. We cannot tolerate that the Christian world sink any deeper into degradation. The world will be cleansed through fire, and we must start with ourselves’ (314). Harriet goes passively to her death, and Westin describes her as akin to the ‘true Christian martyrs’ (391) whose deaths unleashed ‘a wave of true evangelical power that would continue until the New Kingdom of the Lord was fully realised on Earth’ (392). He believes that by reviving the ancient Christian tradition of martyrdom (which he laments has ‘slipped from Christian culture’), he is reinvigorating the faith, saving it from corruption and preparing it for the dawning of a new eschatological age (391−2). While Westin regards his cult members as ‘sacrifices’ and ‘martyrs’, he reserves a number of particularly significant biblical roles for his most ardent follower, Langaas, whom he describes as his ‘disciple’ (255, 291), his ‘apostle’ (261) and his ‘priest’. In turn, Langaas (a former alcoholic and drug addict whom Westin rescued off the streets) regards Westin as his ‘redeemer’ (256), his ‘saviour’ (260), his ‘shepherd’ (261) and even his ‘God’ (257, 261). Adopting these monikers, both men justify their violent actions by infusing them with the divine mandate of sacred scripture. For Westin, his ‘mission’ is justified by God, and the murders he directs are salvific, for the ‘creation of life’ (310). But they are also vengeful, fulfilling the biblical legal judgment of lex talionis (‘an eye for an eye’; see Exod. 21.23-25; Lev. 24.19-20; Deut. 19.21; cf. Matt. 5.38-39). Near the end of the novel, he explains to his daughter Anna why it is necessary to kill her friend, Zeba, who had earlier admitted to Anna and Linda that she had an abortion when she was fifteen. For Westin, abortion is tantamount to murder; he therefore tells Anna that Zeba’s death is mandated by divine decree, and therefore just: ‘She who commits a sin and takes the life of another must bear the wrath of God. This is justice and the word of the Lord’ (413). Like Westin, Langaas too rationalizes his multiple murders and violent tendencies by believing them to be directed by God through the strict guidance of Westin. Mankell makes this clear by offering us Langaas’s point of view at various points throughout the novel. In one scene, for example, he encounters

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a homeless drunk to whom he initially gives some money. Frustrated by the unsympathetic coverage of his crimes in the media, he nevertheless fantasizes about assaulting this homeless man at a later date. ‘I’ll come back one day and beat you to a pulp’, he thinks to himself, ‘I’ll crush your face with a single blow, in the name of the Lord, in the name of the Christian uprising. Your blood will be spilled and join the river that will one day lead us to the promised land’ (292). In Langaas’s mind, the biblical concept of the ‘promised land’ (see Deut. 1.8) becomes transposed into the new Christian world that Westin assures him will be heralded through their acts of redemptive violence. The other cult members, whom Westin describes as his ‘Christian army’ (310) and ‘God’s undercover army’ (311), will fight with them in a holy war to lead them towards this promised land.25 They are ‘the righteous and the just’ (312), according to Westin, led by God in a blameless battle against evil. As he tells his followers: ‘The Lord commands our presence – he decrees the battle’ (312). A little later, as the group meet to plan their next bout of violent activities, he preaches to them, making explicit connections between the biblical law of lex talionis and the crimes that they will shortly perpetrate: We know what God demands of us . . . The old scriptures teach us the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. He who kills must himself be killed. We must remove all doubt from our minds. God’s breath is steel and he demands hardness from us in return . . . Only through complete devotion and ruthlessness will we conquer the emptiness that exists inside men. The great darkness, the long days of degeneration and impotence are over. (350)

Westin’s words here clatter with anger, vengeance and the conquest of war. For the cult leader, God is a violent and merciless deity, who demands utter obedience, including the unquestioned perpetration of multiple murders. God has guided Westin to fight ‘a war against emptiness, soullessness . . . a war in which it is not always possible to be gentle, or merciful’ (414). And, while Wallander, Linda and the other police officers initially see the cult’s various crimes as sadistic and meaningless, in Westin’s eyes, they are not so much crimes as necessary sacrifices decreed by the Bible and by God, a process of sanctification that will usher in renewal and healing to a damaged world. As he later reasons to himself, ‘God created a world where everyone was equal, a world people had turned their backs on and destroyed. Was it not that world they were trying to recover?’ (389). By granting access to Westin’s and Langaas’s perspectives on the violence perpetrated in Before the Frost, Mankell thus invites readers to make sense of their actions within a biblical and religious framework. The murders and arson attacks are not random, chaotic or sadistic acts, but rather are imbued with the theological significance of redemption, salvation and new creation. In offering

25. Westin also draws battle imagery into his understanding of martyrdom, envisioning his cult members as martyrs who ‘march forth in row upon row’ (392).

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this alternative perspective, Mankell is by no means condoning or rationalizing the cult’s horrific acts of violence, but he is compelling us to understand that, for its perpetrators, such violence has profound meaning. And it is only by acknowledging this meaning that we can fully grasp the root causes of the violence, and perhaps prevent it from recurring. Religion is, for Mankell, undoubtedly a source of violence, yet within Wallander’s contemporary Swedish milieu, with its easy acceptance of religious and biblical illiteracy, this fact can often be overlooked, and the violence explained away by overly simplistic references to the illogic of insanity and sadism.

‘I Am Your God’: Religious Fanaticism and Religious Violence By showing readers the biblical basis of Westin’s violent agenda, Mankell does not, however, simply declare that religion, and the Bible in particular, are ipso facto sources of violence for all who encounter them. To be sure, Before the Frost confirms to readers that the Bible is a text drenched in violence. The cult’s various crimes, including the burning of animals and the capital punishment of sinners, are undoubtedly found in the pages of scripture.26 The angry, violent and vengeful God evoked by Westin and Langaas makes innumerable appearances throughout the Bible, and is far from being an eccentric theological idea conjured up by their deluded imaginations. Langaas affirms this as he sits meditating on the biblical verse of Jude 5: ‘And the Lord, having saved the people from the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not’ (289). Furthermore, on several occasions, Mankell draws even more tangible connections between the Bible and the violence enacted within the novel. The last thing Birgitta Medberg does before she is murdered is pick up her killer’s Bible. Wallander finds her severed hands, clasped in prayer, lying next to it, its pages smudged with Langaas’s ‘bloody fingerprints’ (131). The scene thus invites us to forge a connection between the Bible and the horrific barbarity of Birgitta’s murder. This connection is reinforced when Linda first sees Birgitta’s severed head lying near her hands. Her mind immediately flies back to a childhood memory  – her grandmother’s illustrated Bible, where she once looked with such fear on an image of John the Baptist’s head sitting on a platter, while Salome danced in the background (see Mk 6.21-28; Matt. 14.6-11). Linda’s memories of this biblical illustration are ‘unbearably strong’, evoking the same sense of ‘childhood horror’ that she experienced on first seeing it (127). Indeed, Linda’s encounter with Birgitta’s head makes her feel for a dizzying moment as though ‘the picture had escaped from the page’ of her grandmother’s

26.  See, for example, the laws pertaining to burnt sacrifices in Leviticus 1, and the numerous references to capital punishment in texts such as Exod. 21.12-17; 22.18-19; 31.14; Lev. 20.10-16, 27; 21.9; 24.14; Deut. 18.20; 22.20-24. Capital crimes included murder, blasphemy, working on the Sabbath, disobeying a parent, false prophecy and a whole raft of sexual indiscretions.

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Bible and entered her current reality (127). A not so subtle reminder from Mankell, perhaps, that the violence inherent in these sacred texts always has the potential to ‘escape’ from its ancient pages and enact itself in real life. At the same time, however, Mankell complicates any simple equation between the Bible and contemporary violence by portraying Westin’s biblical faith as misguided and flawed – the product of multiple misunderstandings wrought by his past traumas. Westin’s engagement with the Bible  – and with religion more broadly  – is far from conventional. Indeed, Mankell is at pains to separate the violence of Westin’s cultic fundamentalism from mainstream Swedish Christianity; if anything, the latter is another victim of Westin’s fervent campaign, its churches burned and desecrated during the various acts of arson and murder perpetrated by cult members.27 Throughout Before the Frost, Westin takes Christianity and makes it his own, reinterpreting and rewriting its sacred scriptures, and reshaping Christian theology into something more reflective of the dark landscapes that he occupies in the aftermath of his Jonestown trauma. He dismisses traditional Christian images of God as a God of light, preferring instead to see the deity as ‘an enveloping, deeply comforting darkness’ (171); he therefore defines himself as a ‘servant’ of this darkness, seeking comfort and purpose in the shadows that now occupy his faith (171). Westin also elevates his own religious significance well beyond that of most adherents of mainstream Christianity. In his eyes, he is a prophet – the ‘one true prophet’ (288) – sent by God to reveal the false prophecies spouted by Jim Jones. Dwelling on 2 Jn 1.7 (‘For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist’), he describes this verse as ‘the holiest key to his understanding of God’s word’ (171). The deceiver and antichrist is Jim Jones, a false prophet whose own fear of the dark has inspired Westin to embrace the shadows as a place where God can truly be found.

27. Linda’s first encounter with Westin’s cult members drives home the unusual nature of their religious beliefs and lifestyle and sets them in conflict against the traditional church in Sweden. The group live in a commune in the woods, and when Linda meets them, she feels incredibly uneasy in their presence. Separating themselves from mainstream society, all but one of them remains silent in her presence, even refusing to give her their names. Indeed, the member who does speak to Linda tells her, ‘We have no use for names here’ (192). The group stand out in stark contrast to the church that Linda has just come from, where the friendly pastor and cool church interior offer sanctuary and solace to the grief stricken. While Linda experiences a vague sense that she does not quite belong in the church, her reaction to the cult members is far more visceral. The woman she talks to is ‘completely disingenuous’, making Linda’s ‘skin crawl’ (193). The entire scene is sinister and unnerving, and the woman’s calm responses to Linda’s questions about Anna carry threatening undercurrents that invite readers to share Linda’s anxiety. Mankell offers us a careful contrast here between the conventional Swedish church, which sits at the heart of the community, and Westin’s fundamentalist cult, which rejects this community and offers outsiders only silence and veiled threats.

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Yet Westin does not only identify himself as a prophet; he teaches his followers to regard him as their ‘redeemer’ (256), their ‘saviour’ (260) and their ‘shepherd’ (261). He likens himself to the biblical patriarch Abraham, and, particularly, to Jesus; he is God’s ‘true servant’, the divinely chosen ‘anointed leader of the new age’, a messianic figure who will lead his community of followers towards the new Kingdom (309). Indeed, Westin seems to regard himself as better than Jesus – a new and improved version of the Christian saviour: ‘God had forsaken him [Jesus] because he had not gone far enough. Jesus had a weakness, he thought. He did not have the strength I  possess. We will complete what he lacked the strength to do’ (392). There is even slippage between Westin’s self-perceptions of being God’s ‘true servant’ and being God himself. When he first sees Langaas lying in the gutter, nearly dead with drug and alcohol abuse, Langas asks him, ‘Are you God?’ ‘Yes’, answers Westin, ‘I am your God’ (257; see also 261). If this were not enough, Westin also plans to rewrite sacred scripture, authoring a ‘fifth gospel’ that will ultimately ‘compete the holy writings of the Bible’ (172). This task, he believes, is foretold in John’s epistle (2 Jn 1.12):  ‘Having many things to write unto you, I would not write with paper and ink; but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full’ (172). Throughout Before the Frost, then, Mankell characterizes Westin as a man set wholly apart from conventional Swedish Christianity. His increasingly grandiose religious convictions and self-serving interpretations of scripture are delusional in their intensity; as the fulfilment of John’s eschatological prophecies, he becomes, in his own eyes and in the eyes of his followers, a messiah whose evangelical power would herald in the new Kingdom of God. These delusions are chilling to witness, particularly when we see the horrific acts of violence that they both inspire and justify. Nonetheless, Mankell refuses to let readers forget that Westin is himself a victim of another man’s religious delusions, which likewise fuelled murderous violence on a sickening scale. While there are moments where Westin appears as much a charlatan as a man driven by genuine religious delusions,28 the overwhelming impression Mankell leaves of this character is that of a man gripped by the trauma and grief of losing his partner and daughter in the Jonestown massacre. Religious violence begets more religious violence. The experience of trauma compels the

28. Mankell hints at Westin’s charlatanry a few times in the book. At one point, the cult leader plans the route that he will take to meet his followers, taking advantage of a dip in the road that will make him ‘seem to appear from nowhere’ (311). On another occasion, he has them repeat a short poem, which he tells them came to him in a ‘vision’ (350). Westin reflects to himself that ‘they did not have to know the truth, that it was something he had read when he was a young man’ (350−51). Yet at this same moment, he starts to wonder if the poem really had come to him in a dream. At the end of the day he admits that ‘he could not be sure, but it was of no importance’. At this point in the narrative, we get the sense that Westin is genuinely starting to believe his own lies and delusions.

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re-enactment of trauma upon others, as though the traumatized feel compelled to make others share their pain.29 As the story progresses, even Westin himself seems to realize this, aligning himself more and more closely with Jim Jones, until it is almost as though he is caught in the grip of a folie a deux, destined to repeat Jones’s crimes against his own loyal followers. At one point in the narrative, he contemplates how wider society might perceive him as a ‘madman’ (392), but reassures himself that Jones can guide his path and, eventually, the truth will be revealed: But when the martyrs march forth in row upon row, people will understand that I am the apostle they have been waiting for. I could not have managed this without the help of Jim Jones. He taught me how to overcome my fear of death, of urging others to die for the greater good. He taught me that freedom and redemption come only through bloodshed, through death, that there is no other alternative and that someone must lead the way. (392)

Just as Westin’s biblically flavoured violence is rooted in his trauma-inspired fanaticism, Mankell likewise situates Langaas’s faith well beyond the orthodox boundaries of mainstream Swedish Christianity. When Nyberg finds Langaas’s Bible at the scene of Birgitta’s murder, he notices that the pages of Revelation have been annotated by hand. Reading these scribbled annotations, he tells Wallander, ‘It seems as if whoever wrote in here wasn’t happy with the original. Someone has taken it upon themselves to improve on the word of God’ (132). Initially, Wallander does not understand what Nyberg is saying to him. ‘What does that mean, “the word of God”?’, he asks. ‘Can you try to be more specific?’ (132). Nyberg explains to him that, for some Christians, the Bible is the literal ‘word of God’, its texts written or dictated by the deity himself. He therefore thinks it noteworthy that ‘someone should rewrite passages in the Bible. Is that something a normal person does? A person in basic possession of his or her senses?’ (132). Wallander has no answer for Nyberg, and must eventually seek the expert advice of Dr Sofia Hanke from Lund University’s Theology department to explain the significance of these annotations. Dr Hanke’s presence in the narrative is telling, reminding readers that, within contemporary Swedish society, biblical literacy is more the remit of academics than it is your average police officer or member of the public. Dr Hanke explains to Wallander and his team that the annotations betray the writer’s unorthodox approach to the biblical text. ‘The writer turns texts upside down, seemingly to find new meanings’, she tells them. ‘I think the writer is hunting for a significance he or she believes is concealed in the Bible, something that is not immediately apparent in the words themselves’ (425). She also insists that ‘religious fanatics’, such as the annotator of this Bible, genuinely believe that

29. Nestingen, Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia, 236−37. Nestingen is referring to the theme of trauma in Wallander novels more widely, but his observations offer interesting insights into Westin’s apparent compulsion to re-enact his own traumas upon others.

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what they are doing is right, or moral, rewriting or reinterpreting the Bible to give divine justification to their actions: Most of these people are honest to the extent that they act out of a genuine belief in their divine inspiration . . . Most of them preach their beliefs and start their sects from a genuine desire to do good. If they commit crimes or evil deeds they often try to legitimise these acts in the eyes of their God, for example by the interpretation of biblical verses. (426)

Framed thus, both Langaas’s and Westin’s enactments of violence are disarticulated from the biblical text itself and linked instead to their fanatical, though genuine, misinterpretation of scripture. The Bible is less the direct inspiration or source of their violence than a tool that they (albeit unwittingly) misuse to validate this violence. Westin is a man haunted by traumatic loss and guilt; Langaas is another damaged soul, whose underlying psychopathy has been fuelled by years of drug and alcohol abuse. These two men are violent, there is no doubt, but their violence is not related in a straightforward manner to their faith. Rather, Mankell shows us that crimes perpetrated in the name of religion are often borne from a fanaticism that lies far removed from mainstream theologies and scriptural interpretations. This understanding of religious violence is echoed again by Linda near the end of the novel, in response to her father’s complaint that Westin and his followers are ‘stark raving mad’. ‘No’, she responds, ‘It’s something else. They believe in what they are doing’ (447). Later, Wallander himself comes to understand what she is saying here, recognizing Westin as a victim of dreadful trauma, a ‘desperate man’ (459) who has ‘lost everything’ (455) and who ‘saw only evil and decay around him’ (459). For Linda and her father, Westin was therefore ‘by no means a madman’ (458), but rather ‘a humble person carrying out God’s work. He wasn’t insane so much as a fanatic, prepared to do whatever it took to realise his beliefs. He was ready to sacrifice people if need be, kill anyone who stood in his way, and punish those whom he deemed to have committed mortal sins. He sought his justification in the Bible’ (458–59). Viewing Westin’s actions through the lenses of religious fanaticism and fundamentalism, both Linda and Wallander have learned to appreciate the distance that stands between Westin’s cult and mainstream Christian faith. To be sure, neither regard Westin’s biblical fanaticism as justification for his violence; for no matter how well intentioned Westin and his followers were in their religious mission, Wallander and Linda recognize that, at its heart, their violence remains ungodly and unbiblical. ‘They believe in God and love him’, Wallander says to Linda, ‘I can’t think their love is reciprocated’ (453).

‘He Wasn’t Insane So Much as a Fanatic’: Final Thoughts Throughout Before the Frost, Henning Mankell weaves together different perspectives to demonstrate the complex and multifaceted relationship between the Bible and violence. After initially suspecting that the crimes being uncovered

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are the work of an insane sadist, Wallander, Linda and their police colleagues gradually realize that these horrific acts are directly linked to the perpetrators’ religious beliefs. But, as I discussed in the previous section, Mankell is at pains to remind us that religious and biblical violence is not part of mainstream contemporary faith; rather it is a sign of faith gone wrong, blood-stained and rewritten (like Langaas’s Bible) by fundamentalism and fanaticism, or misread and misinterpreted through the veil of unspeakable trauma. At the beginning of the story, Wallander and Linda (along with their police colleagues) are unapologetic about their own lack of biblical and religious literacy. In their minds, the Bible is a cultural artefact within contemporary Swedish society, a relatively harmless (and perhaps meaningless) text that belongs within the walls of traditional Swedish churches and universities. Yet their journey through the novel has given these characters a sharper understanding that sacred scripture may serve as a dangerous mandate for horrific crimes, whether in a Guyana commune or on the streets of Ystad. It is therefore a text whose ongoing influence deserves to be understood and taken seriously, if there is any hope of preventing such crimes from being repeated in the future. After witnessing the mass murders carried out in the name of religion at Jonestown, Westin himself ends up re-enacting this same violence, believing that the Christian rebirth ‘would only come to pass through the shedding of blood’ (177).30 By failing to recognize the radical religious roots of Westin’s crimes, by dismissing him as a ‘lunatic’ or a deranged sadist, this cycle of bloodshed might have remained unbroken. As Wallander reminds his daughter, ‘The only hope of preventing something like this in the future, of identifying people prepared to blow themselves up in something they claimed was a Christian effort, was not to dismiss Westin as a madman plain and simple’ (459). Before the Frost thus leaves us with a chilly reminder that religious fundamentalism and fanaticism can be so terribly dangerous, a powerful conduit for people seeking their own redemption, or fighting their own demons, or striking out against those they perceive (rightly or wrongly) to be their enemies. It is particularly significant that the book’s penultimate chapter is set on 11 September 2001. Linda and Nyberg are sitting in the police canteen when Martinsson comes in, switches on the television and tells them that ‘something’s happened in the States’ (461). Given the slew of religiously flavoured violence enacted throughout of the novel, this understated reference to the attacks on New York’s Twin Towers reiterates the potential for all forms of religious fanaticism to sprout unspeakable acts of terror. As Timothy Peters notes, the novel drives home the message ‘that fundamentalism isn’t solely the province of the Muslim world – and the novel itself is a reminder of the evil men do in the pursuit of what they believe is goodness’.31

30.  This sentiment is repeated shortly afterwards, when Westin swears never to forget ‘that the Christian rebirth would demand sacrifice and blood’ (178). 31.  Timothy Peters, ‘Daughter Earns Right to Carry Her Father’s Torch’, SFGate, 13 March 2005, available online https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Daughter-earns-rightto-carry-her-father-s-torch-2723595.php (accessed 21 April 2018).

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Westin was searching for a goodness of his own, there is no doubt. But his vision of goodness was rooted in a fanatical landscape etched out of his own trauma – trauma that he seemed doomed to inflict on those he later encountered. The events of Before the Frost may affirm that religion and the Bible have little everyday relevance in (post)secular Swedish society, but Mankell warns us that we would be well advised to keep both of them in our sights, and to recognize the depths of violence that, in damaged hands, they can justify and inspire.

Bibliography Arvas, Paula, and Andrew Nestingen. ‘Introduction’. In Nestingen and Arvas, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, 1−17. Bergman, Kerstin. ‘From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction’. In Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes, edited by Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps, 65−84. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013. Blyth, Caroline. ‘Lisbeth and Leviticus: Biblical Literacy and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. In Rethinking Biblical Literacy, edited by Katie B. Edwards, 165–86. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Bondebjerg, Ib, Eva Novrup Redvall, Rasmus Helles, Signe Sophus Lai, Henrik Søndergaard and Cecilie Astrupgaard. Transnational European Television Drama: Production, Genres and Audiences. Palgrave European Media Studies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Chidester, David. Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Erb, Peter C. Murders, Manners, Mystery: Reflections on Faith in Contemporary Detective Fiction. London: SCM Press, 2007. Gregorek, Jean. ‘The Man Who Refused to Smile: Henning Mankell’s Wallander Series and Postmodern Cynicism’. Genre 50, no. 2 (2017): 153−79. Hansen, Kim Toft. ‘Postsecularism in Scandinavian Crime Fiction’. Scandinavian Studies 86, no. 1 (2014): 1−28. King, Greg A. ‘Day of the Lord’. In Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, edited by David Noel Freedman, 324−5. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000. Larsson, Stieg. Män som hatar kvinnor. Stockholm: Månpocket, 2005. Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Translated by Reg Keeland. London: MacLehose Press, 2008. Mankell, Henning. The Pyramid. Translated by Laurie Thompson. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. McClure, John A. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. McCorristine, Shane. ‘The Place of Pessimism in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander Series’. In Scandinavian Crime Fiction, edited by Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas, 77−88. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. Nestingen, Andrew K. Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Film, Fiction, and Social Change. New Directions in Scandinavian Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Nestingen, Andrew K., and Paula Arvas, eds. Scandinavian Crime Fiction. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011.

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Peters, Timothy. ‘Daughter Earns Right to Carry Her Father’s Torch’. SFGate, 13 March 2005. Available online https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Daughter-earns-rightto-carry-her-father-s-torch-2723595.php (accessed 21 April 2018). Saarinen, Risto. ‘The Surplus of Evil in Welfare Society: Contemporary Scandinavian Crime Fiction’. Dialog: A Journal of Theology 42, no. 2 (2003): 131−35. Stougaard-Nielsen, Jakob. Scandinavian Crime Fiction. 20th Century Genre Fiction. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Tapper, Michael. ‘ “More than ABBA and Skinny-Dipping in Mountain Lakes”: Swedish Dystopia, Henning Mankell and the British Wallander Series’. Film International 7, no. 2 (2009): 60−69. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Chapter 5 ‘ U N D E R S TA N D E D O F T H E P E O P L E’ :   C .   J .   S A N S OM’ S R EV E L AT I ON A S A C O N T E M P O R A RY C AU T IO NA RY T A L E Suzanne Bray

While many contemporary works of crime fiction contain biblical themes and allusions, a lot of these take place within communities or societies where the Christian scriptures are not very well known and where few study them with enthusiasm. In contrast, C.  J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels are set in the 1530s and 1540s, a period of ‘early sixteenth century Bible mania’,1 when the majority of English people were discovering the biblical text in their own language for the first time and were fascinated by it. However, as Thomas Cromwell said to Parliament in 1540, many of these new readers came up with extreme, historically impossible, interpretations as they studied the scriptures, ‘rather to justify their passions out of them than to direct their belief by them’.2 Belief in these unregulated interpretations led not only to official persecutions, political unrest and social instability, but also, occasionally, to mental delusions or biblically motivated violence. In Revelation (2008), the fourth novel in his Shardlake series, C.  J. Sansom skilfully recreates the atmosphere of London in 1543, including its religious fanatics of all persuasions. Within this setting, a serial killer uses the seven vials of God’s wrath mentioned in Revelation 16 as a pattern for seven murders of lapsed radical reformers and the attempted assassination of future queen Katherine Parr. And yet, this killer’s psychopathy seems scarcely greater than that of many other characters in the novel who base their understanding of political events on John’s apocalyptic prophecies in the book of Revelation. As scholar and crime fiction writer Jane Jakeman, among others, has pointed out, in the worlds of DAESH, the Taliban and the Christian fundamentalists of the American right, Sansom’s novel Revelation warns against all those who practice a selective reading of scripture

1.  Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and Derek Wilson, Reformation:  Christianity and the World 1500–2000 (London: Bantam Press, 1996), 36. 2. Thomas Cromwell, ‘Address to Parliament’, Lords’ Journals 1 (April 1540): 128–29.

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and are certain of the rightness of their own eccentric interpretations3 – especially those who, as Sansom himself puts it, contemplate ‘the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair’.4 C. J. Sansom is ideally equipped to write historical detective fiction, a genre that is, as Mike Ashley explains, the relatively recent ‘union of two much older literary fields – the historical fiction field with that of the detective story’.5 Awarded a PhD in history from the University of Birmingham, Sansom is used to meticulous historical research and still occasionally writes academic articles.6 His books follow the tradition of the late Ellis Peters, ‘working fiction into fact without playing tricks with history’7 and striving for the greatest possible accuracy in background detail. As in Peters’s medieval Brother Cadfael stories,8 all the major authority figures and many minor characters are based on people who really lived. However, when no record is found of the person doing a certain job, both authors feel ‘free to fill the vacancy’9 by inventing a fictional character with the necessary characteristics. Sansom admits that, when attempting to reconstruct Tudor society, ‘unfortunately the sources are very thin’10 and it is impossible to know exactly what society was like, what precisely happened and why. For this reason, he supports historian Glyn Redworth’s assertion that all accounts, academic or fictional, ‘are obliged to be in the nature of interpretative essays’.11 In this context, as Richard Slotkin has stated, ‘the fiction writer must treat a [historical] theory which may be true as if it was certainly true, without quibble or qualification; and credibly represent a material world in which that theory appears to work’.12 This is clearly Sansom’s method, which results in historically realistic novels, creating what Alex Long has described as ‘a semi-fictional world’,13 where an invented murder mystery is inserted into a 3.  Jane Jakeman, ‘Revelation by C.J. Sansom: The Tudor Taliban’, The Independent, 18 April 2008, available online http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ reviews/revelation-by-cj-sansom-810751.html (accessed 10 February 2018). 4. C. J. Sansom, ‘Historical Note’, in Revelation (London: Macmillan, 2008), 548. 5.  Mike Ashley, ‘Introduction:  The Chronicles of Crime’, in The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, ed. Mike Ashley (London: Robinson, 1993), xiii. 6.  For example, C. J. Sansom, ‘The Wakefield Conspiracy of 1541 and Henry VIII’s Progress to the North Reconsidered’, Northern History 45, no. 2 (2008): 217−38, deals with the same historical situation as Sansom’s novel Sovereign (2006). 7. Ellis Peters, ‘Foreword’, in Ashley, The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, xviii. 8. This series consists of twenty novels and three short stories based during the twelfthcentury civil war between Henry I’s daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen of Blois. The first novel in the series is A Morbid Taste for Bones (1976). 9. Peters, ‘Foreword’, xix. 10. C. J. Sansom, ‘Historical Note’, in Lamentation (London: Mantle, 2014), 621. 11. Ibid. 12.  Richard Slotkin, ‘Fiction for the Purposes of History’, Rethinking History 9, no. 2/3 (2005): 226. 13.  Alex B. Long, ‘Professionalism and Matthew Shardlake’, in Legal Studies Research Paper Series 167 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee, February 2012), 109.

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convincing and otherwise largely accurate Tudor context. The fact that Sansom’s detective, Matthew Shardlake, is a lawyer is also logical in this period; as Arthur Griffiths points out, before the creation of police forces in Britain, ‘the ingenious piecing together of clues, and the following up of light and baffling scent, was the work, generally, of the lawyers engaged by the parties aggrieved’ – in other words, those representing the victims of the crime.14

The Bible in Sixteenth-Century England The Bible had been available in English to at least some people in Britain ever since the last part of the fourteenth century. Anxious to preserve the privileges of the all-male, clerical elite, chronicler Henry Knighton lamented in the 1390s that Bible translator John Wyclif ‘translated from the Latin into the language not of angels but of Angles (Englishmen), so that he made the Bible common and open to the laity, and to women who were able to read, which used to be reserved for literate and intelligent clergy’.15 However, as this was prior to the invention of printing, copies of the English Bible were rare and had to be laboriously copied out by hand. It was only after the Reformation in Germany, when Lutheran ideas began to spread in England and the printing press had appeared on the scene, that William Tyndale, a gifted scholar in both Greek and Hebrew, decided to translate the Bible into English. For, as the protestant John Foxe, author of the famous Book of Martyrs, recorded, ‘He perceived that it was not possible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the Scriptures were so plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the meaning of the text.’16 Tyndale had already moved to Germany to avoid trouble from the authorities when he finished his English New Testament in 1525. After some difficulties with officials in the Catholic city of Cologne, he eventually got it printed in Lutheran Worms a year later. Tyndale’s supporters in England ordered 6,000 copies of the first edition, knowing the extent of interest in the country, and ‘the books, infiltrating east coast ports hidden in bales of cloth, sacks of grain and barrels of wine, were soon being eagerly bought’17 and read, first in London and soon afterwards in Oxford, Cambridge and further afield. In addition, the Eindhoven brothers in Antwerp brought out several pirate editions of Tyndale’s New Testament, many copies of which were also smuggled into England. Possession of the work was officially illegal, as the authorities at the time strongly opposed the idea of the common people reading the scriptures.

14.  Arthur Griffiths, ‘Afterword:  Old Time Detection’, Cassell’s Magazine, April 1902, reprinted in Ashley, Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, 505. 15. Cited in Gordon Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Version (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9. 16. John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563; New Kensington, PA: Whitaker, 1981), 141. 17. Fernandez-Armesto and Wilson, Reformation, 43.

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However, there were so many copies of this ‘pocket-sized’18 book, and so many officials who actually supported the Reformers and looked the other way, that it was impossible to suppress them. Tyndale then worked on the Old Testament; Foxe claims that the future Bishop of Exeter Miles Coverdale helped him finish the Pentateuch in the second half of 1529.19 So, by the time both Tyndale and his principal opponent in England, Thomas More, had been martyred (in 1536 and 1535 respectively), the whole Bible was more or less ready for production and had the more diplomatic Coverdale’s name on the cover and a dedication to the king inside. This was the Bible Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Chancellor Thomas Cromwell presented to Henry VIII for approval in the late summer of 1538.20 Henry not only approved but decreed that every parish in England had to purchase a copy of the English Bible and instructed the clergy to display it ‘in a convenient place . . . in the church . . . whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it’.21 By November 1539 this was done, the Bible often being chained to a lectern to prevent theft, as is the case in the novel Revelation, in the church Sansom’s Shardlake visits to check a biblical prophecy (162).22 For the next few years, as Fernandez-Armesto and Wilson explain, ‘the illiterate went to school in order to gain access to the divine message. Farmers read the Bible to their workers and landowners to their tenants. Gospellers stood up in churches to recite passages of the sacred text’.23 It is clear that Sansom shares C. S. Lewis’s opinion that the Protestant reformers had the very latest, fashionable, even revolutionary ideas in the mid-sixteenth century and that the novelty of their opinions was disturbing to more conservative souls.24 Both Catholics and members of the upper classes who feared public disturbance opposed the general availability of the biblical text. The Reformers lost some of their influence over the king after his short-lived and unsuccessful political marriage to protestant Anne of Cleves25 and the return of some prominent Catholic supporters from exile. As a 18. Campbell, Bible, 11. 19. Foxe, Book of Martyrs, 145. 20. See Antonia Fraser, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1992), 294. 21.  Roger Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1902), 151. Cited in Robert Hutchinson, Thomas Cromwell (London:  Phoenix, 2008), 188. 22. Throughout the chapter, page references to Sansom’s novels will be given in brackets within the main text. Full publication details for these novels are listed in the bibliography. 23. Fernandez-Armesto and Wilson, Reformation, 36. 24.  C. S. Lewis, Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1954), 43. 25.  Henry and Anne were only married for a few months before the unconsummated marriage was dissolved. It had been doomed since their first meeting when Anne had failed to recognize the king and respond to his advances. See David Starkey, Six Wives (London: Vintage, 2004), 627.

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result, Edmund Bonner, the new Bishop of London, was encouraged to start a wave of repression in the spring of 1542 and published a long list of forbidden, mainly Protestant books.26 Printing of the English Bible was halted in March 1543 and the Act for the Advancement of True Religion, passed in May 1543, claimed that ‘the highest and most honest sort of men’ benefitted from the study of scripture, but ‘the lower sort . . . women, artificers, prentices, journeymen, serving men of the degree of yeomen or under, husbandmen or labourers’ could no longer legally read the Bible ‘privately nor openly’.27 This was a cruel blow for the Reformers and inevitably led to the establishment of secret Bible study groups. This historical milieu is the context of Revelation. Sansom describes the religious divisions in London as including ‘a radical vicar in one church whitewashing over ancient wall paintings and replacing them with texts from the Bible, a conservative in another insisting on the full Latin mass’ (29), ‘ranting Bible men springing up everywhere’ (12) and hot-gospellers ‘who drove at you with biblical verses like a carpenter hammering in nails’ (15). At the same time, Bishop Bonner, through ‘his harsh religious rule of the city’ (17), was arresting those who ate meat during Lent and also burning heretics, including the genuine case of Richard Mekins, ‘a fifteen-year-old apprentice who had been burned alive at Smithfield for denying the presence of Christ in the Eucharist’ (17). As Ben Witherington points out, in the Revelation novel, ‘one gets a real feeling for the good and bad of what it would be like to have Christian values and concerns involved at every turn’28 of the life of the nation; moreover, Sansom evokes an atmosphere of fear and trepidation, as no one knows what will happen next in an unstable, constantly shifting society.

The Place of Revelation According to Jakeman, ‘Revelation is not merely the title of the book, nor an indication of what Shardlake finally achieves in his search to unmask a murderer. It is the apocalyptic nightmare of the four last things.’29 And, as Shardlake seeks to reveal the identity and motivations of the murderer, as well as the reasons behind a client’s mental instability, it becomes increasingly clear that the biblical book of Revelation and its place in people’s imagination form the key to these mysteries. In the sixteenth-century world portrayed by Sansom, most scholars agree that the principal reformers were ‘cautious in their approach to the Book of

26.  See Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (1989; London:  Mantle, 2014), Kindle e-book, chapter 8. 27. Ibid. 28.  Ben Witherington, ‘A Novel Approach to the Reformers – C.J. Sansom’s Mysteries’, Beliefnet, 26 August 2009, available online http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/ bibleandculture/2009/08/a-novel-approach-to-the-reformers-cj-sansoms-mysteries.html (accessed 10 February 2018). 29. Jakeman, ‘Tudor Taliban’.

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Revelation’.30 Some reformers, such as John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli, ‘were even antiapocalyptists and said little about end-time events’.31 Although he expressed doubts about the book’s canonicity,32 Luther was convinced of its relevance to his own era and stated: ‘We have reached the time of the pale horse of the Apocalypse. The world will not last any more, if God wills it, than another hundred years’.33 Also, radical interest in the work increased to the extent that, by the 1540s, Revelation had become an essential part of the Protestant hermeneutic. Historian Susan Brigden records that in London around the year 1540, a man called John was copying out Wyclif ’s translation of Revelation,34 while John Foxe refers to a certain man called Stile who was burned in Smithfield in 1539 with ‘a book of the Apocalypse, which he was wont to read upon’.35 Richard Kyle observes that ‘apocalyptic ideas and activities increase during times of stress and upheavals’ and that ‘the sixteenth century was such a time’,36 so the interest in the last book of the Bible was perhaps predictable. In Revelation, Sansom describes a society where radical reformers ‘believed that the Day of Judgement, the end of the world foretold in the book of Revelation would soon be upon us all’ (22), but at the same time, ‘often comforted themselves in the belief that Revelation foretold their eventual victory against the Beast of Rome’.37 The fact that the reformers did not all agree in their interpretation of Revelation is also portrayed:  many of the characters in the novel consider that Babylon in the biblical text represents Rome, while Shardlake learns that the Duke of Norfolk’s fashionably radical son ‘sees London as the Babylon referred to’ (135). Sansom also refers to polemicists like John Bale, whom he describes as ‘a religious, though not social radical’, and whom he considers was ‘the most feared’38 of the radicals by the authorities. In Revelation, Bonner arrests two actors for ‘possessing forbidden plays by John Bale’ (403). Bale is important, as he published ‘the first complete commentary on the Book of Revelation to be printed in English’,39 entitled The Image of Both Churches after the Most Wonderful and Heavenly Revelation of Saint John, and understood the last book in the Bible to be ‘a description of human

30.  Robert Zaller, The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 201. 31.  Richard Kyle, The Last Days Are Here Again (Grand Rapids, MI:  Baker Books, 1998), 60. 32. See Zaller, Discourse of Legitimacy, 201. 33. Martin Luther, Dr Martin Luther’s Sämmtliche Schriften 22, ed. Johann Georg Walch (St Louis: Concordia, 1881–1910), col. 1334. 34. Brigden, London and the Reformation, chapter 8. 35. Foxe, Book of Martyrs, 323. 36. Kyle, Last Days, 57. 37. Sansom, ‘Historical Note’, Revelation, 548. 38. Sansom, ‘Historical Note’, Lamentation, 622. 39.  John Simkin, ‘John Bale’, Spartacus Educational, July 2015, available online http:// spartacus-educational.com/John_Bale.htm (accessed 10 February 2018).

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history before the Second Coming of Christ’.40 Although Bale’s commentary had not yet been published in 1543,41 it is fair to assume that the ideas were circulating freely in London before the actual publication. However, Sansom is careful to indicate that apocalyptic fervour was not limited to the radical Protestants. His characters observe the fourteenth-century, definitely Catholic, paintings on the walls of the chapter house of Westminster Abbey, which may still be seen today. Each arch shows four, often lurid, scenes from Revelation with scrolls of text beneath them, interrupted in the eastern bays ‘by a Doom painting, showing the righteous ascending into heaven, while below pale, naked sinners were thrown into hell’ (220). It is made clear that, before the dissolution of the monasteries, the monks at the abbey would have seen these vivid images of judgement, hell and damnation every day of their lives.

Solving the Mysteries In Revelation, lawyer Matthew Shardlake is confronted by two mysteries, one criminal and one social, both of which require a knowledge of theology, the Bible and the human mind in order to solve them. To help a client and his family, Shardlake has to work out why teenager Adam Kite appears to have gone mad and how to help him recover his wits. He also has to assist Archbishop Thomas Cranmer with identifying and catching a serial killer, one of whose victims was a friend of Shardlake’s. Eventually, the detective and his doctor friend Guy situate both problems in the doctrine of predestination. As Guy puts it, ‘There are some who are utterly certain they are saved. They can be dangerous because they believe they are special, above other people. But just as every coin has two sides, so there are others who crave the certainty, yet are convinced they are unworthy’ (54). The murderer corresponds to the first of these categories and the unfortunate Adam Kite to the second. Guy identifies Adam’s problem as ‘Salvation panic. A strange obsession’ (96). In his historical note, Sansom explains that this was a genuine problem in early modern England and that cases are mentioned both in the early-seventeenth-century records of a therapist at Bedlam42 and in ‘the first great Awakening in eighteenth century colonial America’, where some ‘people who had come to believe they were irrevocably damned’43 committed suicide. This panic is often described today as ‘a 40. Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 78. 41. Opinions appear to be divided on the actual date of publication. Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 237, argues plausibly that it was published in Antwerp in 1545 and in London in 1547, the year of Henry VIII’s death. 42.  See Michael McDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981). 43. Sansom, ‘Historical Note’, Revelation, 549.

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consequence of predestination and the complete transcendence of God’, which led people to believe ‘there existed no course or conduct to secure salvation’.44 As Paul Searight explains, in the novel, Adam is convinced ‘he was sinful and wicked and therefore he just couldn’t be chosen by God . . . [N]o matter how much he wanted God, he was sure God didn’t want him and that it was obvious he wasn’t one of those chosen from before time began’.45 Although Sansom attributes this belief to ‘Lutheran and Calvinist notions of God’s predestined division of humanity into the saved and the damned’,46 it seems unlikely that Lutheran ideas would cause this problem. For, while Luther believed in the predestination of the elect to salvation,47 his ideas on the subject were practically identical to those of St Augustine and, as he made clear in his Lectures on Genesis (1535–45), these did not include double predestination or God condemning some people to damnation for all eternity, regardless of their lives.48 As Guy correctly observes in Revelation, double predestination is the idea that ‘God has decided, as though through caprice, to save some and damn others to perpetual torment; and if God does not give you the assurance of his Grace, you are doomed’ (54). It is a specifically Calvinist doctrine, more emphasized by some of Calvin’s radical followers than by the man himself, and which became particularly widespread in the second half of the sixteenth century. As Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion was not published in English until 1561, it does seem a little unlikely that a working man with little education like Adam Kite would be affected by this problem as early as 1543, even if it would not have been particularly surprising half a century later; but this is a minor quibble. Although Guy is usually right in questions of human psychology in the Shardlake series, in the case of Adam, it is Matthew Shardlake whose instincts are correct. When discussing what has set off Adam’s salvation panic, Matthew wonders if ‘he has committed some great sin’ (54), while Guy esteems that ‘usually in some cases their sins are small, it is something in the workings of their mind that brings them to this pass’ (54). In this case, Adam has been sexually initiated by the clandestine mistress of a radical clergyman (449), a lapse which would have been considered serious by his community at the time – not only because of the extramarital sexual relationship, but also because he did not

44.  Kees van Kersbergen, ‘From Charity to Social Justice:  Religion and the European Welfare State Traditions’, in Beyond Welfare State Models:  Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy, ed. Pauli Kettunen and Klaus Petersen (Cheltenham:  Edward Elgar, 2001), 88. 45.  Paul Searight, ‘Salvation Panic’, Sermon Central, 1 October 2008, available online https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/salvation-panic-paul-searight-sermon-onsalvation-127371 (accessed 10 February 2018). 46. Sansom, ‘Historical Note’, Revelation, 549. 47. This is explained in Luther’s 1525 work, On the Bondage of the Will. 48.  See Matthew Block, ‘Why Lutheran Predestination Is Not Calvinist Predestination’, First Things, 10 February 2013, available online https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/ firstthoughts/2013/10/why-lutheran-predestination-isnt-calvinist-predestination (accessed 10 February 2018).

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denounce the hypocritical vicar who was deceiving his parishioners. Once his sin has been openly admitted, Guy and Matthew’s lack of condemnation and their patient care help the young man to recover and believe that God has not abandoned him. Although the detection of a serial killer is in many ways more difficult and more serious than the healing of a distraught teenager, it requires similar insights. The detectives have to get inside the mind of the mentally unbalanced criminal in order to find a solution. It is Matthew’s knowledge of the Bible which helps him to see that the murders correspond to the vials of God’s wrath in the book of Revelation and to realize that this means at least seven killings are intended. At first, Matthew and his assistant Barak think the killer intends to symbolically fulfil the prophecy and thus bring about the end of the world (164−5). Together with Guy, they understand that the madman must believe he has been chosen by God for this mission and that he is ‘bringing forward the good and holy work outlined in the book of Revelation’ (185). Like Adam, the man is obsessed, inappropriately applying one tiny part of scripture, out of context, to himself. The detectives, however, start to question what may happen if the killer ‘pours out the seven vials of wrath and the world does not end’, with Guy deducing that he will probably ‘go back to Revelation for the clues [he has] missed’ (365). And, when Shardlake remembers that the pouring out of seven vials in Revelation is followed by the judgement of the whore of Babylon who is associated with ‘an eighth king’ (Rev. 17.11), he realizes that Henry’s betrothed, the highly moral Katherine Parr, is in danger. The thought processes of Sansom’s serial killer, Cantrell, appear to echo those of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who insisted at his trial that he had ‘messages from God to kill prostitutes’, and that he was carrying out a ‘divine mission’,49 which ‘was his calling and he didn’t have any qualms about it’.50 In the same way, Cantrell explains his murders by referring to a divine calling he himself had received: ‘It was all meant by God. The day came when I heard his voice, and knew that it was his, that he had chosen me’ (523). He is convinced that apostates deserve to die and makes the sweeping assumption that any woman who agrees to marry Henry VIII must be an apostate. Shardlake’s reaction to these horrors is categorical:  ‘I believe the Book of Revelation was written by a false prophet . . . who repeated his dreams and fantasies’ (338). This may seem anachronistic, because denying the divine inspiration of part of scripture was very rare and extremely dangerous in the political climate of the time; moreover, an educated man like Shardlake would almost certainly have been aware of the precise and carefully composed structure of the book of Revelation, even if he may have been unaware of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition which inspired it. In contrast, Guy’s reaction is to deplore an uninstructed subculture where ‘the Bible is interpreted as literal fact, its symbols and metaphors forgotten’ (181). Such a response would, historically, have been much more common.

49. Keith Brannen, ‘The Trial of Peter Sutcliffe’, execulink.com (2005), 1, available online http://www.execulink.com/~kbrannen/trialall.pdf (accessed 10 February 2018). 50. Ibid., 29.

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Revelation and Fanaticism Today It is clear that C. J. Sansom was aware of the relevance of his 2008 novel to his own twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts. In the historical note at the end of the book he comments, ‘The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and today’s fundamentalist Christian fanatics extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, even to their phraseology.’51 However, some commentators, including Jakeman, have interpreted this relevance as going further than the Christian scriptures and traditions. In an article entitled ‘Revelation by C. J. Sansom: The Tudor Taliban’, Jakeman remarks, ‘Not the least scary thing is the mirror this book holds up to our own times, as the powerfully imagined record of a society that has spiralled out of control.’52 She then proceeds to apply the message not only to ‘modern hot-gospellers willing to undertake Crusades’, but also to ‘Islamic extremists tearing their countries apart’.53 It is certainly true that in the 1970s and 1980s, when Sansom was a young man, and also to a certain extent up until 9/11, many Evangelical Christians, particularly in the United States, were preoccupied by the end of the world. The return of the Jews to their homeland in 1948 had triggered, for many, the countdown to Armageddon. As Richard Kyle notes, ‘Spurred on by Hal Lindsey’s bestselling Late, Great, Planet Earth, a host of fundamentalist preachers, authors and TV personalities continued to bring an apocalyptic message to millions of Americans.’54 The Late Great Planet Earth is a work of popular eschatology with a literalist, premillennial and dispensational theological emphasis, claiming to see ‘predictions made centuries ago being fulfilled before our eyes’55 in the build-up to the end of the world. Published in 1970, it was the first of a series of books, films and songs to present the message of an imminent apocalypse. During the 1980s, this fixation on the apocalypse reached right to the top of the American political structure, with James Watt (Secretary of the Interior), Caspar Weinberger (Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defence) and even Reagan himself expressing agreement with this point of view.56 Many others, including C. J. Sansom, were disturbed by this position, repelled by the way people could look forward with enthusiasm to the violent destruction of humankind. In Revelation, Guy echoes his creator’s view when he deplores any theological approach to Revelation which ‘teaches that the destruction of human beings does not matter, it is even to be rejoiced over’ (411). Evangelical apocalyptic fervour appears to have been on the decline since the year 2000 (‘Y2K’). Matthew Avery Sutton writes in his book American Apocalypse:  A History of Modern Evangelicalism of a ‘waning emphasis’ on the

51. Sansom, ‘Historical Note’, Revelation, 548. 52. Jakeman, ‘Tudor Taliban’. 53. Ibid. 54. Kyle, Last Days, 17. 55. Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970), 18. 56. See Kyle, Last Days, 16–17.

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second coming and notes that ‘some of the most famous evangelical preachers in the nation no longer talk about a soon-coming apocalypse’.57 Chuck Colson’s post9/11 column in Christianity Today presents a similar position, when he writes, ‘I try to avoid end-times prophecy.’58 It seems that the uneventful arrival of ‘Y2K’ led to a greater scepticism, particularly among American Evangelicals. However, apocalyptic ideas are still alive and well today in some currents of radical Islam. Matthew Shardlake speaks in Revelation about ‘wild, brutal fanaticism . . . sweeping through the land’ in the 1540s, which gave men like serial killer Cantrell ‘an excuse for what he wanted to do’ (535). Several commentators have mentioned the connection between such apocalyptic readings of current events and the many young people who have left Europe for various conflicts in the Middle East since the 1990s.59 Charles Lister, author of a much acclaimed recent study on ISIS (or DAESH),60 argues that ISIS ‘presents itself as an almost apocalyptic international Jihadist organization’ and talks openly and clearly ‘about how their actions and strategies are directed specifically to bringing about the end of the world’.61 The name of their English-language magazine, Dabiq, refers to a town which features in Islamic apocalyptic prophecies as the site of an endtimes showdown between Muslims and their enemies and plays a significant role in the official ISIS belief structure. In this context, Cantrell’s violent executions of apostate radical believers may look frighteningly familiar, as does victim Roger’s unease with the ‘preaching full of rage and hatred’ (48) he hears all around him.

57.  Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2014), 368. 58.  Charles Colson, ‘Wake-up Call’, Christianity Today, 12 November 2001, available online http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/november12/32.112.html (accessed 8 April 2018); quoted in Meghan O’Gieblyn, ‘The End’, Boston Review, 16 March 2015, available online http://bostonreview.net/book-ideas/meghan-ogieblyn-american-apocalypse-evangelicalism (accessed 10 February 2018). 59.  See, for example, David Cook, ‘The Recovery of Radical Islam in the Wake of the Defeat of the Taliban’, Terrorism and Political Violence 15, no. 1 (2003):  31−56; Gilles Keppel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006); Joel C. Rosenberg, ‘Islamic Extremists Are Trying to Hasten the Coming of the Mahdi’, National Review, 11 September 2015, available online https://www.nationalreview. com/2015/09/radical-islam-iran-isis-apocalytpic-messiah-mahdi/ (accessed 7 April 2018); Mustafa Akyol, ‘The Problem with the Islamic Apocalypse’, The New York Times, 3 October 2016, available online https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/opinion/the-problem-withthe-islamic-apocalypse.html (accessed 5 April 2018). 60. See Charles Lister, The Islamic State: A Brief Introduction (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015). 61.  Elias Isquith, ‘The End of the World:  Why America Misunderstands ISIS  – and What You Really Need to Know’, Salon, 1 April 2015, https://www.salon.com/2015/04/01/ the_end_of_the_world_why_america_misunderstands_isis_and_what_you_really_need_ to_know/ (accessed 10 February 2018).

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While Sansom does not specifically mention Islamic extremism, Revelation may be read as an indication of his opposition to all forms of religious extremism, whatever their origin. In the novel, former radicals Matthew and Roger remember their own vision of Christianity, studying the works of humanist philosopher Juan Vives (who had been a tutor to Henry VIII’s daughter Mary),62 and meditating on ‘how the Christian prince could end unemployment by sponsoring public works, building hospitals and schools for the poor’ (48). Sansom places himself politically ‘on the democratic Left’,63 and appears to approve of Matthew and Roger’s reforming vision of a caring, Christian kingdom. Unfortunately, this vision had largely been replaced in the 1540s by extremism and hatred of the opposition. And, most of all, it had been supplanted by a lack of humility – what Sansom calls the radicals’ ‘certainty of their rightness’.64 The novel ends with hope for the future, as Adam Kite is back in his right mind and the wise, compassionate Katherine Parr has become queen. But Guy’s final words condemn the politicized religious conflict around them, which has ‘driven men to extremes, to the impious extravagance of believing they alone can comprehend the vast mysteries of Scripture, let alone the mind of God’ (535). This leaves the novel’s readers with the timely reminder that being human, in all circumstances, we, and our leaders, may just possibly be wrong. C. J.  Sansom claims that he is particularly drawn in his novels to ‘the moral dilemmas the literate classes often find themselves in at times of ideological conflict’.65 Revelation contains many of these dilemmas for Sansom’s protagonist and his associates. It is, at the same time, an exciting crime novel about a serial killer and an exploration of how to, and how not to, read, understand and apply the sacred text. For this reason, American theologian Ben Witherington finds in the Shardlake novels a ‘cautionary lesson’ for his own overzealous compatriots who wish to enshrine their interpretations of scripture in the law of the land. Witherington encourages them to ‘beware of trying to legislate Christianity, or at least beware of using OT law and the book of Revelation as the basis for civil jurisprudence’.66 By showing the chaos caused by extreme interpretations of scriptural prophecy in the past, Revelation provides a timely warning for the present.

62.  Among other things, Vives wrote in favour of giving financial relief to the urban poor through social legislation, the education of girls and the humane treatment of the mentally ill. 63.  C. W. Gortner, ‘An Interview with C.J. Sansom’, BookBrowse, March 2014, https:// www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1517/ cj-sansom (accessed 10 February 2018). 64. Sansom, ‘Historical Note’, Revelation, 548. 65. Gortner, ‘An Interview with C.J. Sansom’. 66. Witherington, ‘Novel Approach’.

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Bibliography Akyol, Mustafa. ‘The Problem with the Islamic Apocalypse’. The New York Times, 3 October 2016. Available online https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/opinion/theproblem-with-the-islamic-apocalypse.html (accessed 5 April 2018). Ashley, Mike. ‘Introduction: the Chronicles of Crime’. In Ashley, The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, xiii–xvii. Ashley, Mike, ed. The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. London: Robinson, 1993. Block, Matthew. ‘Why Lutheran Predestination is not Calvinist Predestination’. First Things, 10 February 2013. Available online https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/ firstthoughts/2013/10/why-lutheran-predestination-isnt-calvinist-predestination (accessed 10 February 2018). Brannen, Keith. ‘The Trial of Peter Sutcliffe’. execulink.com (2003–11). Available online http://www.execulink.com/~kbrannen/trialall.pdf (accessed 10 February 2018). Brigden, Susan. London and the Reformation. London: Mantle, [1989] 2014. Kindle. Campbell, Gordon. Bible: The Story of the King James Version. London: Oxford University Press, 2010. Cook, David. ‘The Recovery of Radical Islam in the Wake of the Defeat of the Taliban’. Terrorism and Political Violence 15, no. 1 (2003): 31–56. Cromwell, Thomas. ‘Address to Parliament’. Lords’ Journals 1 (April 1540): 128−9. Evenden, Elizabeth, and Thomas S. Freeman. Religion and the Book in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, and Derek Wilson. Reformation: Christianity and the World 1500−2000. London: Bantam Press, 1996. Foxe, John. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. New Kensington, PA: Whitaker, 1981. Fraser, Antonia. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1992. Gortner, C. W. ‘An Interview with C.J. Sansom’. BookBrowse, March 2014. Available online https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_ number/1517/cj-sansom (accessed 10 February 2018). Griffiths, Arthur. ‘Afterword: Old Time Detection’. Cassell’s Magazine, April 1902. Reprinted in Ashley, The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, 504–13. Hutchinson, Robert. Thomas Cromwell. London: Phoenix, 2008. Isquith, Elias. ‘The End of the World: Why America Misunderstands ISIS – and What You Really Need to Know’. Salon, 1 April 2015. Available online https://www.salon. com/2015/04/01/the_end_of_the_world_why_america_misunderstands_isis_and_ what_you_really_need_to_know/ (accessed 10 February 2018). Jakeman, Jane. ‘Revelation by C. J. Sansom: The Tudor Taliban’. The Independent, 18 April 2008. Available online http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ reviews/revelation-by-cj-sansom-810751.html (accessed 10 February 2018). Keppel, Gilles. The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006. Kersbergen, Kees van. ‘From Charity to Social Justice: Religion and the European Welfare State Traditions’. In Beyond Welfare State Models: Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy, edited by Pauli Kettunen and Klaus Petersen, 82–101. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2001. Kyle, Richard. The Last Days Are Here Again. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998. Lewis, C. S. Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954.

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Lindsey, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970. Lister, Charles. The Islamic State: A Brief Introduction. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015. Long, Alex B. ‘Professionalism and Matthew Shardlake’. In Legal Studies Research Paper Series 167, 87−109. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee (February 2012). Luther, Martin. Dr Martin Luther’s Sämmtliche Schriften 22. Edited by Johann Georg Walch. St Louis: Concordia, 1881−1910. McDonald, Michael. Mystical Bedlam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Merriman, Roger. Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902. Molekamp, Femke. Women and the Bible in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. O’Gieblyn, Meghan. ‘The End’. Boston Review, 16 March 2015. Available online http:// bostonreview.net/book-ideas/meghan-ogieblyn-american-apocalypse-evangelicalism (accessed 10 February 2018). Peters, Ellis. ‘Foreword’. In Ashley, The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, xviii–xix. Rosenberg, Joel C. ‘Islamic Extremists Are Trying to Hasten the Coming of the Mahdi’. National Review, 11 September 2015. Available online https://www.nationalreview. com/2015/09/radical-islam-iran-isis-apocalytpic-messiah-mahdi/ (accessed 7 April 2018). Sansom, C. J. Lamentation. London: Mantle, 2004. Sansom, C. J. Revelation. London: Macmillan, 2008. Sansom, C. J. ‘The Wakefield Conspiracy of 1541 and Henry VIII’s Progress to the North Reconsidered’. Northern History XLV, no. 2 (September 2008): 218−37. Searight, Paul. ‘Salvation Panic’. Sermon Central, September 2008. Available online https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/salvation-panic-paul-searight-sermon-onsalvation-127371 (accessed 10 February 2018). Simkin, John. ‘John Bale’. Spartacus Educational, July 2015. Available online http:// spartacus-educational.com/John_Bale.htm (accessed 10 February 2018). Slotkin, Richard. ‘Fiction for the Purposes of History’. Rethinking History 9, no. 2/3 (2005): 221−36. Sutton, Matthew Avery. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2014. Witherington, Ben. ‘A Novel Approach to the Reformers – C. J. Sansom’s Mysteries’. Beliefnet, 26 August 2009. Available online http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/ bibleandculture/2009/08/a-novel-approach-to-the-reformers-cj-sansoms-mysteries. html (accessed 10 February 2018). Zaller, Robert. The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Chapter 6 W H E R E H AV E A L L T H E G O O D M E N G O N E ? M A L E ANTIHEROES IN THE BOOK OF JUDGES AND A M E R IC A N T E L EV I SIO N Benjamin Bixler

Recent American television has been described as being in a new golden age, marked by an explosion of available content as cable networks produce their own high-quality series. At the same time, online streaming services such as Netflix make these shows readily available, while also producing their own original content.1 Even more significantly, television producers, directors and writers have begun to embrace the creative potential of television, with its ability to tell detailed stories, develop characters with true depth and connect with audiences in new ways.2 Within this recent television renaissance, it is striking how many central characters within crime dramas adopt the role of male antihero.3 Antiheroes are those protagonists who defy the common characteristics of a hero, often in their failure to fulfil conventional heroic attributes. As television characters, these men are conflicted, capable of both good and evil – adulterers, criminals, mob bosses, even serial killers – yet audiences continue to root for them, despite their being ‘unhappy, morally compromised, complicated, [and] deeply human’.4 Characters such as Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), Vic Mackey (The Shield), Omar Little (The Wire), Seth Bullock (Deadwood), Raylan Givens (Justified) and Walter White (Breaking Bad), to name but a few, regularly embrace noble ideals, from providing for their families to the pursuit of justice. Nonetheless, they are often forced to make morally questionable choices as they attempt to hold onto these ideals.

1.  Amy M. Damico and Sara E. Quay, 21st-Century TV Dramas:  Exploring the New Golden Age (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), viii–ix. 2. Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 6–7. 3.  Brett Martin, Difficult Men:  Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution:  From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (New York:  Penguin, 2013), 4–6; Damico and Quay, 21st-Century TV Dramas, 91–93. 4. Martin, Difficult Men, 4.

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To a large extent, these characters are led to make such dubious decisions because they represent hegemonic masculinity, a term developed by Raewyn Connell to describe the ways in which ‘one form of masculinity rather than others is culturally exalted’.5 These normative expectations about what it means to be a ‘real man’ dictate that men who fail to meet these expectations are regarded as somehow ‘lesser’. Within the American cultural context in which US television shows are produced, attributes of hegemonic masculinity include, but are not limited to, physical strength and dominance, a refusal to cry or show emotions, an obsession with retribution and revenge, and the justification of violence to maintain honour. The need to preserve this hegemonic masculine identity in the pursuit of noble goals is what leads certain television characters to make morally questionable choices. In this chapter, I examine the similarities between the recent rise of the male antihero in American television and the hegemonic masculine ideal given voice in the book of Judges. Specifically, I focus on Walter White, the antihero protagonist of television drama Breaking Bad, who embraces this American understanding of hegemonic masculinity in his pursuit of (what he regards as) noble ideals. Central to my inquiry is an intertextual comparison between Walter White and the biblical character of Samson (Judges 13–16). A  number of Hebrew Bible narratives portray characters who exhibit the same tension between admirable ends and questionable means, by embodying similar understandings of hegemonic masculinity. In the story of Samson, one can see these dynamics play out explicitly. The hero of the story achieves what can be seen as the noble goal of freeing the Israelites from their Philistine oppressors; yet because of Samson’s adherence to hegemonic masculinity, he makes use of extreme violence to achieve this goal, inviting speculation on the morally problematic nature of his actions. Reading the story of Samson intertextually with the television series Breaking Bad, I argue that comparing the hegemonic masculine ideal represented by Walter White and Samson helps to clarify the limitations of violence as a means to noble ends. In the first section of the chapter, I offer a reading of the characters of Samson and Walter White, arguing that they both, in their own way, embody the status of antihero. In the second section, I look at connections between Samson and Walter White, focusing primarily on the role that hegemonic masculinity and violence play in the creation of these antiheroes. In the last section of the chapter, I consider how both Judges 13−16 and Breaking Bad reveal the problematic nature of violence as a means of pursuing noble goals. By troubling this often positive portrayal of male antiheroes in the biblical text and in contemporary television, I therefore seek to challenge contemporary hegemonic understandings of masculinity, which regard male violence as a heroic endeavour. Before I begin, however, let me issue a caveat. While a contemporary television series and an ancient biblical text may not appear the most obvious pairing for an intertextual reading, these two cultural products may nevertheless be read

5. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 77.

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effectively alongside one another. To my knowledge, Breaking Bad is not drawing explicitly on the story of Samson in its construction of Walter White, nor does there appear to be any direct reliance on this biblical material in Breaking Bad as a whole. Nevertheless, as I  discuss throughout this chapter, there are some commonalities between the characters of Samson and Walter White, despite their separation across space and time. Particularly, both characters appear to embody an antihero, whose conformity to hegemonic masculinity and use of ‘justified’ violence elevates them to the status of narrative protagonist. Moreover, I contend that understandings of biblical masculinity have had (and continue to have) a significant impact on the construction of masculinity in American culture. When these two cultural texts (Judges 13−16 and Breaking Bad) are read alongside one another, the parallels between their expressions of masculinity become apparent. In addition, the obvious immorality of Walter White’s actions allows me to highlight the similarly immoral nature of Samson’s behaviour, which is often excused or justified within its sacred biblical setting. In other words, placing these texts in dialogue with each other offers potential for a richer and more critical reading of the Samson narratives, as well as shining new and interesting lights on the contemporary cultural figure of Walter White.

Samson as a ‘Liminal Hero’ Samson has traditionally been hailed as a heroic figure in the Bible, and the status he has been granted within his many post-biblical afterlives has only increased this reputation. Modern versions of the Samson story, such as Cecil DeMille’s 1949 movie Samson and Delilah, typically portray Samson as an iconic hero with flowing hair, rippling muscles, incredible strength, lion-wrestling skills and imposing military prowess. In the realm of biblical scholarship, Gregory Mobley has done extensive work on Samson’s status as a hero, arguing that ‘the Samson story draws on various elements of an Israelite heroic repertoire, and shares certain features in common with stories about Shamgar, Gideon, Jephthah, Saul, Jonathan, and David. Samson displays virtually every possible motif for the Israelite heroic tradition’.6 In addition, the story contains a ‘heroic tone and scale [that] is larger-than-life’.7 For Mobley, Samson is clearly portrayed as one of the greatest heroes in the Hebrew Bible, where his ‘strength, and implied mass, opens him to comparison with titanic deities, demons, and supermen’.8 His great feats of strength, including killing a lion with only his hands (Judg. 14.6), carrying the gates of Gaza away (16:3) and collapsing the temple of the Philistines (16:30), mark him as an extraordinary

6. Gregory Mobley, The Empty Men: The Heroic Tradition of Ancient Israel, 1st edn, The Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 205. 7. Gregory Mobley, Samson and the Liminal Hero in the Ancient Near East, LHBOTS 453 (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 2. 8. Mobley, The Empty Men, 174.

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character. Additionally, Mobley demonstrates that Samson does appear to embody some heroic characteristics by noting the ways that the Samson saga draws on the pattern of heroic tales found in other ancient literature. This encourages readers to identify with and root for Samson. First, Samson is marked by a special birth in Judges 13, where an angel appears to his barren mother and announces the birth of her son. Second, he pursues adventure and battle in foreign lands when he travels to Timnah (14.1, 5-9; 15.1-5), Ashkelon (14.19) and Gaza (16.1). Last, Samson returns to society when his body is taken home for burial in 16.31.9 Even as Samson displays these heroic attributes, he does not fit the pattern of the other Israelite judges who arise prior to him in the Judges narrative; he fails to fulfil the same duties as men like Gideon and Jephthah who exercised strong leadership, fought with an army for the good of the people rather than personally settling scores and delivered the people from their enemies.10 So, while Samson fits the model of ancient literary hero, both in terms of his narrative journey and his characterization, he fails with regard to completing all the tasks that a hero would normally be expected to do for his people. Thus, Samson becomes a complicated hero, never fully embodying his heroic status as readers might expect. Given Samson’s seeming failure to meet fully the criteria of ‘hero’, Mobley argues that Samson is a ‘liminal hero’, in that he is ‘defined by contradiction, alienation, and hybridity’.11 For Mobley, liminality represents the transitional and the marginal, which have become permanent conditions for Samson.12 Thus, Samson is constantly shifting between being a hero and failing as a hero. More specifically, I  see Samson as also shifting between righteous motivation and immoral, or unjustified, action. In this way, he occupies a morally ambiguous space where not all of his actions can be seen as deriving ‘from the LORD’ (14.4).13 In each of Samson’s three primary exploits – his marriage (Judges 14), his battle with the Philistines following his wife’s death (Judges 15) and his relationship with Delilah (Judges 16) – his motivations can be regarded as justifiable (as they serve to aid the Israelites in their battle against the Philistines), but his means of achieving those ends are anything but. In the first section of Samson’s story, the reader learns that he has been set apart as ‘a Nazarite to God from birth’ (13.5) and that ‘the LORD blessed him’ (13.24). An angelic messenger announces his birth and the spirit of the LORD stirs during Samson’s youth, leading the reader to anticipate that he will follow in the mode of other Israelite judges, such as Gideon and Jephthah, to righteously pursue Israel’s freedom. After all, the angel of the LORD has announced that Samson ‘shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines’ (13.5). Nevertheless, one of his first acts is to marry a Philistine woman (14.8), despite the Philistines being the

9. Mobley, Samson and the Liminal Hero, 12. 10. Ibid., 2. 11. Ibid., 28. 12. Ibid. 13. All biblical quotations are from the NRSV.

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enemy of his people. While the text tells us that ‘this act was from the LORD’ (14.4), it still upsets his parents and is likely to have been regarded as morally problematic by his fellow Israelites.14 Samson also exhibits morally problematic behaviour in response to losing a wager at his marriage feast. Samson proposes the wager to thirty young men attending the feast, offering them a riddle that he thinks cannot be solved. After his wife manipulates him into revealing the answer to this riddle, Samson takes revenge on the Philistines who had pressured her to betray him. In this encounter, Samson feels dishonoured, embodying the hegemonic ideal that men retain sole ownership of and sexual access to ‘their’ women; this is demonstrated by his complaint that the Philistines had ‘plowed with my heifer’ (14.18). This phrase carries sexual overtones, serving as a metaphor for adulterous sexual intercourse, and thus accentuates the nature and extent of Samson’s shame.15 His sense of dishonour leads him to respond by killing thirty Philistine men and using their cloaks as payment for the lost wager. Again, the text attempts to justify the slaughter by relating that ‘the spirit of the LORD rushed on him’ (14.19). Yet this action of Samson’s is difficult to justify as a reasonable response to his being tricked, or to his suspicions about his wife’s sexual infidelity (which, in fact, are unfounded). Lev. 20.10 decrees that the appropriate response for committing adultery with another man’s wife is that both the man the woman should be put to death. Even if Samson were to assume that thirty men had indeed ‘plowed with [his] heifer’, he should have killed these men, not thirty different men he just happens to encounter on his travels. Samson himself knows that he is not justified in killing these men, because the next time he seeks revenge he says to himself, ‘This time, when I do mischief, I will be without blame’ (15.3).16 These words appear to indicate that he admits his previous ‘mischief ’ was not justified. Thus, Samson begins his interactions with the Philistines in a way that establishes his reputation for carrying out unjust retribution against them. In the second of Samson’s adventures, narrated in Judges 15, Samson returns to his wife with sexual intentions (marked by the use of ‘abo’ah, ‘to go into’, in 15.1),17

14. J. Cheryl Exum, ‘Feminist Criticism: Whose Interests Are Being Served?’, in Judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, ed. Gale A. Yee, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 81. 15.  Ela Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska, ‘Samson: Masculinity Lost (and Regained?)’, in Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond, ed. Ovidiu Creangă, The Bible in the Modern World 33 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 175. Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska points to the heifer as ‘an immature cow, a virgin’ and references other ancient Mesopotamian literature that describes intercourse as plowing. 16.  The NRSV translation of ‘mischief ’ here also reveals the attempts at justifying Samson’s previous actions. The Hebrew word ra’ah is translated in other texts as ‘evil’, ‘wickedness’, ‘harm’ or ‘displeasure’. Yet the NRSV translation minimizes the unjustified violence of Samson’s behaviour. 17. Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska, ‘Samson: Masculinity Lost (and Regained?)’, 176.

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only to find that she has been given to ‘his companion, who had been his best man’ (14.20). Her father offers him his younger daughter, but this only further offends Samson’s honour; according to Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska, Samson ‘is now being cuckolded by one of the men who had beaten him at the challenge he himself set. Accepting the offer of the younger sister would symbolize Samson’s acceptance of his weakened position’.18 Samson takes personal revenge and destroys the Philistines’ ‘shocks and standing grain, as well as the vineyards and olive groves’ (15.6). The Philistines respond by burning and killing Samson’s wife and her father (15.6). As a result, he ‘struck them down hip and thigh with great slaughter’ (15.8). While Samson declares here that ‘[t]his time, when I  do mischief to the Philistines, I will be without blame’ (15.3), the community does not agree. Rather, the men of Judah are ready to hand Samson over to the Philistines to avoid more retribution for his unjustified actions. Samson initially lets the men of Judah bind him, so they can hand him over to Philistines, but then changes his mind, turning this attempt by the men of Judah to pacify the Philistines into an act of hostility, which results in him slaughtering a thousand men (15.11-15). The text again attempts to justify Samson’s actions by stating that ‘the spirit of the LORD came upon him’ (15.14), impelling him to commit this act of slaughter. After the battle, Samson calls on the LORD because he is thirsty, and God provides water for him, reviving his strength (15.19). The narrator then tells us that Samson ‘judged Israel in the days of the Philistines for twenty years’ (15.20). Despite his act of violence and vengeance against the Philistines, it would appear that Samson is still in favour with the LORD. Nevertheless, in contrast to the reciprocal justice articulated in the Hebrew Bible legal codes, a number of Samson’s responses appear irrational and fuelled more by vengeance than a thirst for justice.19 Particularly, the killing of one thousand Philistines (15.14) in retaliation for the murder of his wife and fatherin-law (15.6)  – whom the Philistines had killed to avenge Samson’s burning of their crops (15.5) – does not follow the lex talionis (eye for an eye) logic of biblical legal codes (e.g. Exod. 21.23-34; Lev. 24.19-20; Deut. 19.21). Indeed, the narrator explicitly tells us that Samson’s violence is driven by his desire for personal revenge; he tells the Philistines at the start of this narrative, ‘I will not stop until I have taken revenge on you’ (Judg. 15.7). In the third main narrative of the Samson saga (Judges 16), Samson again exhibits behaviour that is morally questionable when he kills countless Philistines by causing the collapse of their temple. After the Philistines finally capture him (16.21), they respond in much the same way as Samson had previously wreaked revenge upon them – through the use of excessive retribution. Once he has lost his strength (16.19), they gouge out his eyes, shackle him and put him to work grinding at the mill (16.21), thus humiliating him and prolonging his torment.

18. Ibid. 19. While it is impossible to know whether the author(s) of Judges had knowledge of this legal material and assembled this story with it in mind, the final form of the Hebrew Bible provides these intertextual possibilities that invite an ethical evaluation of Samson’s actions.

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Samson’s response is to kill as many Philistines as he can, only this time, he kills himself in the process, pushing down the supporting columns of the temple and collapsing the roof upon himself and the assembled Philistines. Just prior to his death, Samson once again calls upon the LORD to strengthen him, so that ‘with this one act of revenge I may pay back the Philistines for my two eyes’ (16.28). The LORD answers this call and provides Samson with strength for the task. But again, Samson’s logic of retribution is grossly out of proportion; rather than following the biblical retributive justice of an eye for an eye, he instead appears to consider his two eyes worthy of the deaths of over a thousand Philistines, as ‘those he killed at the death were more than those he had killed during his life’ (16.30). Thus, throughout Judges 13–16, Samson responds with escalating acts of violence against the Philistines. His actions are not based on a Hebrew biblical sense of reciprocal justice. Even though the text implies that these actions are sanctioned and blessed by the LORD, they always appear disproportionate to the situation. He responds with extreme violence whenever his hegemonic masculinity is threatened  – that is, when he perceives himself to have been dishonoured or shamed (14.18-19; 15.3-8), or when others attempt to curtail his masculine strength (15.11-15; 16.28-30). This, in turn, leaves his status as narrative hero open to question, and perhaps casts him more in the role of liminal hero, or antihero.

Walter White as an Antihero Some of the same morally ambiguous choices made by Samson in Judges 13–16 may also be discerned in the conflicted antiheroes occupying the screens of twenty-first-century American television dramas. According to Jason Landrum, these shows ‘all revolve around, in one way or another, this type of complicated masculinity, a complex mixture of hyper-masculine disregard for the law, family, and the public good’.20 This form of masculinity is represented by protagonists who are prototypically male, and who make choices that do not conform to the standards of moral behaviour dominant within their own contemporary context, but nevertheless gain the sympathy of the viewers despite their flaws. As Janina Rojek observes, ‘The viewer is on [the male antihero’s] side, despite their actions. This inversion of traditional notions of justice and morality makes the serials prime examples of transgressive television.’21 The transgressive nature of these television shows vividly comes to life in the character of Walter White. 20.  Jason Landrum, ‘Say My Name:  The Fantasy of Liberated Masculinity’, in The Methods of Breaking Bad: Essays on Narrative, Character and Ethics, ed. Jacob Blevins and Dafydd Wood (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015), 95. 21.  Janina Rojek, ‘Crime, Control, and (Medical) Condition:  The Illness Narratives of The Sopranos, Boss, and Breaking Bad as Boundary Transgression’, in Transgressive Television: Politics and Crime in 21st-Century American TV Series, ed. Birgit Däwes, Alexandra Ganser and Nicole Poppenhagen, American Studies 264 (Heidelberg:  Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015), 267.

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When the viewers first meet Walt22 he is a sympathetic figure, a middle-aged man in financial difficulties, teaching at a public school and working a second job to support his pregnant wife Skyler and their son Walt Jr., who has cerebral palsy. The pilot episode begins on Walt’s fiftieth birthday, which transpires as a disappointment at every turn. Walt is served vegetarian bacon rather than his traditional birthday breakfast and is mocked by students at his after-school job washing cars. Later, he is overshadowed at his own party by his brother-in-law Hank – a hyper-masculine Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent – and then goes to sleep next to his wife, who is more interested in her eBay sale than in having sex with him. Later in the episode, viewers learn that Walt has been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He appears to sacrifice his own needs for the needs of others, not wishing to burden anyone else with his problems. For instance, Walt bears the burden of his cancer alone for a number of weeks, not even sharing the news with his wife so that she does not worry about him, while continuing to work his second job despite the risks to his health. His sense of responsibility and morality, however, begins to shift in the weeks following his cancer diagnosis. He seeks financial security for his family by using his chemistry expertise to start the lucrative but dangerous task of cooking crystal methamphetamine, in partnership with a former student, Jesse Pinkman. It is this change in Walt – from mundane family man to illegal drug producer – that defines his antihero status. Breaking Bad is fundamentally about change, about the manner in which Walt becomes Walter – a person who is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his goals. According to series creator Vince Gilligan, ‘I thought it’d be interesting as an experiment to create a television show where a major point of the show was change  – to see a good man transform into a bad man.’23 In the pilot episode, Walt is in his chemistry classroom explaining to students that he prefers to view chemistry as the study of change. He gives them a visual representation of this change by spraying different chemicals into a fire and changing the colour of the flame. The scene ends with Walt framed behind the open flame, foreshadowing how he will change over the course of the series and how close he will venture to the danger of the fire. In the same way that Walt studies change in chemistry, the viewers are invited to study the changes in Walt and to see him transform over

22.  Walt is the name used in the beginning of the series by those who have known him, especially his brother-in-law Hank. But as the show progresses, characters like Gus Fring (the meth distributor who operates Los Pollos Hermanos) and Mike Ehrmentraut (Gus’s security coordinator and ‘muscle’), who know him only after he has become the drug kingpin, mostly address him as Walter. The shortened form of his name seems to serve as an emasculation of sorts, a lessening of his manhood and the power of his full name. For ease of readability and consistency, I refer to the character as Walt in descriptions of the show but will occasionally use Walter White in order to retain the full effect of the hegemonic masculinity that I feel the character embodies. 23. Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised, 390.

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the course of the series to become an undeniably immoral person, all the while rooting for him to succeed. Walt even manages to convince himself that all his actions are justifiable in order to provide for his family and himself. Early in the first season, in the episode ‘. . . And the Bag’s in the River’ (season 1, episode 3), he has to make the decision about whether or not to kill Krazy-8, a drug dealer who had been attempting to kill him and Jesse; he agonizes over the decision and makes a list of the pros and cons of killing Krazy-8, which suggests that he is at least trying to make a logical moral choice. Walt ultimately kills Krazy-8 in an act that can be interpreted as selfdefence, as the drug dealer seemed intent on killing Walt. As the series progresses, Walt remains just as calculating and logical, but the rationale for his decisions becomes less clearly justifiable. For example, in the season 3 finale, ‘Full Measure’ (season 3, episode 13), Walt realizes his life is in danger when he discovers that Gus Fring (the meth distributor for whom Walt is now cooking meth) is planning to kill him and replace him with Gale Boetticher. Walt recognizes that, in order for him to live, Gale will have to die. Despite Jesse’s pleading with Walt (‘For the sake of your family . . . don’t do this, please. Go to the cops’), Walt weighs his options and determines that Gale’s death is the only way that he will be able to continue cooking meth for Gus. Walt eventually manipulates Jesse into killing Gale, a task Jesse carries out with tears in his eyes. Here, Walt’s claim of self-defence becomes harder to justify, as Gale is not a direct threat to Walt’s life; moreover, Walt forces Jesse into committing an act that shatters Jesse’s psyche. Meanwhile, Gus has decided to kill Walt because Walt has proven himself to be unreliable after killing two drug dealers.24 But Walt is willing to go the ‘full measure’ in order to protect himself and his family.25 This family now clearly includes Jesse, whom Walt continues to protect even at the risk to his own life, despite everyone else seeing Jesse as a ‘worthless junkie’. Throughout season 4, Walt undergoes a change of character, morphing into an alter ego he creates for himself by the street name of Heisenberg.26 As Heisenberg, 24.  Again, nothing is clearly moral or immoral in this world. Walt kills the two drug dealers to save Jesse, who was seeking to kill the dealers in retaliation for the death of an 11-year-old boy, who in turn had shot Jesse’s friend Combo. The world and morality of Breaking Bad is very much like that of Samson: a mix of revenge and honour determine the actions that are perceived to be necessary. 25.  The phrases ‘full measure’ and ‘half measure’ come from the titles of the last two episodes of season 3 and are based on the story Mike tells of his days as a cop, when he chooses not to kill a man who is beating his wife. Mike ends his story with the following statement: ‘But two weeks later he killed her. Of course. Caved her head in with the base of a Waring blender. We got there, there was so much blood you could taste the metal. Moral of the story is I chose a half measure when I should have gone all the way. I’ll never make that mistake again. No more half measures, Walter.’ 26. Even the cover art for the Breaking Bad DVDs reveals this transformation. Season 4’s cover features a close-up of Walt, fully embracing his Heisenberg persona while menacingly staring down the camera. Two of the previous season covers feature longer shots, with

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he begins to make unambiguously immoral decisions. After having Jesse kill Gale, Walt sees himself as ‘the man’ among other lesser men, able to control situations and turn them to his favour. In ‘Cornered’ (season 4, episode 6), in what has become one of the iconic scenes of the series, Walt declares to his wife, ‘I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger! A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!’ These words betray that he has completed his transformation into Heisenberg and is now the one handing out judgement and retribution. Bryan Cranston, the actor who plays Walt, confirms this transformation. Discussing the closing scene of ‘Cornered’, he describes the way Walt is lying in the crawl space under his home, ‘framed through the access hatch like he’s a body in a casket’.27 According to Cranston, this scene confirms that ‘Walter White is dead, and Heisenberg rises from the ashes. And that’s basically what happens’.28 Indeed, over the last seasons of the show, Walt becomes a remorseless killer of anyone standing in the way of his goals. He bombs a nursing home, poisons women and children and executes his competition without so much as a twinge of conscience. As Alan Sepinwall notes, ‘No matter what heinous things Walt would do . . . for some viewers he remained the unquestionable hero of the piece, the guy they liked and rooted for no matter what.’29 Despite the fact that Walt has ‘clearly become a monster’, many viewers continue to ‘cheer’ for him, a fact that came as a surprise even to series creator Vince Gilligan.30 As the series nears its conclusion, Walt has indeed become a monster; even his own family cannot bear him any longer. Walt tries to tell Walt Jr. that he has done everything for the family, and Walt Jr. responds, ‘Just leave us alone, you asshole. Why are you still alive? Why don’t you just die already?’ (‘Ozymandias’, season 5, episode 14). Meanwhile, Skyler tells Walt, ‘All I can do is wait. That’s the only good option. Hold on. Bide my time and wait . . . for the cancer to come back’ (‘FiftyOne’ season 5, episode 4); she is waiting, even hoping, for his cancer to return, killing him so that she does not have to deal with him anymore. When Walt does die at the end of the series (‘Felina’, season 5, episode 16), he is able to do so on his terms, choosing to go into the compound where Jesse is being held prisoner, kill the men forcing Jesse to cook meth and set Jesse free. But even in this final liberative act, Jesse still sees the monster that Walt has become. Jesse refuses to kill Walt, telling him that if he wants to die, Walt will have to ‘Do it yourself ’. These are

desert landscapes in the background, and Jesse shares the cover with Walt on two of the seasons. Season 4’s cover, however, is all about Walt, zoomed in on his face, his anger and his ruthlessness. 27.  Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised, 398. During this scene, Walt is digging in the crawl space under his home, looking for the money he has saved from his drug operation. He discovers that it is missing, and then Skylar reveals that she has given the money to her boss Ted Beneke, with whom she has been having an affair. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 389. 30. Ibid.

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his final words to Walt. Jesse refuses to take the same path that Walt has taken, and Jesse’s final moments on screen are his laughter of joy at finally being free, both from his imprisonment and from Walt’s. Even though Walt’s death is on his own terms, it does little to redeem him in the eyes of those closest to him, who still see him as the evil man he has become.

Hegemonic Masculinity in the Hero Stories of Samson and Walter White In laying out the heroic tales of Walter White and Samson, I  have shown that the stories share a number of similarities. This connection between Samson and ‘adventure heroes’ in popular culture has been suggested by Mobley, who looks at hard-boiled detective novels and the fictional figure of James Bond as paradigmatic examples of the ways in which contemporary hyper-masculine heroes manage to avoid being domesticated and remain perpetually ‘savage, violent, [and] peripatetic’.31 Breaking Bad, while not a detective or spy story, takes this same thematic move as Walt follows a similar model, and, like Samson, lives a life marked by a willingness to enact savage violence, while rarely remaining settled at home. The connections between the Samson saga and Breaking Bad also exist in some of the structural and thematic components of the stories. For example, both stories end with their heroes making sacrifices so that their deaths may be liberating for others. And both characters are undone at various stages of their narratives by their own pride and carelessness. But one major unifying element stands above the rest:  their creators’ interest in maintaining a hegemonic masculinity for their heroes. As mentioned above, hegemonic masculinity is a performative set of behaviours, actions and attitudes that are culturally inscribed for men to follow. These behaviours are culturally constructed, and whatever behaviours are normative in a given society constitute a hegemonic masculinity in that time and place.32 The stories of Samson in Judges 13–16 and Walter White in Breaking Bad reflect this hegemonic ideal, in part because they are told from an androcentric

31. Mobley, Samson and the Liminal Hero, 111. 32.  Connell, Masculinities, 77–86. Timothy Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, Theory and Society 14, no. 5 (1985): 551–604, also address the ways in which masculinity is socially constructed. Stephen Whitehead, Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002), 94, gives a helpful overview of the development of the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ as a ‘useful shorthand descriptor of dominant masculinities’, and also cautions that ‘its overuse results in obfuscation, in the conflation of fluid masculinities with overarching structure’ (ibid., 94). I  am using the term descriptively here to emphasize the fluidity of masculinity, in the sense that it can morph from the context of Samson to the world of Breaking Bad.

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perspective, one where a man’s world is central, and concerns about the preservation of a certain type of masculinity is paramount. Their characters, as conflicted antiheroes, represent the moral problems within hegemonic masculinity. The creators of both stories use notions of hegemonic masculinity in their attempts to justify the actions of the characters and invite us, as readers and viewers, to identify with and root for their heroes. Both Samson and Walter White can be read as responding to threats against hegemonic masculinity; the story of Samson may be understood as a morality tale, cautioning Israelite men against the influence of women in general, and foreign women in particular,33 while Breaking Bad focuses on the threatened state of masculinity in twenty-first-century America. I suggest that, in response to this threat against hegemonic masculinity, both Samson and Walter White respond with violence and murder to reassert their masculine dominance and their corresponding place of authority in their worlds. Through an analysis of biblical hegemonic masculinity and the dominant understanding of masculinity in contemporary American culture, it is possible to see how both heroes are tied to their respective hegemonic masculinities. With regard to biblical hegemonic masculinity, Susan Haddox names four specific attributes of masculinity found in the Hebrew Bible, criteria which characterize Samson well: ‘displaying sexual potency’, ‘wisdom and persuasiveness’, ‘maintaining one’s honor’ and not wanting to be ‘seen as feminine’.34 Samson fulfils these four attributes throughout his story. His sexual potency does not manifest itself in bearing children, but his sexual conquests of some of the women in the story show his potency and sexual agency. And, while Samson at times lacks wisdom and persuasiveness (especially in his decisions with women; see 14.17; 16.17), he does manage to convince his parents that his marriage to the Philistine woman should go ahead (14.1-10) and ultimately judges Israel for at least twenty years (15.20). Moreover, Samson seeks retribution and regains his honour when it is violated, especially during the debacle around his Timnite wife. As noted above, Samson believes that his wife’s sexual purity has been violated and he feels cheated by the Philistines’ underhand method of besting him at his wager. Samson thus enacts vengeance against the Philistines in order to regain his sense of honour. The issue of Samson’s honour is also linked to Haddox’s fourth category of hegemonic masculinity: a reluctance on the man’s part to be regarded as ‘feminine’. In this final category, Samson’s efforts to maintain his masculinity are not as successful after his encounter with Delilah. Ken Stone argues that ‘biblical thought and language has been shaped decisively by ancient constructs of “male” and “female”. Such constructs include quite rigid notions of “proper” sexual behaviour

33.  Exum, ‘Feminist Criticism’, 65–89; Susanne Scholz, ‘Judges’, in Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, 3rd edn (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 113–27. 34.  Susan Haddox, ‘Favoured Sons and Subordinate Masculinities’, in Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond, ed. Ovidiu Creangă, The Bible in the Modern World 33 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 4–6.

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for members of each gendered class’.35 This includes the masculine active role of ‘going in’ during a sexual encounter, a role Samson fulfils in Judg. 16.1 when he visits the prostitute in Gaza. With Delilah, however, he gives up his dominant and active role, allowing Delilah to bind him (16.8, 12).36 Thus, as J. Cheryl Exum notes, ‘the story expresses the male’s fear of surrendering to a women . . . surrender is both attractive and dangerous – too dangerous, according to our story, since it threatens a man’s distinctness as male and thus his superior status . . . The man who surrenders is emasculated; he loses his potency’.37 Moreover, after he is captured by the Philistines, Samson is set to work grinding grain (16.21), a task associated with women’s work; this again challenges his masculine role, bringing him a loss of honour.38 He is, however, able to regain both his masculinity and his honour in his final act of collapsing the Philistines’ temple upon himself and a great many Philistines (16.30). As Suzanne Scholz notes, ‘Social stereotypes about masculinity emphasize physical strength, size, initiative, male agency, and aggression as superior male characteristics.’39 Thus by demonstrating these characteristics when he kills those who have attempted to denude him of his masculinity, Samson recaptures his masculinity and becomes ‘in his own way a caricature of hypermasculinity’.40 In the end, readers may evaluate Samson as an epitome of masculinity in the Hebrew Bible. And the primary method by which he maintains this masculine status is through the use of violence. As Scholz further notes, ‘In short, Samson’s masculinity is relentless, violent, and divinely endorsed . . . his virility and masculine aggression seek destruction rather than coexistence, and his attitude finds approval.’41 The text relates that Samson kills thirty men after losing a bet (14.19), destroys the Philistines’ grain, vineyards and olive groves (15.5), slaughters the men who have killed his wife and father-in-law (15.8), slaughters a thousand men after being handed over the Philistines (15.15) and then makes the ultimate sacrifice of killing himself in order to destroy even more people than ever before

35.  Ken Stone, ‘The Hermeneutics of Abomination:  On Gay Men, Canaanites, and Biblical Interpretation’, BTB 27, no. 2 (1997): 40. 36.  Lori Rowlett, ‘Violent Femmes and S/M: Queering Samson and Delilah’, in Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, ed. Ken Stone, JSOTSupp 334 (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2001), 106–15. Rowlett points out the power dynamics and role reversals represented by the bondage game that takes place in the Samson and Delilah story. 37. Exum, ‘Feminist Criticism’, 80. 38.  Lazarewicz-Wryzykowska also posits that the blinding of Samson may be a euphemism for castration, which would further distance him from a masculine identity. She argues that Samson may have been castrated as a way of controlling him, like cattle, because ‘fettered animals were castrated to make them less aggressive and more easily manageable’ (‘Samson’, 180). 39. Scholz, ‘Judges’, 122. 40. Mobley, The Empty Men, 174. 41. Scholz, ‘Judges’, 122.

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(16.30). And despite the questionable choices that he makes along the way, he tends to be remembered positively at the end of this narrative, maintaining his status as a hero, however immoral his actions were and however flawed a character he was. Similarly, Walter White uses violence to maintain a hold on his own masculinity. In evaluating the perspectives on masculinity in Breaking Bad, Brian Cowlishaw names five actions associated with what it means to be a ‘real man’ within this series: [A] man provides for his family . . . a man possesses (and, if possible, flaunts) visible physical strength . . . a man stays ready to wreak violence at any time, especially for the purpose of protecting his family . . . a man shows no weakness and brooks no challenge to his manhood . . . [and he keeps] control not only over his own life, but over the lives of others.42

While the categories for hegemonic masculinity here do not perfectly match Haddox’s own categories of hegemonic masculinity in the Hebrew Bible, there is much overlap, and the specific addition of physical violence illuminates an aspect lacking in Haddox’s analysis.43 Walter White manages to fulfil these categories well. When the viewers first meet Walt, however, he is anything but the masculine ideal. He is bullied by his students, his boss and especially his wife. His brotherin-law, Hank, spends Walt’s birthday party ‘busting his chops’ and mocking his lack of masculinity. But the Walt we encounter at the end of the series has changed dramatically. He has overcome his physical limitations by beating cancer and is no longer mocked by Hank after having outsmarted him; now he is the one in charge. Walt is more ruthless and is willing to do whatever it takes to maintain his status as the alpha male. Thus, according to Brian Faucette, Breaking Bad is playing on the fears of male angst that America has been dealing with since the late 1960s [which] has resulted in the feeling within men that they are no longer in control – not of their homes or even themselves . . . [F]or men like Walter . . . to restore their authority they must embrace older models of masculinity based on violence, intimidation, and control in order to re-masculinize themselves and

42.  Brian Cowlishaw, ‘Intellectual Men: Masculinity Versus Intelligence’, in Masculinity in Breaking Bad:  Critical Perspectives, ed. Bridget Roussell Cowlishaw (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015), 64–65. 43. Other assessments of hegemonic masculinity do include violence as a criteria, most notably David Clines’s discussion of ‘David the Man’, which includes the category ‘the fighting male’. However, Clines’s analysis is limited to David and also includes categories such as ‘the musical male’ that seem less helpful in my discussion of Samson. See David J. A. Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible, JSOTSupp 205 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 212–41.

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their lives during periods where ‘traditional’ modes of masculinity seemed to be under assault.44

These traditional modes of masculinity allude to a time when men were indisputably in charge of the home, when men ‘wore the pants’. In the opening scene of the series’ pilot episode, the viewers see a pair of khaki pants floating through the air; the audience is left uncertain to whom these belong, but, as Jason Landrum notes, ‘the imagery is unmistakable. From the beginning of the series, Breaking Bad has concerned itself with questions about who wears the pants’.45 Indeed, this theme is used throughout the show, most notably in exchanges between Walt and Jesse. In season 1, after Skyler confronts Jesse about selling weed to Walt, Jesse mocks him saying, ‘Good job wearing the pants in the family’ (‘Cat’s in the Bag . . .’, season 1, episode 2). Walt later reverses the insult when he gives Jesse’s share of the money from the sale of meth to Jesse and his girlfriend Jane, repeating the insult, ‘Good job wearing the pants!’, in an effort to shame Jesse into abandoning Jane’s blackmail plan (‘Phoenix’, season 2, episode 12). These exchanges form part of a wider theme of gendered insults running throughout the show, from Jesse’s tagging ‘bitch’ onto many of his sentences, to Hank’s macho routines questioning the manhood of everyone around him; together, they reveal the masculine logic of the series, suggesting that ‘locker room talk’ is part of what it means to be a ‘real’ man.46 This performance of masculinity can be seen most clearly in the changes in Walt. As Stephanie Stringer Gross notes, ‘Before his transformation into Heisenberg, Walt seems patient, attentive and kind. He seems to have chosen, for the most part,

44.  Brian Faucette, ‘Taking Control: Male Angst and the Re-emergence of Hegemonic Masculinity in Breaking Bad’, in Breaking Bad:  Critical Essays on the Contexts, Politics, Style, and Reception of the Television Series, ed. David Pierson (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), 73–74. 45. Landrum, ‘Say My Name’, 94. 46.  Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised, 407. Sepinwall notes that Walt’s most performative masculinity, which comes in his phone call to Skyler as he begins his life on the run, was in part inspired by real-life online commentary about Skyler’s role as an antagonist to Walt. While Walt is clearly attempting to remove any suspicion about Skyler’s guilt rather than saying what he believes, he does believe some of the things he says in his rant, including that Skyler is a ‘stupid bitch’. The online backlash against Skyler shows that this type of language (epitomized by Donald Trump’s defence of ‘locker room talk’ during his presidential campaign) is a strong part of the culture of masculinity in America. Anna Gunn, who played Skylar, wrote an op-ed about the online backlash, detailing comments about her character as an ‘annoying bitch wife’, and a ‘shrieking, hypocritical harpy’. The online commentary went so far as to direct anger not at the character Skyler but at Gunn herself, with one post asking, ‘Could somebody tell me where I can find Anna Gunn so I can kill her?’ See Anna Gunn, ‘Opinion: I Have a Character Issue’, New York Times, 23 August 2013, available online https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/opinion/i-have-acharacter-issue.html (accessed 10 April 2018).

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to operate outside the hegemonic norms of macho, Machiavellian masculinity.’47 But after becoming Heisenberg, he begins to perform characteristics of macho hegemonic masculinity, seen in a number of scenes, from Walt’s pronouncement that he is ‘the danger’ and ‘the one who knocks’ in ‘Cornered’ (season 4, episode 6), to his killing of Mike Ehrmantraut, former police officer and security coordinator for Gus (‘Say My Name’, season 5, episode 7). According to Rojek, ‘In the course of five seasons, he gradually assumes the identity of his alter ego Heisenberg, who takes control, is ruthless and calculating, and represents a somewhat twisted hyper-masculinity run amok.’48 The show itself identifies this change in Walt when Gretchen, a friend who knew him long before the events related in the series, is asked if Walter White still exists. She replies, ‘I can’t speak to this Heisenberg that people refer to, but whatever [Walter White] became, the sweet, kind, and brilliant man that we once knew long ago, he’s gone’ (‘Granite State’, season 5, episode 15). This hyper-masculinity run amok, a masculinity that mirrors what can be seen in the story of Samson, is successful for Walt. While he is asserting himself in his new-found aggressive and violent role outside the house, he finds great success and is able to gain wealth, prestige and a mythical status that surrounds his Heisenberg persona. Meanwhile, when he wants to ‘get his house in order’, he takes on a more domestic, even feminized role, whether cooking breakfast or taking Walt Jr. out to practise his driving. But these more traditionally feminized attempts at winning over Skyler ultimately fail, as she recognizes his attempts as ‘obvious’ and ‘desperate’ (‘Down’, season 2, episode 4). By contrast, when Walt begins to assume his Heisenberg alter-ego, he takes more initiative with Skyler sexually, which she responds to positively. After he fondles her leg during a school meeting and they subsequently have sex in the car, she asks, ‘Where did that come from, and why was it so damn good?’ (‘A No-Rough-Stuff-Type-Deal’, season 1, episode 7). Again, the masculine logic of the show, as in the story of Samson, offers up the rhetoric that women enjoy sexually aggressive men. In addition, just as some interpretations of Judges read the text as a warning against the emasculating potential of assertive and independent women like Delilah,49 so too does Breaking Bad. This fear of assertive women can be seen when Walt’s masculinity is most directly threatened by Skyler’s admission that she ‘fucked Ted’ (‘I.F.T.’, season 3, episode 3); she uses her infidelity with her boss, Ted Beneke, as a means of asserting her control over Walt, making him leave her

47. Stephanie Stringer Gross, ‘Machiavellian Men: How Walter White Learns “Not to Be Good” ’, in Masculinity in Breaking Bad: Critical Perspectives, ed. Bridget Roussell Cowlishaw (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015), 122–23. 48. Rojek, ‘Crime, Control, and (Medical) Condition’, 283. 49.  Although the text never identifies her as a prostitute or a Philistine, this is often the image of Delilah presented in popular culture. See J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, 2nd revised edn (Sheffield:  Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012), 209−75, for a thorough exploration of Delilah’s cultural afterlives.

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and grant her a divorce.50 Walt responds by dropping any attempts at sustaining a domestic life, and instead brings his hyper-masculinity into full view for Skyler. This comes though most clearly in his infamous declaration to Skyler, mentioned above, which makes clear to her that he is now in charge  – he is ‘the danger’ (‘Cornered’, season 4, episode 6). Skyler’s assertion of her independence through her affair with Ted ultimately leads to Walt’s transformation into Heisenberg. After she reveals that she has given Walt’s money to Ted, we see Walt lying in the crawl space under his house, framed as though he were lying in a coffin (‘Crawl Space’, season 4, episode 11). Realizing that he must earn back the money his wife has given away and regain his control over his family, Walt takes the final step to leave ‘Walt’ behind and embrace his hyper-masculine alter ego. Flashbacks to an earlier version of Walt, however, reveal that his Heisenberg persona was never that far from the surface: whether he is flirting with Gretchen while working with complicated formulas (‘There’s nothing but chemistry here’; ‘. . . And the Bag’s in the River’, season 1, episode 3), or walking through the house as a prospective buyer asking Skyler, ‘Why be cautious? We’ve got nowhere to go but up’ (‘Full Measure’, season 3, episode 13), Walt exudes an aura of hegemonic masculinity. It is only the intervening years that have pushed this form of masculinity underground. When his cancer diagnosis gives him nothing to lose, his (hyper)masculinity resurfaces, with no inhibitions. Walt begins to perform this hyper-masculinity perfectly, showing himself to be just as violent and ruthless as any other man. Yet for all of Walt’s performances of hegemonic masculinity, he is unable to sustain these performances in the end. In what Gilligan considers to be the series’ finest hour, the episode ‘Ozymandias’ (season 5, episode 14) leaves Walt a broken man. He loses his family and friends, most of his money and even his own identity as Walter White. The final scene of the episode has Walt leaving town alone, about to assume a new identity on the run. His situation is reflected in the opening shot of the scene, near the end of the episode, when he leaves his daughter Holly at a fire station; the scene opens with a shot of a chessboard, the viewer positioned behind a king looking out from the corner with only a few moves left; this serves as a metaphor for the current state of Walt’s life.51

Questioning the Validity of Violence In the episode ‘Ozymandias’, Breaking Bad is at its most honest about where the violence of hyper-masculinity leads. Walt has spent the entire series attempting

50.  Note that she delivers this line while Walt is preparing dinner for the family and a guest, so that he is cuckolded by her while he is performing a traditionally feminine role. This moment when Skyler reveals that she has slept with her boss Ted is so significant that Gilligan titled the episode ‘I.F.T.’ – ‘I fucked Ted’. 51.  This scene becomes even more telling given that the tagline on the season 5 promotional poster and DVD cover reads, ‘All Hail the King’.

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to convince himself and everyone around him that he was justified in his actions because he was acting for the good of his family. But now, at last, he recognizes that this is not true, and finally realizes what he has lost. He arrives home to convince his family to run away and start a new life with him. But they cannot accept him; Skyler even stabs him with a knife while Walt Jr. attempts to protect his mother in the ensuing struggle. TV critic Alan Sepinwall describes the aftermath of that scene with an emphasis on the shift that we see taking place: ‘As Walt stares at his terrified wife and son, he bellows “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?! WE’RE A FAMILY!!!” He then pauses for seven seconds that feel like an eternity, before repeating, in a defeated whisper, “We’re a family”.’52 At this moment, Walt realizes that everything he has been working for, every justification that he has given himself and others, is a lie: Those seven seconds [between the two spoken lines] . . . are every illusion Walter White has ever had about himself being shattered. They are the terrified faces of his wife as they huddle together on the floor, trying to wish him into the cornfield. They are all the bogus self-rationalizations he has told himself and others being dipped into acid until they are no longer identifiable by forensic science. They are Walter White finally, after so much time and so much sin, coming to terms with everything he has lost – everything he has caused himself to lose, through one terrible choice after another.53

Nevertheless, this is not the finale of Breaking Bad. There are still two episodes remaining, and these final two episodes cast a much more positive light on Walt by allowing him some redemption. He provides a way for his family to receive his money, frees Jesse from prison and performs the ultimate act of heroism by giving his life to save Jesse from his captors. He also has the chance to make amends with Skyler, when, in one of his truly honest moments in the series, he tells her, ‘I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was . . . really . . . I was alive’ (‘Felina’, season 5, episode 16). This moment didactically affirms what was implicit at the end of ‘Ozymandias’, as Walt reveals how empty his pursuit of the hegemonic masculine ideal has been. But that is not how the series ends. Rather, the viewers are left with the image of Walt in a meth lab, at peace with himself, with the lyrics, ‘I guess I got what I deserved’ playing in the background. Here, there is little evidence of the devastation that Walt brought to those around him.54 By allowing Walt one last opportunity to strut around the screen for the final episode in his Heisenberg persona, Breaking Bad ultimately affirms and implicitly justifies Walt’s violent and hyper-masculine methods by giving him a hero’s ending.

52. Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised, 405–406. 53. Ibid., 406. 54.  Ibid., 415. Sepinwall makes this note on the relatively positive ending to the series:  ‘Others (including me on some days) might have preferred that the series ended with “Ozymandias” or “Granite State”, rather than letting Walt have one last victory, even

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The book of Judges also justifies and affirms Samson’s hyper-masculinity, particularly his violence against the Philistines, by giving him a hero’s ending. Yet, despite the text’s pronouncement that Samson is ordained by the angel to ‘begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines’ (13.5) and the narrator’s repeated reassurances that God lies behind a number of Samson’s violent responses (14.6, 14; 15.14-15), it is possible to argue that Samson’s behaviours might not be so justified. Rather, his actions can be read as serving the political interests of the author(s) or editor(s) of these narratives. As Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska suggests: If we look at the notion of God in this narrative as the projection of the author’s/ editor’s ideological agenda, it becomes evident that Samson’s actions in defence of his honour are here employed in the framework of the ideology of war. Not only do they defend the collective honour, but they also serve the purpose of killing large numbers of national enemies . . . the text’s message to an Israelite man is not only ‘do not trust women!’, but also, ‘It is all right to be violent and kill in defence of your masculine honour. And when you do that, you might actually be fulfilling God’s plan.’55

In this reading, Samson’s actions can be seen for what they are: acts of revenge with a thinly veiled justification for the violent and unwarranted deaths of Israel’s enemies. This is the moral space inhabited by the ‘liminal hero’ that Mobley sees in Samson, where the actions are not so clearly categorized as moral, despite the results that the text presents as positive and good. The Israelite community views the destruction of the Philistines as a good thing, as the text desires that Samson ‘begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines’. But the text also acknowledges that Samson’s motives are still primarily based on his desire for revenge, not on receiving a command from the LORD (15.7; 16.28). While the actions are explicitly affirmed in the text by Samson’s connection to the LORD (13.5; 14.19; 15.18; 16.17, 28), there is still ambivalence about the character of Samson himself and the morality of his actions. The men of Judah are willing to hand Samson over the Philistines (15.12), and Samson often exists on the margins of society, even living for a time in the cleft of a rock (15.8). In the end, Samson dies a heroic death, so that his return to the community of Israel is not as a member of that community, but as a hero to be buried.56 Might the narrative here be recognizing the limits of affirming one who commits such violence in order to avenge oneself (rather than the community), as Samson has done?

a pyrrhic one’. Compare the ending of Breaking Bad with The Shield, where antihero Vic Mackey is all alone in abject misery, or The Sopranos, which ends with the question of whether Tony Soprano is executed in front of his family; at least Walt receives an affirming final victory. 55. Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska, ‘Samson: Masculinity Lost (and Regained?)’, 183. 56. Ibid., 183–84.

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Just as Walt finally admits to Skyler that his actions have been self-serving all along, is the narrator of Judges finally having that same moment of clarity, where there is an implicit judgement of the immorality of Samson as an antihero? Walt’s delusions about his own motivations fall away in the end, as perhaps do the narrator’s attempts to fully justify Samson’s actions.

Conclusion: An Alternative to Violence By reading the story of Samson alongside Breaking Bad, it is possible to recognize the shortcomings of a traditional understanding of masculinity that is based on violence and retribution. Breaking Bad clearly dramatizes the damage done by following the logic of hegemonic masculinity to its end – it results in a cycle of retribution, leaving everyone empty and disillusioned. A  reading of Judges that recognizes Samson as an antihero reveals the Hebrew Bible’s efforts to justify the rhetoric of violence against other people. Looking back to Breaking Bad, perhaps Walt’s partner-in-crime Jesse has a better understanding of masculinity, as a man who has rarely been comfortable with the hegemonic masculinity and violence that surrounds him. He is a man who all along has been resistant to the violence forced upon him, crying when he is forced to kill Gale. He has always had a soft spot for children, based on his interactions with them throughout the series. He never acclimates to what is happening around him to the extent that Walt does. Jesse’s final act before walking away is to throw down the gun and refuse to kill Walt. Jesse breaks the cycle of retribution, and in this way, is truly a hero. Perhaps Samson might have done well to find a similar way forward in his dealings with the Philistines in order to find a more restorative, less violent response, throughout his time as judge over the Israelites.

Bibliography Carrigan, Timothy, Bob Connell and John Lee. ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’. Theory and Society 14, no. 5 (1985): 551–604. Clines, David J. A. Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible. JSOTSupp 205. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Cowlishaw, Brian. ‘Intellectual Men: Masculinity Versus Intelligence’. In Cowlishaw, Masculinity in Breaking Bad, 63–87. Cowlishaw, Bridget Roussell, ed. Masculinity in Breaking Bad: Critical Perspectives. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015. Creangă, Ovidiu, ed. Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond. The Bible in the Modern World 33. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010. Damico, Amy M., and Sara E. Quay. 21st-Century TV Dramas: Exploring the New Golden Age. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016.

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Exum, J. Cheryl. ‘Feminist Criticism: Whose Interests Are Being Served?’ In Judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, edited by Gale A. Yee, 65–89. 2nd edn. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Exum, J. Cheryl. Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women. 2nd revised edn. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012. Faucette, Brian. ‘Taking Control: Male Angst and the Re-emergence of Hegemonic Masculinity in Breaking Bad’. In Breaking Bad: Critical Essays on the Contexts, Politics, Style, and Reception of the Television Series, edited by David Pierson, 73–86. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Gross, Stephanie Stringer. ‘Machiavellian Men: How Walter White Learns “Not to Be Good” ’. In Cowlishaw, Masculinity in Breaking Bad, 110–32. Gunn, Anna. ‘Opinion: I Have a Character Issue’. New York Times, 23 August 2013. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/opinion/i-have-a-characterissue.html (accessed 10 April 2018). Haddox, Susan. ‘Favoured Sons and Subordinate Masculinities’. In Creangă, Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond, 2–19. Landrum, Jason. ‘Say My Name: The Fantasy of Liberated Masculinity’. In The Methods of Breaking Bad: Essays on Narrative, Character and Ethics, edited by Jacob Blevins and Dafydd Wood, 94–108. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015. Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska, Ela. ‘Samson: Masculinity Lost (and Regained?)’. In Creangă, Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond, 171–88. Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. New York: Penguin, 2013. Mobley, Gregory. The Empty Men: The Heroic Tradition of Ancient Israel. 1st edn. The Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York: Doubleday, 2005. Mobley, Gregory. Samson and the Liminal Hero in the Ancient Near East. LHBOTS 453. New York: T&T Clark, 2006. Rojek, Janina. ‘Crime, Control, and (Medical) Condition: The Illness Narratives of The Sopranos, Boss, and Breaking Bad as Boundary Transgression’. In Transgressive Television: Politics and Crime in 21st-Century American TV Series, edited by Birgit Däwes, Alexandra Ganser and Nicole Poppenhagen, 267–86. American Studies 264. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015. Rowlett, Lori. ‘Violent Femmes and S/M: Queering Samson and Delilah’. In Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, edited by Ken Stone, 106–15. JSOTSupp 334. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2001. Scholz, Susanne. ‘Judges’. In Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, 113–27. 3rd edn. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012. Sepinwall, Alan. The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Stone, Ken. ‘The Hermeneutics of Abomination: On Gay Men, Canaanites, and Biblical Interpretation’. BTB 27, no. 2 (1997): 36–41. Whitehead, Stephen. Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002.

Chapter 7 ‘ L O N G I S T H E W AY A N D H A R D, T HAT O U T O F H E L L L E A D S U P T O L IG H T ’ :   S E R IA L M U R D E R A S H OM I LY I N S E 7 E N James C. Oleson

That this chapter exists – that I wrote it, that you are reading it – is itself a vindication of John Doe’s vision. Near the conclusion of David Fincher’s 1995 neo-noir police procedural Se7en, John Doe, an enigmatic serial murderer, assures the two detectives who have captured him that who he is does not matter, but that what he has done is extraordinary. He prophesies: ‘You can’t see the whole complete act yet, but when this is done  – when it’s finished  – it’s going to be so  – flawless. People will barely comprehend, but they won’t be able to deny. What I’ve done is going to be puzzled over. And studied. And followed. Forever.’1 Doe was correct. For twenty years now, scholars have wrestled with his puzzle. They have studied Se7en. And that Doe was right about this bodes badly for the rest of us. Our society celebrates serial killers as celebrities.2 The A-list of killers is filled with household names: virtually everyone has heard of Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Unabomber. Many people can name more serial killers than Nobel laureates.3 Even the B-list, murderers who do not command the same level of brand recognition, are merchandized through serial killer trading cards, comic books and action figures. Serial killers attract hybristophiliac groupies and fan clubs. A flourishing market for murderabilia exists4: in 2012, Bonnie and

1.  Andrew Kevin Walker, Seven, film script, 1994, available online http://www. dailyscript.com/scripts/seven_production.html (accessed 11 January 2018). All quotations from the film are drawn from this source. 2. David Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 3. J. C. Oleson, ‘King of Killers: The Criminological Theories of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Part One’, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 12, no. 3 (2005): 188. 4.  Steven F. Scouller, Murderabilia and True Crime Collecting (Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2010).

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Clyde’s two handguns sold for $504,000.5 In fiction, both literary and cinematic, our fascination with the serial killer runs amok. Dr Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter was selected as the American Film Institute’s number one screen villain of all time.6 Dexter Morgan, star of the Dexter franchise, however, rivals Lecter for notoriety, and John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer transformed Saw into the most successful horror franchise in the world. There are even Saw theme park rides.7 Lecter, Dexter and Jigsaw – film’s most famous serial killers – share common characteristics.8 All are organized killers  – intelligent, socially competent and geographically mobile – who kill their victims with foresight and control.9 They are also mission-oriented killers, killing because they feel compelled to eliminate a certain class of person from the world.10 Lecter kills the rude; Dexter, other killers; and Jigsaw, those who lack sufficient will to survive. Amid this pantheon of mission-oriented vigilantes belongs Jonathan Doe, the antagonist from the 1995 movie Se7en, written by Andrew Kevin Walker (who also wrote the screenplay for 8MM) and directed by David Fincher (who went on to direct Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl). Distilled down to a single sentence, the plot of Se7en nearly flunks the laugh test:  two detectives  – one, an impulsive cop, new to the precinct; the other, a jaded veteran, one week from retirement  – must overcome their differences in order to capture the brilliant serial killer who will kill seven victims in seven days, corresponding to the seven deadly sins. It sounds like a Die Hard instalment or another Lethal Weapon sequel (e.g. in Lethal Weapon 3, Danny Glover’s Roger Murtaugh is eight days from retirement). Some involved in the film’s production wanted it to be a buddy film. The film’s producer complained that Se7en, as made, had taken ‘a perfectly good genre movie and turned it into a foreign film’.11 Other

5.  Nick Carbone, ‘What a Steal:  Bonnie and Clyde’s Guns Sell for $504,000 at Auction’, newsfeed.time.com, 1 October 2012, available online http://newsfeed.time. com/2012/10/01/what-a-steal-bonnie-and-clydes-guns-sell-for-504000-at-auction/ (accessed 10 January 2018). 6.  American Film Institute, AFI’s 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains, available online http://www.afi.com/100years/handv.aspx (accessed 4 March 2018). 7.  J. C. Oleson and Tamara Mackinnon, ‘Seeing Saw through the Criminological Lens:  Popular Representations of Crime and Punishment’, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law and Society 16, no. 1 (2015): 36. 8.  J. C. Oleson, ‘Dissecting the Serial Killer:  Toward a Typology of Serial Homicide’, in Crime Types: A Text Reader, ed. Dean A. Dabney, 2nd edn (Belmont, CA:  Wadsworth, 2013), 57–69. 9.  Robert K. Ressler et  al., ‘Sexual Killers and Their Victims:  Identifying Patterns through Crime Scene Analysis’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 1 (1986): 288–308. 10. Ronald M. Holmes and James E. DeBurger, ‘Profiles in Terror: The Serial Murderer’, Federal Probation 49, no. 3 (1985): 29–34. 11.  Cited in Valerie Allen, ‘Se7en: Medieval Justice, Modern Justice’, Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 6 (2010): 1169.

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critics dismissed Se7en as a gimmicky imitation of Oscar-winner The Silence of the Lambs, compensating for a lack of substance with David Fincher’s slick musicvideo direction and Darius Khondji’s atmospheric re-silvered cinematography.12 Janet Maslin savaged the film for its reliance on darkness and graphic visuals.13 But these critics saw only the surface of Se7en, and failed to recognize the serious religious and philosophical challenges that sound deep within the film. On the surface, Se7en unfolds as a traditional police procedural that traces the seven moral (‘deadly’) sins of the Catholic Church: envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth and wrath.14 The investigation commences on Monday when Detectives Somerset and Mills first respond to the death of an obese shut-in who, bound and held at gunpoint, has literally eaten himself to death. An autopsy produces small slivers of tile from the victim’s stomach, allowing Somerset to discover the word ‘gluttony’ written in grease behind the victim’s refrigerator, along with a handwritten quote from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (‘Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light’).15 For . . . the glutton shall come to poverty. (Prov. 23.21)16

The second victim, defence lawyer Eli Gould, dies on Tuesday while attempting to excise a pound of flesh, Merchant of Venice style, from his own abdomen. The word “greed” is written in blood on the floor beside his body. Beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. (Lk. 12.15)

12.  See, for example, Owen Gleiberman, ‘Seven’, Entertainment Weekly, 29 September 1995, available online http://www.ew.com/article/1995/09/29/seven (accessed 10 January 2018); Edward Guthmann, ‘ “Seven’s” Lurid Monster Mash/Psycho Killer a Nod to Hannibal Lecter’, San Francisco Chronicle, 22 September 1995, available online http://www.sfgate. com/entertainment/article/Seven-s-Lurid-Monster-Mash-Psycho-killer-a-3023907.php (accessed 11 January 2018). 13.  Janet Maslin, ‘A Sickening Catalog of Sins, Every One of Them Deadly’, New York Times, 22 September 1995, available online http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=99 0CE1D81F3AF931A1575AC0A963958260 (accessed 11 January 2018). 14.  See Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II (Vatican City:  Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), ¶1866, available online http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_P6D.HTM (accessed 11 April 2018). 15.  John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. J. Leonard (New York:  Penguin, [1667] 2003), book 2, lines 432–3. 16. All quoted Bible passages draw upon the King James Version, using the Bible Society’s online materials. Available online https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/explore-the-bible/read/ eng/KJV/Prov/23/ (accessed 4 March 2018).

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After Somerset and Mills discover a message made of fingerprints (‘help me’) behind a painting in Gould’s office, police on Wednesday trace the fingerprints and then raid the apartment of drug dealer and pederast Theodore ‘Victor’ Allen. Allen, the third victim, is strapped to the bed, emaciated beyond recognition. The real killer severed Allen’s hand in order to leave fingerprints in Gould’s office. Over the bed, in excrement, is written the word ‘sloth’. Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep. (Prov. 19.15)

Officers initially assume that Allen is dead, but he is still (barely, somehow) alive, and is evacuated by ambulance. Somerset then uses FBI records to search for library patrons who have checked out books related to the seven deadly sins, and traces these results to the apartment of Jonathan Doe. Doe arrives to find the detectives at his door and shoots at them. They give chase and Doe manages to knock Mills down, pressing his gun against Mills’s head, before inexplicably letting him go. Doe’s fourth victim, a prostitute, is killed on Saturday in an underground sex club, slain by a john wearing a strap-on dildo with a serrated blade. The word ‘lust’ is scratched into the door of the room. Ye lust, and have not. (Jam. 4.2)

Doe’s fifth victim is a beautiful woman whose face has been disfigured (her nose was cut off to spite her face). On Sunday, Doe glues a telephone to one hand and a bottle of sleeping pills to the other, affording her a choice between living (with disfigurement) and ‘the easy way out’, the latter of which she takes. The word ‘pride’ is written in red on the wall above her portrait. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. (Prov. 16.18)

At this point, curiously, Doe then surrenders, offering to plead guilty if Somerset and Mills – and only Somerset and Mills – will accompany him to find the two remaining bodies. If they refuse, he will plead insanity. The detectives accept Doe’s offer and drive him from the city into a desert area dotted with high-tension towers, where they are observed by police helicopter cover. In the desert, a delivery van races to the scene. Mills stays with Doe and Somerset runs to intercept the van. The driver gives Somerset a box that he was supposed to deliver to David Mills. Somerset hesitates, but then in a nod to Eden’s fruit of knowledge,17 opens the box, finding within the head of Mills’s wife, Tracy. Somerset warns the helicopters away: ‘John Doe has the upper hand now.’ Doe laconically explains to Mills that he had ‘tried to play husband and taste the life of a simple man’, but when ‘it didn’t work out’, he cut off Tracy’s head as a

17. Richard Dyer, Seven (London: BFI, 1999), 32.

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souvenir, even though she pleaded for her life and for the life of her unborn baby. Envy, then, is Doe’s sin. Envy though not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways. (Prov. 3.31)

Doe urges Mills to take vengeance, to ‘become wrath’ (the seventh sin). Yet vengeance is not Mills’s to rightly take. For ‘[v]engeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’ (Rom. 12.19). Somerset pleads with Mills to cast down his weapon, reasoning that if Mills does kill Doe, Doe will win. Mills agonizes over what to do, but when an image of Tracy flashes in his mind, he shoots Doe in the head, thereby completing the cycle. Se7en has the trappings of a procedural,18 and can be read as a superior example of serial killer cinema19 or as a new incarnation of film noir,20 yet the film can also be read on a deeper register. For example, Valerie Allen suggests that, just as Somerset and Mills employ The Divine Comedy as an atlas in their search for Doe, they – themselves – fall into the roles of Virgil and Dante: Dante plays passion to Virgil’s reason, and, especially at the beginning of the poem, undergoes Virgil’s chastisement as he slowly learns to master his emotions. Somerset’s gravitas well captures the famous sadness Virgil wears, and the detective’s intelligence is highlighted throughout . . . Somerset stresses the need to ‘divorce ourselves from emotions’, but Mills waves him off, claiming that he feeds off those emotions. Watching the ugly display that will prove to be Mills’s downfall, Somerset coldly observes: ‘It’s always impressive to see a man feeding off his emotions.’21

Somerset embodies reason and represents thought. He lives alone, a sombre and ordered man, and he does not trust emotions. This very orientation, however, establishes him as an outsider within his precinct. In one of Se7en’s early scenes, another detective describes a murder to Somerset as he surveys the crime scene: ‘Neighbours heard them screaming at each other for like two hours. It was nothing new. Then they heard the gun go off. Both barrels. Crime of passion.’ Somerset sighs, ‘Yeah, just look at all the passion on that wall.’ This is not some

18.  As William Luhr notes, ‘While Se7en initially seems to be a procedural, we realize by its conclusion that its apparent procedural structure is misleading. Instead, the film is a detailed depiction of the crime itself, planned long before the film begins. The detectives were pawns in John Doe’s scheme.’ See William Luhr, Film Noir (Chichester:  WileyBlackwell, 2012), 200. It is no coincidence that in the first frame of the film, Somerset is viewed in his kitchen, across a table upon which an active chessboard rests. 19.  Robert Cettl, Serial Killer Cinema: An Analytical Filmography with an Introduction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003), 404–6. 20. See Luhr, Film Noir, 192–214. 21. Allen, ‘Se7en’, 1154.

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glib Die Hard one-liner, but an important observation, since in Se7en, emotions are framed as antagonistic to reason. Echoing the classical criminology of Cesare Beccaria, passion is the prime mover of sin and the genesis of crime.22 When Somerset notices a child’s drawing on the crime scene refrigerator and asks if the kid saw the shooting, the other detective responds with venom:  ‘What kind of fucking question is that? You know, we are all going to be real glad when we get rid of you, Somerset. Know that? It’s always these questions with you. “Did the kid see it?” Who gives a fuck? He’s dead. His wife killed him. Anything else has nothing to do with us.’ Mills, embodying action and representing feeling, is a kindred spirit.23 In an early version of the script, Mills explicitly says, ‘It’s not our job to figure him out, is it? All we have to do is catching [sic] him.’ Ambitious, impulsive and brash, Mills fought to be reassigned to the precinct, not to think, but act, ‘to do some good’. The detectives’ relationships with firearms are instructive on this point. On the way to Victor’s apartment, Somerset tells Mills that he has only drawn his service weapon three times in thirty-four years of service, and has never pulled the trigger.24 Mills reveals that he has used his, fatally, when he was a still a ‘shaky’ rookie on a narcotics raid. Yet although Mills killed a man that day, he cannot recall the name of the officer who took a bullet in the arm. Somerset’s inclination to thought and Mills’s inclination to action shape their respective understandings of crime. Somerset is an instinctive sociologist, locating the origins of crime in the nature of the city around them. He recounts a recent crime to the police captain: ‘Guy’s out walking his dog. Gets attacked. His watch is taken, his wallet. While he’s lying there on the sidewalk, helpless, his attacker stabs him in both eyes. Now, this happened just last night, about four blocks from here – I don’t understand this place anymore.’25 The cynical captain says it has always been this way, but Mills’s wife Tracy commiserates: ‘The conditions here – are horrible’. 22.  Cesare Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (Birmingham, AL:  Legal Classics Library, [1764] 1991). 23. The music for the end credits is David Bowie’s ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’. Even after the final scene, Se7en is warning viewers that unregulated passions are the source of sin and crime. 24. Allen describes the phallic symbolism of the guns (‘Se7en’, 1155). In the final scenes of Se7en, Somerset finally pulls his trigger: once, but fires into the air. 25.  Luhr compares Somerset’s observation with that of the retiring lawman in No Country for Old Men: Tommy Lee Jones . . . feels that the evil surrounding him has metastasized beyond his comprehension and that he can no longer even pretend that he can deal productively with it. On one level, such comments reflect anxieties shared by many older people who feel that their world is passing them by, that the securities upon which they have built their lives are becoming ignored or invalidated. But Seven, No Country for Old Men, and other recent neo-noirs indicate that more is involved, that a new era of evil is emerging. Such films partake of a

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For Somerset, the city itself is criminogenic, Hobbesian and irredeemable, punctuated by barking dogs, incessant sirens and distant voices raised in anger but inaudible. The darkened metropolis, where it is always raining but which is never cleansed, is the unreal city of T. S. Eliot’s waste land,26 a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare. Many scenes resemble the dystopian noir of Blade Runner.27 And, as Magistrale observes, ‘much of the film is a literal vertical descent’.28 The city of Se7en is hell. And Somerset, as Virgil, recognizes it for what it is. In a bar with Mills, Somerset says, ‘I just don’t think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was a virtue.’ Mills responds, pointing out that Somerset is no better, an observation that Somerset heartily accepts: ‘Apathy is a solution. I mean, it’s easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life. It’s easier to steal what you want than it is to earn it. It’s easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs, takes effort and work.’ Mills, however – instinctively relying upon psychological explanations – locates crime within the offender. He tells Somerset, ‘We are talking about people who are mentally ill; we are talking about people who are fucking crazy.’ Mills follows the Lombrosian school of thought29: crime can be explained by psychological defect, although these defects do not engender sympathy or exculpate.30 Throughout Se7en, Mills repeatedly mocks Doe: ‘mentally ill’, ‘lunatic’, ‘crazy’, ‘freak’, ‘nutbag’. The idea that someone would take such care in killing, not for profit or revenge, but for the very idea of it, is inconceivable to Mills.31 When Doe tells Mills, ‘It’s more comfortable for you to label me as insane’, Mills glibly replies, ‘It’s very comfortable’. Mills is not alone. The police captain says of Doe, ‘About the only thing we know about that guy right now is that he’s independently wealthy, welleducated and totally insane.’ But Somerset rejects this view. ‘It’s dismissive to call him a lunatic’, he says. ‘Don’t make that mistake.’ Doe’s crimes are not the product of pathology. They

millennial sensibility, a sense that the world is entering a phase so degenerate that traditional agents of law, stability, and continuity can no longer cope with, or even understand, it. (Film Noir, 211). 26. See T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Horace Liveright, 1922). 27. Dyer, Seven, 63. 28. Tony Magistrale, Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 121. 29.  Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, trans. M. Gibson and N. H. Rafter (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press [1876] 2006). Lombroso was a leading proponent of the belief that crime is caused by defective biology. Specifically, Lombroso believed that criminals suffered from mental disorders like epilepsy, and atavism, a form of evolutionary regression, that led them unavoidably to crime. 30. See Allen, ‘Se7en’, 1150–72. 31. Richard Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

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are normal. They are all too normal. In the bar, Somerset corrects Mills: ‘No, we’re talking about everyday life here.’ This conflict in worldviews lies at the centre of Se7en. Somerset’s penetrating vision allows him to see, but renders him impotent. Mills’s myopia propels him into action, yet with tragic consequences. As W. B. Yeats observed, ‘The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.’32 Doe’s worldview resembles that of Somerset. In fact, Doe operates as a shadowy analogue of Somerset. When Somerset characterizes Doe as ‘methodical, exacting, and worst of all, he’s patient’, he might as well be describing himself.33 Doe, like Somerset, looks below the surface of things. Everyone else is benighted, from the security guards in the library who play cards instead of reading the garden of books that surround them, to the flatfoot who didn’t bother checking the gluttony victim for vitals,34 to the police captain. Doe, like Somerset, sees iniquity on every corner of the fallen city, but unlike Somerset (who withdraws from the world, hoping to go ‘far from here’ in retirement), Doe immerses himself in the fallen city, striving to instruct it in the ‘wages of sin’ (Rom. 6.23) as a scourge of God. Somerset recognizes Doe’s intentions quickly, after just the second victim. ‘He’s preaching’, he observes. ‘Punishing’, disagrees Mills. Later, surrounded by Doe’s 2,000 notebooks, Mills acknowledges, ‘You were right  – he’s preaching.’ Doe’s homilies, however, are not to be found in his half-million handwritten pages. Words would be wasted on the denizens of Se7en’s city of endless night and rain. Yes, Somerset reads them, but he is the only policeman who bothers. Rather, Doe’s homilies are his murders, his staged ‘victims like models for a painting’,35 his morality plays for a post-literate society. As Deborah Wills and Andrew Wilson note: ‘In case Mills (or the viewer) still misses the point, Somerset clarifies that it’s not the ranting of the notebooks that comprise John Doe’s text, but rather the spectacle of the killings:  “His murders are his sermons to us.” The purpose of these sermons is conversion, or the calling back to faithfulness of a wayward flock.’36 Echoing an observation made by the Unabomber, real-life serial killer Theodore Kaczynski (‘In order to get our message before the public with some

32.  W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. R. J. Finneran (New York: Scribner’s, [1920] 1996), 187. 33.  Dennis Yeo, ‘Gothic Paranoia in David Fincher’s Se7en, The Game and Fight Club’, Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 18. 34.  This scene sets up a later shot in the ‘sloth’ apartment, when a SWAT officer leans over Allen’s ‘body’ and hisses, ‘You got what you deserved’, only to jump back in terror and revulsion when Allen coughs. 35. Thomas Fahy, ‘Killer Culture: Classical Music and the Art of Killing in Silence of the Lambs and Se7en’, Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 1 (2003): 28. 36. Deborah Wills and Andrew Wilson, ‘Mortality Plays: Pain, Penance, and Admonition in Se7en and Saw’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 23, no. 3 (2011): 399. Both Wills and Wilson and Allen (‘Se7en’) discuss Doe’s medieval worldview.

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chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people’),37 Doe justifies his crimes: ‘Wanting people to listen, you can’t just tap them on the shoulder any more. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. And then you’ll notice you’ve got their strict attention.’ As John Nelson explains: ‘In postmodern apathy, Se7en insists, we currently tolerate, even cultivate,38 practices for which medieval Christians knew we humans deserve to die – and suffer eternal damnation. The challenge is to help us jaded, worldly viewers sense how daily gluttony, greed, anger, and all the rest are now destroying our souls.’39 When Mills challenges Doe’s decision to kill innocent people, Doe responds, working himself into a lather, responding with mounting animation: Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? Look at the people I killed. An obese man, a disgusting man who could barely stand up – who if you saw him on the street, you’d point so your friends could mock him along with you. Who if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn’t be able to finish your meal. After him I picked the lawyer. And, you both must have been secretly thanking me for that one. This was a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath he could muster – to keeping rapists and murderers on the streets. A woman – so ugly on the inside that she couldn’t bear to go on living if she couldn’t be beautiful on the outside. A drug dealer – a drug dealing pederast, actually. And, don’t forget the disease spreading whore. Only in a world this shitty could you even try and say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that’s the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every house, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it’s common, because it’s trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not any more. I’m setting the example.

Although Doe’s stated goal, ‘to turn each sin against the sinner’, corresponds roughly to the reciprocal religio-legal principle of lex talionis (‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot’; see Exod. 21.24), Allen rightly observes the imperfect correspondence between the sin and Doe’s forced attrition:

37.  Theodore. J. Kaczynski, ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’, Washington Post, 22 September 1995, special supplement, ¶96, available online http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm (accessed 4 March 2018). 38.  Chris Willman describes an MTV News special on the seven deadly sins in which a number of celebrities reject the characterization of lust and pride as sins. Instead, several are affirmatively touted as virtues. See Chris Willman, ‘MTV’s “Seven Deadly Sins” Examines Traps of Humanity’, Los Angeles Times, 11 August 1993, available online http:// articles.latimes.com/1993-08-11/entertainment/ca-22512_1_deadly-sins (accessed 11 January 2018). 39. John S. Nelson, ‘The Passion of the Film: Cinematic Modes of Empathy in the Service of Moral Action’, Poroi 3, no. 2 (2004): 98.

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Doe . . . punishes the sinners by making them reenact their sin, dying as they lived (the glutton by eating, the sluggard by inactivity, the lecher by having sex, the angry man by killing) or by making them the receiver rather than doer of the action (the avaricious man is bled dry), or by contrariety (the proud woman is disfigured). Doe might equally have starved the glutton or worked the sluggard to death. It barely matters whether punishment is meted out by more of the same or the contrary of the sin, which is simply the same sin in negated form. Doe’s punishments compound the evil, aggravating sin with crime; they do not restore balance, as do the penances of Purgatorio.40

At one point, Mills sneers at Doe. ‘You’re no Messiah’, he tells him, ‘you’re a movie of the week. You’re a fucking t-shirt. At best.’ But by this point in Se7en, the audience should know better than to listen to Mills. He is no more enlightened than the other cops in his precinct. The audience should take seriously, however, what Doe says and does. Doe has out-manipulated all of them, even Somerset, with ‘that big brain of his’. As Steffen Hantke notes: The game of authorship, when regarded as a competition for textual power between two opposing authors, essentially hinges on which side manages to fabricate a story that most effectively incorporates the other side’s counternarrative and pre-empts it most brutally. John Doe wins this game hands down. Every move the detectives make has been anticipated, every strike preempted, and even the supposedly spontaneous outburst of righteous anger with which Mills kills him in the very end has been carefully orchestrated. There is no escaping the killer’s well-made narrative. Ultimately, he is not an author trapped in his own mad narrative. He is the creator of the narrative universe that all the other characters around him must share, no matter if Mills and Somerset turn out to be successful in eliminating him in the end or not.41

Doe ‘runs rings around the two detectives’42 because he is more perceptive and more intelligent than them (even the sagacious Somerset). Doe is a criminal genius,43 an embodiment of the ‘high-IQ killer . . . above and beyond society’,44 which  – given the sorry state of the fallen world in Se7en  – is reassuring. His formidable intellect allows him to predict perfectly the behaviour of each of his victims and orchestrate a highly contingent series of crimes. If the ‘lust’ john had refused to penetrate the prostitute with the razor-dildo, because he was unwilling

40. Allen, ‘Se7en’, 1157. 41.  Steffen Hantke, ‘Authorship in Serial Killer Narratives: David Fincher’s Se7en’, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 12 (2001): 79. 42. Nelson, ‘Passion of the Film’, 99. 43. See J. C. Oleson, Criminal Genius: A Portrait of High-IQ Offenders (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). 44. Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters, 148.

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to harm her, could Doe – a mission-killer who punishes sinners – really have shot him? If the pride victim had just called an ambulance instead of overdosing, or if Mills had just dropped his pistol, choosing justice over vengeance, Doe’s entire homiletic cycle would have failed. But they didn’t. Doe selects his targets like a marksman. Doe also appears as a prophet. Remember, during the first six days of Se7en, the city is filled with darkness and interminable rain, like an Old Testament deluge to punish sin (Gen. 6.6–8.22). Cinematographer Darius Khonji used a re-silvering process on the negatives to produce an oligochromatic palette of grimy browns, necrotic greens and inky blacks. But, ‘at the end of the movie and in reversal of Dante’s infernal imagery, [shadows and darkness] are thrown aside to reveal hell’s bottom as a wide open, flat desert full of blinding sunshine. The shadows at least allowed some hope, but disappear in the apocalyptic landscape of this final scene’.45 This desert sequence is the realization of the John Milton quote from Paradise Lost, as plucked from behind the gluttony refrigerator at the first crime scene: ‘Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light’.46 In Milton, this light symbolizes a salvation that lies beyond reach. With his series of murders, Doe has led Mills, and Somerset as well, out of hell and into the naked light of judgement. In the desert, Mills and Somerset are tested, and they fail. Nelson thus describes Doe as the embodiment of Old Testament wrath: ‘There, framed by electrical towers, John Doe delivers the punch line to his prophesy. He is a desert father declaring a plague or foreseeing a purge for the city gone bad.’47 David Fincher’s vision had been famously usurped by Fox executives when he directed Alien3 (1992). A  similar struggle ensued over the ending of Se7en. Fincher wanted to end Se7en with Mills killing Doe with a single shot, then going immediately to a black screen, with a long silence before rolling the credits, thereby allowing the meaning to sink in for the audience. New Line studio executives, however, either wanted a big Hollywood ending (such as a race against time to save Tracy) or a justice-prevails conclusion (e.g. Somerset shoots Doe and says to an astonished Mills, ‘I’m retiring’). Brad Pitt, however, refused to make the film unless they adhered to the original ending.48 Ultimately, there was a compromise: Tracy’s head is in the box and Mills does shoot Doe, but this dénouement is followed by police chatter from the helicopters, with Somerset instructing the police captain to give Mills ‘whatever he needs’, and an ameliorating voiceover of Morgan Freeman

45. Allen, ‘Se7en’, 1169. 46. Milton, Paradise Lost, book 2, lines 432–3. 47. Nelson, ‘Passion of the Film’, 100. 48.  Rebecca Hawkes, ‘The Head Stays in the Box’:  Seven Alternative Se7en Endings’, The Telegraph, 23 September 2015, available online https://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/ Seven/alternative-endings/ (accessed 4 March 2018). Pitt insisted that everything about Mills’s character leads to his action. Of course, Somerset’s forlorn passivity locks him into a complementary course of inaction. This is why he casts his own revolver away, as an example to Mills, rather than shooting Doe and thwarting Doe’s design.

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paraphrasing For Whom the Bell Tolls: ‘Ernest Hemingway once wrote the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I agree with the second part.’ The ending is still bleak, unquestionably, but the coda insulates the viewer from the terrific ontological violence of the film. Audiences can read the film as the tragedy of David Mills, or the story of a murderous zealot who wants to inscribe his name upon history. David Schmid suggests that ‘the very fact that Seven grossed over $300 million worldwide and was Blockbuster’s number one video rental for 1996 was proof enough that Doe’s predictions about the fame his actions would bring him were reasonably accurate’.49 With Freeman’s reassuring voice in their ears, viewers can walk out of the theatre without appreciating that John Doe’s vision of a fallen world has been vindicated. But understood in this light, Se7en presents a radical, transgressive vision. According to Philippa Gates, ‘The greatest fear Doe represents is that he might be right.’50 Certainly, Doe’s willingness to confront sinners about their sins is supported by Roman Catholic doctrine, which teaches that people share responsibility for the sins committed by others when they cooperate in them by ‘participating directly and voluntarily in them’; ‘ordering, advising, praising, or approving them’; ‘not disclosing or not hindering them when we have an obligation to do so’; or ‘protecting evil-doers’.51 Doe struggles to expose the sins of the world, but because the fallen city is literally benighted, its citizens are incapable of seeing, even when they are shown. Thus, according to Wills and Wilson, ‘[l]ooking is not the same as truly “seeing”. Not only is the fallen world a dark place in this film, literally and metaphorically shadowed, it is also a world consistently portrayed as encroaching in its spreading darkness’.52 For most of Se7en, the audience is benighted as well. As Dyer notes: ‘The rigour and remorselessness of Seven’s darkness serve not only to make it frightening and sinister, but are also redolent of the film’s vision of the encroachment and profundity of sin. Seen in ideal conditions . . . it should be impossible to discern the contours of the screen, the film’s darkness reaching out to embrace us.’53 Carried from darkness into the light, can the viewer discern things for what they are? Can they recognize that although David Mills might be a good guy – funny, loving to his wife, nice to his dogs, the kind of guy you’d invite to a BBQ – David Mills is not a good man? Can the viewer see beyond Brad Pitt’s Hollywood looks, beyond the natural sympathy felt for protagonists, and perceive Mills as stupid (Somerset’s term), volatile, violent and murderous?54 Can

49. Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities, 120. 50.  Philippa Gates, Detecting Men:  Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2006), 279. 51. Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶1868. 52. Wills and Wilson, ‘Mortality Plays’, 401. 53. Dyer, Seven, 64–5. 54. Strictly speaking, Doe, like Saw’s Jigsaw, does not kill his victims (Wills and Wilson, ‘Mortality Plays’, 399). Rather, he engineers circumstances so that they will destroy themselves. Of course, Doe does kill Tracy (and her unborn child). But Mills is also

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they actually see him as a trigger-happy hothead, as the embodiment of wrath? Probably not. It is easier – for Mills and for the audience – to understand Mills as a hero and Doe as a villain. To conceive of the alternative, of Doe as the hero and of Mills as the villain, is too uncomfortable. In an evocative poem from The Black Riders, Stephen Crane describes someone in darkness and ignorance: I was in the darkness; I could not see my words Nor the wishes of my heart. Then suddenly there was a great light – ‘Let me into the darkness again’.55 If one takes seriously the Weltanschauung of John Doe, his victims were not ‘innocent’. To justify this understanding, Doe needs only to open the Bible. Time and time again, God destroys communities that displease Him: the flood of Noah (Gen. 6.7), the firstborn of Egypt (Exod. 12.29) and the enemies of Israel (2 Kgs 19.35). Doe explains, ‘Don’t ask me to pity those people. I don’t mourn them any more than I do the thousands that died at Sodom and Gomorrah’ (cf. Genesis 19). There is ample biblical precedent for Doe’s behaviour. Even if Doe’s victims were innocent, Doe might still believe that he is justified in exploiting their deaths in his homily against sin. After all, the physical death of seven people is nothing. Human lives are but a dream  – in his diaries, Doe dismisses the lot of humanity as ‘sick ridiculous puppets’. At least for some religious thinkers, the thing that really matters is the afterlife, which is eternal. For example, Catholic doctrine cautions that if people commit deadly sins, knowingly and wilfully, it ‘destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible. Unrepented, it brings eternal death’.56 Thus, if Doe’s crimes can rouse the fallen city from its acquiescence, sparing even a few souls an eternity of hell, they might be defended under a utilitarian calculus. But knowledge is one thing and action is something else. No matter how fervent Doe’s belief was, no matter how certain his knowledge was, the affirmative act of killing another person – motivated by neither anger nor greed, but by principle – must have forced Doe to transcend normal human boundaries. Existentially, it must have been analogous to Abraham’s journey of fear and trembling to sacrifice his son Isaac.57 Doe’s crimes, elaborate and exacting, would have required

responsible for two deaths: the homicide of a junkie when he was a rookie and the murder of John Doe. Yet Mills is a ‘champion’, and Doe a villain. 55.  Stephen Crane, ‘The Black Riders and Other Lines’ (Boston, MA:  Copeland and Day, 1895), available online https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/black.htm (accessed 4 March 2018). 56. Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶1874. 57. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. E. H. Hong and H. V. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1843] 1983).

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superhuman fortitude. Somerset glimpses this when he remarks about Doe’s ‘sloth’ victim, ‘Imagine the will it takes to keep a man bound for a full year. To sever his hand and use it to plant fingerprints.’58 If Doe is taken seriously and not written off as insane, a freak and a nutbag, then Se7en offers its viewer a serious moral and ontological challenge. But many viewers are no better than the other benighted denizens of the fallen city. They watch the action and miss the clues; they look but do not see; they listen but do not hear. In Se7en, they see just another buddy movie, Somerset and Mills as stock Hollywood heroes, and Doe as just another serial killer. Se7en invites a deeper, transgressive reading, but – as the viewer is advised in Doe’s first communication – long is the way, and hard.

Bibliography Alien3. Directed by David Fincher. DVD. Twentieth Century Fox, 1992. Allen, Valerie. ‘Se7en: Medieval Justice, Modern Justice’. Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 6 (2010): 1150–72. American Film Institute. AFI’s 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains. 4 June 2003. Available online http://www.afi.com/100years/handv.aspx (accessed 4 March 2018). Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. DVD. United Artists, 1979. Beccaria, Cesare. An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. Birmingham, AL: Legal Classics Library, [1764] 1991. Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II. Vatican City : Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997. Cettl, Robert. Serial Killer Cinema: An Analytical Filmography with an Introduction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003. Crane, Stephen. The Black Riders and Other Lines. Boston, MA: Copeland and Day, 1895. Available online https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/black.htm (accessed 4 March 2018).

58. At the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), antagonist Colonel Walter E. Kurtz describes an analogous exercise of will: I remember when I was with Special Forces. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember. I – I – I cried, I wept like some grandmother. And then I realized – like I was shot – like I was shot with a diamond – a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God – the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that. These were not monsters, these were men  – trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love – but they had the strength – the strength – to do that.

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Dyer, Richard. Seven. London: BFI, 1999. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. New York: Horace Liveright, 1922. Fahy, Thomas. ‘Killer Culture: Classical Music and the Art of Killing in Silence of the Lambs and Se7en’. The Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 1 (2003): 28–42. Gates, Philippa. Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film. Albany : State University of New York Press, 2006. Gleiberman, Owen. ‘Seven’. Entertainment Weekly, 29 September 1995. Available online http://www.ew.com/article/1995/09/29/seven (accessed 10 January 2018). Guthmann, Edward. ‘ “Seven’s” Lurid Monster Mash/Psycho Killer a Nod to Hannibal Lecter’. San Francisco Chronicle, 22 September 1995. Available online http:// www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Seven-s-Lurid-Monster-Mash-Psychokiller-a-3023907.php (accessed 10 January 2018). Hantke, Steffen. ‘Authorship in Serial Killer Narratives: David Fincher’s Se7en’. Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 12 (2001): 75–95. Hawkes, Rebecca. ‘ “The Head Stays in the Box”: Seven Alternative Se7en Endings’. The Telegraph, 23 September 2015. Available online https://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/ Seven/alternative-endings/ (accessed 4 March 2018). Holmes, Ronald M., and James E. DeBurger. ‘Profiles in Terror: The Serial Murderer’. Federal Probation 49, no. 3 (1985): 29–34. Kaczynski, Theodore. J. ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’. Washington Post, 22 September 1995. Special supplement. Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Translated by E. H. Hong and H. V. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1843] 1983. Lombroso, Cesare. Criminal Man. Translated by M. Gibson and N. H. Rafter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, [1876] 2006. Luhr, William. Film Noir. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Magistrale, Tony. Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Maslin, Janet. ‘A Sickening Catalog of Sins, Every One of Them Deadly’. New York Times, 22 September 1995. Available online http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=990C E1D81F3AF931A1575AC0A963958260 (accessed 10 January 2018). Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by J. Leonard. New York: Penguin, [1667] 2003. Nelson, John S. ‘The Passion of the Film: Cinematic Modes of Empathy in the Service of Moral Action’. Poroi 3, no. 2 (2004): 94–108. Oleson, James C. ‘King of Killers: The Criminological Theories of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Part One’. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 12, no. 3 (2005): 186–210. Oleson, James C. ‘Dissecting the Serial Killer: Toward a Typology of Serial Homicide’. In Crime Types: A Text Reader, edited by Dean A. Dabney, 57–69. 2nd edn. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2013. Oleson, James C. Criminal Genius: A Portrait of High-IQ Offenders. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016. Oleson, James C., and Tamara Mackinnon. ‘Seeing Saw through the Criminological Lens: Popular Representations of Crime and Punishment’. Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society 16, no. 1 (2015): 35–50. Ressler, Robert K., Ann W. Burgess, John E. Douglas, Carol R. Hartman and Ralph B. D’Agostino. ‘Sexual Killers and Their Victims: Identifying Patterns through Crime Scene Analysis’. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 1 (1986): 288–308. Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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Scouller, S. F. Murderabilia and True Crime Collecting. Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2010. Se7en. Directed by David Fincher. DVD. New Line Home Entertainment, 1995. Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Walker, A. K. Seven. Film script. 1994. Available online http://www.dailyscript.com/ scripts/seven_production.html (accessed 11 January 2018). Willman, Chris. ‘MTV’s “Seven Deadly Sins” Examines Traps of Humanity’. Los Angeles Times, 11 August 1993. Available online http://articles.latimes.com/1993-08-11/ entertainment/ca-22512_1_deadly-sins (accessed 11 January 2018). Wills, Deborah, and Andrew Wilson. ‘Mortality Plays: Pain, Penance, and Admonition in Se7en and Saw’. Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 23, no. 3 (2011): 397–412. Yeats, W. B. ‘The Second Coming’. In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by R. J. Finneran, 187. New York: Scribner’s, [1920] 1996. Yeo, Dennis. ‘Gothic Paranoia in David Fincher’s Se7en, The Game and Fight Club’. Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 16–25.

Chapter 8 ‘ T H E M A N W HO D I E D’ :   R E A D I N G D E AT H I N J O B W I T H F I N N I SH N O I R Yael Klangwisan

When death brushes past one, the uncanny follows in its wake; something like a shiver in the soul reminding one of the bearer’s ultimate fate, something ‘as sure as taxes’. When death brushes past like the very omen of one’s own death, this can invoke a sudden terrifying cognition, a chilling vacancy or ubiquitous nameless terror. The effect of this knowledge is true suffering, to be snared in death’s ‘intolerable violence’1; the kind of anticipatory suffering experienced by Antti Tuomainen’s protagonist, Jaakko, in Finnish noir crime novel The Man Who Died: When you hold a newly born baby in your arms, the game is already up: death will come as surely as a bottle of milk, and with the same warmth and certainty. Death is the only permanent thing in our lives; in a morbid way it’s the only thing we can really trust. I lean backwards, breathe in and out, and wonder whether, on top of everything else, I really am losing my mind . . . Be that as it may, death will be the next room into which I step. It’s there, behind my office door. Death is something concrete, a meeting that’s been arranged on my behalf and that I can’t pull out of. And it won’t let me forget about it either. (68)2

Poets, novelists and philosophers aver that this existential dread leads to inexorable and deep interior change: ‘Rebleute graben, die dunkelstündige Uhr um, Tiefe um Tiefe’.3 Whether by war, accident or illness, they claim that death will change the passers-by forever. François de La Rochefoucauld attests, ‘Le soleil ni la mort ne

1.  Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2001), 115. 2. Page references in parentheses always refer to Antti Tuomainen, The Man Who Died, trans. David Hackston (London: Orenda Books, 2017). 3.  Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead, trans. Pierre Joris (New York:  Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2014), III, Kindle: ‘vine growers dig, under the darkhoured watch, depth upon depth’.

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se peuvent regarder fixement’,4 or, one cannot stare straight into the sun, or death. Death and its essential meaninglessness or meaningfulness is rarely encountered without a kind of existential vertigo that shakes one to the core. Like Jaakko, death leaves a calling card for the biblical character of Job: May that day be darkness; May God above have no concern for it; May light not shine on it; May darkness and deep gloom reclaim it; May a pall lie over it; May what blackens the day terrify it. May obscurity carry off that night. (Job 3.4-6a, JPS) In the book of Job, the reader finds a biblical hero, a quintessential righteous man, who lives by all accounts a very lucky life. This cosy utopia in which Job lives a peerless life is the first surprise really. In the context of the Ancient Near East and its literature, misfortune and loss is ever-present, the death of children too soon, the death of women in childbirth, plagues taking poor and wealthy alike, wars robbing villages and cities of young men. The literature of this period is sensitized to the merciless finitude of mortality. War, plague and famine were commonplace. Fragility of life and the ever-present spectre of death is imprinted on the Bible which is thick with scenes of slaughter, famine and plague. However, in the space of a few textual moments, Job’s life transitions from fat utopia to desolate dystopia. Job is assaulted by a divine conspiracy of fantastic losses that suddenly strike him left and right: sword, fire and wind. First a messenger comes with the news of the theft of his cattle and slaughter of his servants by nomadic bandits, then a messenger comes with news of a fire from the sky that has burned up his flocks, then another messenger with the news of the theft of his other herds, again by the sword, then before these first messengers, falling over one another, can even fully complete their tales – ‘this one was still speaking when another came and said’ – a new messenger comes bringing word of the death of all his children by dint of natural disaster and building collapse (Job 1.13-19). It is an incredible scene that is confronting for both characters and reader. It is in appropriate horror that we are touched by the shock and despair with which Job staggers to his feet, tears his clothes and falls down to the ground, the traditional, faithful words of grief pouring from him: Naked I came out from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1.21)5 4.  François de La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales (Paris: Chez LeFevre, 1827), maxim 26. 5.  Unless otherwise stated, all further English translations of the book of Job are from the NKJV.

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After a segue in the narrative in which the reader has been swept up again to spy on the divine council, there is a final and cruelly unnecessary strike. The ubiquitous antagonist, Satan, asks for rights to the grieving Job’s body: ‘Skin for skin, yes, all that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out Your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will surely curse You to Your face. And the Lord said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand, but spare his life” ’ (Job 2.4-6). Thus, Job becomes gravely ill with a burning plague on his body (2.7). The bulk of the book of Job thereafter maps Job’s tortured metamorphosis through an interminable wrestling with his beliefs about life and meaning.6 While his discourse partners are figured in the book as more than simply figments of Job’s imagination, the deeply tortuous prayers and poetry truly do seem to trace the striving of a man against the voices of his own soul.7 I imagine then in the text that rather than a divine entity and virtuous friends, Job wrestles with the ghosts of his own self, his own self reflected, his own subjectivities, a traumatic psychosis of sorts. The persona of Job is thus diffracted into an array of subjectivities:  Job the righteous, Job the wicked, Job the mourner, Job the survivor, Job the faithful, Job the faithless, Job the foolish, Job the wise, the Job who is dying, the Job who lives.8 In this kind of reading, I  picture a mise-enscène where Job has been in seclusion on a smouldering ash heap for the entire play, where the hallucinatory voices of friends and the divine are the polyphony of his own subconscious. At the end of the day it is Job alone, staring into death’s face.9 Did Job fear death then? Did he think he could escape it? Did he believe it when he saw it coming? For before my bread my moaning comes, And my roar pours out like water.

6.  Note the psychoanalytic reading of the Book of Job by Carl Jung, Answer to Job (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), Kindle, where the discourses effect the metamorphosis of the character of God. 7.  Carol Newsom comes closer to this kind of reading in her work The Book of Job:  Contest of the Moral Imagination (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009). Newsom presents a Bakhtinian reading of the book of Job as polyphonic text. In this reading it is the author of Job who is the one orchestrating an imaginary play of voices (ibid., 21). 8.  Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 2003), presents a similar thesis regarding discourses between humans and the gods in the Illiad. 9.  In Jung’s reading, the fourth face of God is the dark face of death and destruction. It is this persona of God who projects his inadequacies onto Job: ‘Yahweh projects on to Job a sceptic’s face which is hateful to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an uncanny and critical eye’ (Jung, Answer to Job, chapter 2). But Jung also grants the possibility of this paradoxical wrestling or ‘split-consciousness’ within the biblical human character: ‘That is to say, even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells in him, whose form has no knowable

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For I feared a thing – it befell me, What I dreaded came upon me. I was not quiet, I was not still, I had no repose, and trouble came. (Job 3.24-26)10 The character of Job’s discourses on the meaning of life and death are at times fanciful, indulgent and petulant, but also humane, poignant and profound. When death enters life such as it did for Job, he became ‘everyman’ in his misfortunes that same moment. In his anguished monologues, Job describes death as a stain on life as if life was never really free from it.11 That calamity and catastrophe can make one long for death. That death is a refuge and a life of mourning and survival is too hard after death has touched life.12 Job questions his own belief in a higher power, to trust in divine omniscience and redemption, and implies the culpability of the divine in allowing calamity to strike the just.13 Job considers that life is linear and death is the final door and upon crossing it there is no returning back.14 That the emotional and physical cost of grief alone is beyond bearing:  ‘My face is flushed with weeping, and on my eyelids is the shadow of death’ (16.16). Job grieves the absurdity of death, the waste that it is. That death terrorizes and holds one in fear,15 pervades one’s thoughts with dread; there seems a great hopelessness in such destruction.16 The relation of righteousness to death bothers Job: that the way one lives one’s life seems to make little difference at all in the arrival of misfortune. Thus, in such futility and powerlessness, the meaning of life is continually at stake (27.15). Job ponders whether the burden of mourning in life arises somehow in wisdom:  an end has man set to darkness, and each limit he has probed, the stone of deep gloom and death’s shadow (28.3). But this notion loses its solace when he reflects on the cruel capriciousness of death, that loved ones are a short time here and then just as suddenly gone, like wildflowers (28.22). That the role of God in the arrival of death is suspect (30.23). And that the possibility of judgement after death remains as a final nightmare; that death

boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky’ (ibid.). 10. Translation from Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), 22. 11.  ‘May darkness and the shadow of death claim it; May a cloud settle on it; May the blackness of the day terrify it’ (Job 3.5). 12. ‘Who long for death, but it does not come’ (Job 3.21); ‘So my soul chooses strangling, and death rather than my life’ (7.15). 13. ‘In famine He shall redeem you from death, and in war from the power of the sword’ (Job 5.20); ‘and brings the shadow of death to light’ (12.22). 14.  ‘Before I go to the place from which I shall not return, To the land of darkness and the shadow of death’ (Job 10.21-22). 15. ‘[T]he firstborn of death devours its limbs’ (Job 18.13). 16. ‘For the morning is the same to them as the shadow of death’ (Job 24.17).

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might stretch out as its own underworld and be yet another strange land one must traverse, where one must answer for one’s mortal life (34.22). That the living will never know, never know at all, and yet at the same time, living beings are cursed to anticipate it.17 Job’s fear of death is the beginning of philosophy according to Jewish philosopher and theologian Franz Rosenzweig, who faced his own burdens of suffering, dying aged 42 of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Rosenzweig begins his famous book, The Star of Redemption, with a discourse on death. He argues that it is fear of death that drives civilization, all its acts of progress are an attempt to stave death off, to desensitize it. Humanity doesn’t cease to try to veil it over and eradicate it: It is from the fear of death that all cognition of the All begins. Philosophy has the audacity to cast off the fear of the earthly, to remove from death its poisonous sting, from Hades his pestilential breath. All that is mortal lives in this fear of death; every new birth multiplies the fear for a new reason, for it multiplies that which is mortal. The womb of the inexhaustible earth ceaselessly gives birth to what is new, and each one is subject to death; each newly born waits with fear and trembling for the day of its passage into the dark.18

Jean Paul Sartre also meditates on the nature of death in the human condition by drawing the focus back to how death rims life. He writes in the play Huis Clos through the character Inès: ‘On meurt toujours trop tôt – ou trop tard. Et cependant la vie est là, terminée:  le trait est tiré, il faut faire la somme. Tu n’es rien d’autre que ta vie’.19 That is, death always comes too soon or too late in the scheme of a person’s life. And yet at that very moment of death, it is as if the whole of life is drawn and weighed up: like a heart and a feather balanced on a scale. There can be no more to a person’s life then but this terminally bordered existence, no more than an epitaph remains. One endures the death of others, as Job did with his children, but never one’s own death. The accounting of a life is made by others. One’s death serves as the final page of one’s life, tied off by a seam of scarlet thread. Like Job, Jacques Derrida spent a good portion of his later texts reflecting on the meaning of life and the finality of death. He reflects on death’s inescapability. He ties the dread of dying to the joys in living. At the time of his own battle with debilitating disease that would finally take him in 2004, he wrote: 

17. ‘[H]ast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?’ (Job 38.17). 18. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), Introduction, Kindle. 19. Jean Paul Sartre, Huis Clos suivi de Les Mouches (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 90. Sartre also notes, ‘One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are – your life, and nothing else.’ In Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York:  Vintage, 1989), 43.

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I am never more haunted by the necessity of dying than in moments of happiness and joy. To feel joy and to weep over death that awaits are for me the same thing . . . When I recall the happy moments, I bless them too, of course, at the same time as they propel me toward the thought of death, toward death, because all that has passed, come to an end.20

For Derrida, the debilitating notion of death serves also to limn life’s joys. They are even more precious in light of the end. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, like Job, faced his own mortality in his recurrent bouts of illnesses and a final, terrible and haunted decline in 1900. He muses on death, specifically thinking about death, in The Gay Science. For Nietzsche, the careless bustle of life becomes ridiculous in light of death. He sees life as gratuitous, raucous and ultimately delusional. He castigates human beings for being thoughtless, petty and determinedly obtuse. If death is such a common outcome for all, what is this discordant, noisy life about? This milling humanity and all its trivialities: nobody wants to think about death and for Nietzsche, death follows like a grim shadow everywhere. At the same time this ingenuous village life has a nostalgic cast for Nietzsche. There is a kind of jubilance in the forgetting of death, and celebration in its raucous disavowal. This kind of life is blissfully naïve. Let one worry about death when it comes: The thought of death. – It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this jumble of lanes, needs, and voices:  how much enjoyment, impatience, desire; how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment of the day! And yet things will soon be so silent for all these noisy, living, life-thirsty ones! How even now everyone’s shadow stands behind him, as his dark fellow traveller! It’s always like the last moment before the departure of an emigrant ship: people have more to say to each other than ever; the hour is late; the ocean and its desolate silence await impatiently behind all the noise – so covetous, so certain of its prey. And everyone, everyone takes the past to be little or nothing while the near future is everything; hence this haste, this clamour, this outshouting and out-hustling one another. Everyone wants to be the first in this future  – and yet death and deathly silence are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole certainty and commonality barely makes an impression on people and that they are farthest removed from feeling like a brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that people do not at all want to think the thought of death! I would very much like to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more worth being thought to them.21

20. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally (New York: Melville House, 2007), 51. 21.  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 158; original italics.

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In his work The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot reflects on death and dying in literature, echoing Job’s futility. Death is the end. There is nothing beyond it. It is a powerful and impossible end. In it there is nothing more. It is an adjourned end. It recuses itself. It holds itself in abeyance. It is not until one comes close and begins to die that its inexorable drag is felt: ‘Death . . . sets a final date, it adjourns in the sense that it assigns to a given day [jour] – both random and necessary – at the same time that it defers till an undesignated day.’22 Of philosophers writing about the human condition in relation to death, it is Martin Heidegger’s work Being and Time that was a seminal moment in continental philosophy and might offer perspectives on Job and death. A phenomenological study of the nature of one’s being in the world necessitates reflection on life and death. For Heidegger, one finds oneself in the world as if thrown down by a capricious goddess, a random piece of clay. Here in the world one finds oneself in an unique time and space. In the inherent absurdity that is one’s existence, one lives one’s life, all the while searching for greater meaning, a way out of the existential torment of geworfenheit (or ‘thrownness’). The totality of time allotted to one’s being in the world is a product of mortality. Death, for Heidegger, brings finitude to life and an end to potentiality. That is all death is in itself. It is a light thing phenomenologically. A single moment. An end. But one’s attitude towards it, and the way the sure knowledge of death impacts one’s living, is its own crucible. Death is the end to all one is, but also, all one could be. Thus, for Heidegger, death is not recused, nor in abeyance, in fact, death is central to life and life spins around it, whether consciously or unconsciously, as it approaches inevitably. Death is naturally a shocking end to existence; therefore, Heidegger avers we flee from this dread through all manner of avoidances, pleasures, adventures and escapes. Regardless of our artifices and ploys to the contrary, we have sein-zum-tode – being-toward-death:23 One can say that the last quarter of the moon is outstanding until it is full. The not-yet decreases with the disappearance of the shadow covering it. And yet the moon is, after all, always already objectively present as a whole. Apart from the fact that the moon is never wholly to be grasped even when it is full,

22. According to Maurice Blanchot, ‘But dying is un-power. It wrests from the present, it is always a step over the edge, it rules out every conclusion and all ends, it does not free nor does it shelter. In death, one can find an illusory refuge: the grave is as far as gravity can pull, it marks the end of the fall; the mortuary is the loophole in the impasse. But dying flees and pulls indefinitely, impossibly and intensively in the flight’ (The Writing of the Disaster [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986], 47). See also Yosefa Raz, ‘Reading Pain in the Book of Job’, in The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics, ed. Ilana Pardes and Leora Batnitzky (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), chapter 6, Kindle. 23.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany :  SUNY Press, 1996), 219.

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the not-yet by no means signifies a not-yet-being-together of parts belonging together, but rather pertains only to the way we grasp it perceptually.24

Heidegger believes that there are two possible kinds of being-toward-death that hinge on a certain definition of authenticity.25 This attitude plays out as a kind of resolute orientation towards or recognition of finality. In an inauthentic kind of being, death is recognized as a kind of phenomenon that happens all the time, but to other people, and for this reason, not really present and not really real. The notion of an actual not-yet death is shadowed in such a way as it fades or recedes to the back of the mind, ambiguous or indeterminate in the way it encroaches upon one’s life. For this reason, it is easy to veil it over, obscure it with everydayness,26 to be caught up in Nietzsche’s hustle and bustle on the streets. It means to be caught up with the vagaries of life, and in doing so to subconsciously tranquilize oneself against it, anaesthetize its truth, to put thoughts of it all to sleep.27 To hold tightly to the multitude of beliefs of afterlife in an attempt to denature the abject reality of finitude and decay, such eschatological hopes as ‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed’ (1 Cor. 15.51). It means to live life, in this frame of reference – dishonestly – and in what might be a prototypically Sartrean kind of bad faith: fleeing from the ultimate reality of death and yet without realizing it, running even faster towards it. Authentic being-toward-death, in Heidegger’s estimation, looks death in the eye, in all its horrifying absoluteness; lives in tension with its dread. An authentic perspective is gained through entschlossenheit (resoluteness) in the face of the brutal truths of mortality in relation to life.28 Dread and anxiety about death from this viewpoint is not necessarily a slough of despair. It is a painful and yet productive foresight and commitment to the truth of things that pulls and stirs one into acknowledging the lived moment, to begin to care. It is possible in the apprehension of death, according to Heidegger, to enter into a kind of ecstasy that yearns for meaningfulness in the things that surround us, but in the scope of time, history and possible futures, and in full awareness of the inexorable encroachment of the end. Death according to Heidegger individuates us. We live in a continual ‘not-yet’ when alive: ‘as soon as a human being is born, he is at once old enough to die right away’.29 Death is inevitable yet indeterminate, and in an authentic

24. Ibid., 226. 25. Ibid., 240. 26. Ibid., 236. 27. Ibid., 235. 28.  According to Heidegger, ‘Resoluteness brings the self right into its being together with things at hand, actually taking care of them, and pushes it toward concerned beingwith with the others’ (ibid., 274). 29. Heidegger quotes from the fifteenth-century poem Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (or, Der Ackermann aus der Tod) by Johannes von Tepl (ibid., 228).

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being-toward-death, death can be conceptualized as always already an inherent part of being human. Death is thus truly heavy as a mountain and light as a feather. While the omen of one’s death is profoundly distressing, according to Heidegger, therein lies the possibility of re-evaluation of life from the standpoint of finitude. The moment of the dreadful realization of mortality in relation to being in the world; to stare into the sun, suddenly and without warning, is a sudden realization of not ‘being at home’ in the world. This is a kind of anxiety, dread, shock – it is real. The feeling is uncanny or unheimlich, which brings upon itself a ‘call of conscience’30 opening itself up to truths or disclosedness – aletheia.31 Truth unfolds itself as a gift in these existential moments, providing vision, a new conception of Self; an awakening of sorts. A recognition of death can prompt the soul to a transformed vision of life like a phoenix from the ashes – albeit heavy and tempered with lost innocence – and this may provide a possible perspective on the evolution of Job’s character captured in the book of Job’s final chapter. This awakening to self in the face of death is a pervasive corollary in crime fiction, such as in the hero who suffers a life-changing loss that catalyses the character’s dramatic transformation. The hero, in light of his or her misfortunes and losses and then subsequent evolution, is both to be pitied and admired, and supporting characters often play important roles in mediating this rebirth. Finnish crime fiction writer Antti Tuomainen invokes such a hero, an archetypal Job,32 in The Man Who Died, which might give the book of Job’s reader a literary foil by which to reconsider the possibility of Job’s interior Heideggerian metamorphosis vis-à-vis death. Tuomainen recounts, in a darkly comedic and yet poignant narrative, the story of the protagonist Jaakko and the consequential events occurring after a diagnosis of toxic mushroom poisoning. We meet Jaakko, the owner of a mushroom company in the small town of Hamina in Finland, in the doctor’s surgery. He is receiving the bad news that he has likely been the victim

30. Ibid., 253. 31. Ibid., 274. 32. The book of Job is considered by many to be one of the great classics of ancient literature, equal parts dread and awe, the majestic poetic, as Alter describes, full of ‘virtuosity and power’ (Wisdom Books, 10). One of the church fathers, Jerome, ironically described the book’s true meaning as ‘slippery as an eel’ (cited in Newsom, Book of Job, 3). The archetype of Job is pervasively resonant in literature, popular culture and cinema. Among the many direct examples, The Trial, by Franz Kafka, was notably influenced by the book of Job. J. B. by Archibald MacLeish also owes Job for its premise. Rob Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice reinscribes the story of Job as science fiction. Notably, Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life (2011) begins with a quotation from the book. See also the 2014 film Leviathan, directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev. Pardes and Batnitzky, The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015) offers critical engagement with the book of Job and its impact on modern literature and thought. While Tuomainen is not necessarily or consciously influenced by the book of Job in The Man Who Died, the Joban themes of misfortune, mortality and metamorphosis can be encountered as comparative literature.

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of a crime of terminal poisoning that gives him a life expectancy of just a month. On returning home to tell his wife, Taina, Jaakko is traumatized afresh to discover her in the midst of a rather outrageous coitus with buff, young employee, Petri. In light of Jaakko’s poisoning diagnosis that same morning, it strikes Jaakko that any criminal conspiracy against him might therefore likely include his wife and her young lover. Within the space of a morning and through a coterie of Joban blows, Jaakko’s entire life has come apart at the seams. And in Joban fashion, Jaakko maunders existentially and poetically on what this all might mean, when one confronts one’s own death – or in fact, whether life and death mean anything at all: I go through the faces that have populated my life  – the sounds they make, their shapes. One after another, familiar people stand up to say something, walk towards me, touch me, look me in the eyes, then saunter away again all the more assuredly. Nobody stops, nobody remains, nobody waits to hear what I’ve got to say. I’m about to lose all hope . . . What else is life if not a mishmash of assumptions, expectations, suppositions and conclusions pulled out of a hat? I’ve never had thoughts like these before. I don’t know if that’s a bad or good thing. (16)

It is Jaakko’s impending death that both destroys and saves him in the novel. The liminal space of that last month forces Jaakko to wake up to the fallacies of his life with a kind of Heideggerian lucidity. The truth of his life begins to unfold and disclose, and the product of this deconstruction is a crystallization of new resolution. In fact, Jaakko is forced to confront the inauthenticity of his former life and take responsibility for his past delusions. He had buried and solaced himself in ordinariness and everydayness:  ‘I sometimes think about death, but even thinking about it is all but impossible – especially your own death. A second later I’m thinking about something different altogether: today’s shopping list, the business’s outgoings’ (9). The gift of such a transformation, or orientation in being (towards death), for Jaakko is the opportunity to begin living with courageous authenticity as much as one can, and as one might when death is a bed fellow: ‘It seems we all have our problems. Mine appear to be twofold: those affecting my life and those affecting my death. Until now I haven’t realised how closely the two are intertwined’ (27).33 Jaakko is shocked into the reality of the illusion that was his marriage to Taina. He realizes that he truly doesn’t know her: ‘The moment captured in that photograph seems as distant in years as it does in kilometres. The Taina I  saw 33. Jaakko continues:  When it comes to the crunch, death is really a distillation of life: everything is condensed into the single, colossal question of how best to live it. Or how we should have lived it. If you had only a day left, what would you do? And what if you had a week? A month? I haven’t thought about things like this. It seems I haven’t thought about very much at all. Something has woken me up. (27)

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today isn’t the Taina in this photograph – the Taina who pressed herself so tightly against me that our suntan lotion all but glued us together’ (26). This implosion of an intimate relationship echoes in Job’s failure of his own relation to his deeply traumatized wife, that moment in the text when she flings words at him through her tears like stones (Job 2.9): ‘Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!’ In Jaakko’s story, his brush with death means new opportunities to see the world anew, and in a real light for once. It means that the abstruseness and inauthenticity of his former life is burned away. It is all terribly real now. This attitude facilitates new ideas and thoughts about life, including his friendship with mushroom picker Sanni: ‘This is what it’s like to be human, to be surrounded by other humans: I know what Sanni wants, but I know nothing about her’ (40). Heidegger would suggest what Jaakko experiences is a new relation to aletheia: I must admit, I  hadn’t thought about things like that before. I  haven’t exactly spent time thinking about the practical aspects of my final days, so there’s no to-do list, as it were. Death only comes round once in a lifetime, that much I realise, and maybe I should have put a bit more effort into it. But I’ve always avoided the subject and everything to do with it. Now I understand quite how immense it is. Big questions, big decisions. (7)

Jaakko takes hold of newly realized potential to become more or other in life: ‘I see a smile on Sanni’s face. “I’m teasing you, Jaakko”, she says and turns away. And when she has almost disappeared from view, I hear her in the doorway. “And I see a lot of potential in you too” ’ (183). This new potential includes leaving a legacy with those we truly love and have been loved by: Sanni has brought me back to life. In so many ways. I want to take her in my arms, to thank her for everything. I want to tell her that I love her with all my strength, with every cell in my body. Of course, I will never recover, and I will die soon. But that is something we all have in common, even those of us who once imagined we would live forever. (245)

Tuomainen’s novel, more clearly than the book of Job, is divided into three parts: Death, Life and Love. The protagonist journeys ironically from death to life to love in the novel, though he is dying from the first page. His life has been about repetition and conventionalities. In the doctor’s surgery on the first page of the novel, Jaakko is beginning to wake up, perhaps wrenched into wakefulness. The portent of his soon-to-come, not-yet death has meant for a radical change in his perspectives. Jaakko is heir to a world-shattering revelation of his own mortality. In the frightful diagnosis he receives at the surgery it is as if he is magically placed at a fork in the road. In the next chapters, he rapidly flips through emotions as if shuffling a deck of cards. He is grieving, and at the same time punishing himself, sad, mourning, taking pleasure, suspicious, enraged, determined, guilty, unbelieving, reflective, surviving, taking refuge. A bit like Job really.

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In Jaakko’s reincarnation during the section of the book called ‘Life’, he finds himself re-engaging with aspects of his life he had formerly ignored. Jaakko throws off his reliance on the comforts of ordinariness and enters into a surprising set of encounters, particularly surprising for those he encounters as he is not at all the same. It is as if prior to the realization of his death he had been wearing cloudy lenses and now he finally sees. Jaakko has entered a liminal space whereupon his former world is destroyed and is being recreated anew. While he had known it all this time, it is only now that he can truly admit that life is a condition that will ‘inevitably lead to death’ (5): Death feels at its most unreal in the mornings. My experience of death is only a few days in length, but already I can say that the nearer the day gets to evening, the closer the end always feels. Perhaps this is only natural. The sun rises, the sun sets. Life is a single day. In the mornings life seems like a foregone conclusion, but by evening the certainty slowly crumbles away. (116)

In light of Tuomainen’s The Man Who Died, I wonder what has changed for biblical Job during his metaphysical pilgrimage on the ash-pile of life. I  wonder if the thoughts and feelings assailing Jaakko bear any relation to what must have been for Job. At the beginning of his legend, Job loses his wealth, his workers and his beloved children, and then he faces illness where he is ‘brought to the brink of the grave’.34 At the end of the book, Job recovers his wealth, his place within his community, he has more children and he is content, even ‘sated’ in years (seva’ yamim).35 I imagine that what has changed for Job is Job himself. That Job, during his mighty oratory battle with his fantasy divine interlocutor, a projection of his grief – as fantastic as Oedipus and the Sphinx – he has found himself transformed by his internal ‘polyphonic’ monologue. The spectre of death that clung to Job like a shadow has left its mark, but also altered his innermost being. I want to argue that Job, like Jaakko, is transformed profoundly by his encounter face-à-face with death. That this mortal struggle has sloughed off Job’s former delusions, denials and escapes, and that he holds the scars of his suffering differently, deeply, with a kind of profound resoluteness, an ‘authentic’ being-towards-death. I imagine the weight of mourning remains, but now sits indelibly upon his shoulders, carried in Sartrean good faith, closer to his heart: a never-ending ache that intensifies vision. Job does not return at the end as the same man he was at the beginning of the book. He is not the same man at all. The good thing about death is that as it draws closer many things I  used to think were important lose their significance. This doesn’t happen the way you’d think or the way you hear people saying:  that your loved ones become more important, that money loses its meaning, that the spirit of god (or God) and an

34. Jung, Answer to Job, 14. 35. Alter, Wisdom Books, 179.

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appreciation of an eternal afterlife flickers into being. In my case my loved ones have become my enemies, the success of my business is now the most important thing of all, and the flame of eternal life is merely something that burns Sami to a crisp and glows like an ember, slowly simmering as it awaits us all. My own thoughts scare me. People don’t know the depths of their own minds until they start to think about things like this. (192–93)

Bibliography Alter, Robert. The Wisdom Books. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Celan, Paul. Breathturn into Timestead. Translated by Pierre Joris. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2014. Kindle. Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. Learning to Live Finally. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Melville House, 2007. Gray, John. The Book of Job. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY Press, 2010. Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Jung, Carl. Answer to Job. London: Routledge, 2002. Kindle. La Rochefoucauld, François de. Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales. Paris: Chez LeFevre, 1827. Newsom, Carol. The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Nietzsche, Fredrich. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pardes, Ilana, and Leora Batnitzky. The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. Kindle. Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption. Translated by Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Kindle. Sartre, Jean Paul. Huis Clos suivi de Les Mouches. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Sartre, Jean Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1989. Tuomainen, Antti. The Man Who Died. Translated by David Hackston. London: Orenda Books, 2017. Kindle.

Chapter 9 T H E D I V I N E U N SU B :   T E L EV I SIO N C R I M E P R O C E D U R A L S A N D B I B L IC A L S E X UA L V IO L E N C E Dan W. Clanton, Jr

I teach the Bible to a variety of students, and do not shy away from presenting and discussing the more graphic and troublesome passages in the biblical library. I also watch (probably) too much television and film, and enjoy talking to students about some of my viewing. These discussions can be pedagogically useful, as they allow me to draw analogies between familiar popular culture media and the (often less familiar) stories from the Bible. However, during these conversations, I have noticed something surprising: when students are confronted with sexually violent images, situations or actions in popular culture texts (such as film or television), they often express outrage at the injustice of such violence; yet when they encounter comparable forms of violence within the biblical texts, these texts more often than not gets a ‘pass’. To my dismay, students – both undergraduate and adult learners in church settings – often dismiss or explain away the sexually violent images and actions in the Bible because they consider the Bible to be ‘sacred’, and therefore beyond criticism. As both an academic and a person of faith, I take issue with this attitude, as it reflects a cursory and timid engagement with scripture. I  have therefore begun to wonder how some of the sexually graphic and violent biblical texts might look when viewed through the lens of one specific popular culture discourse, namely, television police procedurals. One reason for focusing on this popular TV genre is because it is such a ubiquitous and widely used genre, and thus affords us the possibility of engaging a truly ‘popular’ piece of culture. Another reason is that sexually violent behaviour is much more endemic to this genre than other popular forms of television show, thereby providing us with a good range of material to study in depth.1 In this chapter, I therefore examine biblical texts that depict divine 1.  I have previously researched the police procedural genre of television, analysing the ways in which religion is presented in the series Law & Order, the televisual ancestor of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which I examine here. See Dan Clanton, ‘ “These Are Their Stories”: Views of Religion in Law & Order’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 4 (2003). See also Dan Clanton, ‘On the Job and among the Elect: Religion and the Salvation

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and divinely sanctioned sexually aggressive behaviour by exploring parallels with both the content and form of the modern procedural drama. The importance of such a discussion is twofold. First, noting the parallels between aberrant sexual behaviour in these television series and the behaviour of God (the ‘Unsub’, or ‘unknown subject’ of this chapter title) in texts like Hosea 1–2 and Ezekiel 16 allows us a greater specificity in exposing the underlying gender expectations and patterns of sexual abuse in these chapters. While the popular cultural examples I  examine below do not explicitly cite or reference either Hosea or Ezekiel, the sexually violent behaviour found therein echoes the sexual violence in these biblical texts in both form and function. Because of this overlap, we can fruitfully examine these two groups of cultural texts – the Bible and television – to compare their presentations of sexual violence against women. Second, exploring the defining characteristics of the procedural genre of television programmes can help shed light on the function of explicit and abusive images, including the marriage metaphor, in the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible.2 To begin, I will summarize briefly the main actions and issues present in Hosea 1–2 and Ezekiel 16. In Hosea, God instructs Hosea to marry ‘a wife of whoredom’, or a ‘promiscuous wife’, after which she and the prophet have three rather unfortunately named children:  Jezreel (‘God sows’), Lo-ruhamah (‘Not pitied’) and Lo-ammi (‘Not my people’) (Hos. 1.2).3 The book of Hosea thus attempts to draw an analogy between Hosea’s relationship with his wife and their children and the relationship between God and Israel. In Hosea 2, this analogy is intensified with the introduction of violent imagery, focusing on the punishments the wife will endure at the hands of her husband. He will ‘strip her naked and expose her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and turn her into a parched land, and kill her with thirst’ (2.3). There are also indications that this punishment will take place in the presence of her children, and that they, too, will suffer at the hands of their father (2.4). The chapter ends, though, with an image of forgiveness and reconciliation (2.14-23), complete with language implying a covenant renewal: ‘I will make for you a covenant on that day . . . And I will take you for my wife for ever.’

of Sipowicz in NYPD Blue’, in Understanding Religion and Popular Culture, ed. Terry Ray Clark and Dan W. Clanton, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2012), 89–103. 2.  Of course, there are many other texts I  could have chosen that denote episodes of gender violence, including Genesis 34, Judges 19–21, 2 Samuel 13 and Ezekiel 23. For more scholarly works discussing these and similar texts, see Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror:  Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Philadelphia:  Fortress Press, 1984); Renita J. Weems, Battered Love:  Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 1995); Joy A. Schroeder Dinah’s Lament:  The Biblical Legacy of Sexual Violence in Christian Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). 3. All biblical citations are taken from the NRSV.

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Similarly, in Ezekiel 16, the prophet uses the metaphor of Jerusalem as an abandoned female infant; God watches this infant grow, and after she reaches sexual maturity, God enters into a marriage covenant with her: You grew up and became tall and arrived at full womanhood; your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare. I  passed by you again and looked on you; you were at the age for love. I spread the edge of my cloak over you, and covered your nakedness: I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine. (Ezek. 16.7-8)

In vv. 15–34, however, we hear that the young Jerusalem eventually ‘played the whore’ with various foreign ‘lovers’, with the result that God becomes disgusted by her promiscuity. Much like its use in Hosea 1−2, the prophetic marriage metaphor in Ezekiel characterizes the actions of the people of Jerusalem as unfaithful, or ‘whoring’, in that they were worshipping other gods, indulging in religious syncretism, or engaging with other cultures. Unlike Hosea 1–2, though, the punishment detailed in Ezek. 16.35-43b differs in both form and degree: I will gather all your lovers, with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated; I will gather them against you from all around, and will uncover your nakedness to them, so that they may see all your nakedness . . . I  will deliver you into their hands, and they shall throw down your platform and break down your lofty places; they shall strip you of your clothes and take your beautiful objects and leave you naked and bare. They shall bring up a mob against you, and they shall stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords. They shall burn your houses and execute judgments on you in the sight of many women; I will stop you from playing the whore, and you shall also make no more payments.

After all these actions, after his ‘fury’ is satisfied, God says he will be calm; and, at the end of the chapter, God relates that he will remember his covenant with Jerusalem, and ‘will establish with you an everlasting covenant’ (v. 60), just as God promises to Israel in Hosea 2.14-23. Before commenting further on how television police procedurals depict events and actions analogous to those found in Hosea 1–2 and Ezekiel 16, let me briefly discuss what I  mean by ‘television procedural’, and outline how this particular genre affects its audience and determines their expectations. First, like biblical scholars’ understandings of biblical texts, scholars of television see media texts as ‘important sites where meanings are articulated and potentially activated into larger cultural circulation’.4 And, like the issue of textual determinacy in the field

4. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 123.

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of biblical studies, media critics generally see ‘meaning . . . as formed through the culturally specific interplay of texts, audiences, producers, and contexts’.5 So, we can view television episodes as ‘texts’ with which viewers engage, and we can see the construction of meaning as occurring in that engagement, but also informed by other concerns and issues, such as the viewer’s identity and context(s), as well as other economic and social variables. Thus, Miguel De La Torre notes the centrality of ‘social location’ in the interpretive process. He writes that ‘social location’ encompasses cultural influences which influence a person’s identity . . . These experiences define the meaning we give to the symbols that exist in our lives, including whole texts or individual words that operate as a form of linguistic symbol. In other words, we are all born into a society that shapes and forms us, [that is] our religious beliefs and . . . our interpretation of the Bible are mostly formed by our social location.6

For example, my own reading of Hosea 1–2 and Ezekiel 16 is shaped by my social location as an academic, a Jew, a straight white American man and a near compulsive TV viewer. Obviously I  construe a different kind of meaning from these texts than someone of a different gender, living in another geographical and historical location. The differences in our respective social locations necessarily determine what kinds of questions, ideas and assumptions we bring to a given text, which, in turn, determines the kinds of meaning(s) we might draw from it. Second, another variable that we need to consider is the genre of the television text we are examining. In biblical studies, the issue of genre is complex and contested, but in media studies, genre is an even more difficult definitional category due to the multifaceted nature of content and the means of delivery, such as traditional television, internet and personal devices. Put differently, at the dawn of American television, understanding and classifying genre was more convenient,

5.  Ibid. I  have addressed these and other questions in my article, ‘Pop Culture and the Bible’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation, ed. Steven L. McKenzie (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 2:114–23, especially 115–17. The interested reader can also consult two reliable overviews of this topic. First, Jonathan Culler offers an accessible introduction to these issues in his Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially ‘Language, Meaning, and Interpretation’ (55–68). Second, in Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Terry Eagleton discusses these topics in the chapter titled ‘Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory’ (47–78). For a discussion of the issue of ‘textual determinacy’ in the context of biblical studies, see The Bible and Culture Collective, ‘Reader-Response Criticism’, in The Postmodern Bible (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1995), 20–69. 6.  Miguel De La Torre, Reading the Bible from the Margins (Maryknoll:  Orbis Books, 2002), 2.

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as the number and types of shows were minimal, and the means of delivery was limited to in-home, static viewing. Now, scholars such as Jason Mittell note the classification of genre as a more daunting task, which must take into account ‘the larger cultural life of television texts, looking at how shows circulate in a range of spheres of practice’ (original emphasis).7 Third, since we are focusing on one specific genre, the police procedural, let me define what that is. In his work, Eddy von Mueller offers the following definition: The police procedural, in print or on the screen, organizes its narrative around the execution of a process, an orderly and to some extent standardized set of practices used by law enforcement to detect, deter and investigate criminal activity . . . The procedural is most frequently about the trials, triumphs and occasional travesties of police work as work, performed by paid agents of widely varying gifts and aptitudes. Law enforcement in the procedural mode is, moreover, an industrialized process: there is a complex division of labor, marked by professional hierarchies and specialized training . . . the individual members of the force are mobile, to some extent expendable . . . and like many industrial laborers, police officers are often alienated from their constituency . . . and their ostensible masters [original emphasis].8

Mueller and other scholars also describe an attempt on the part of the procedural to strive for realism or authenticity in their portrayal of the criminal justice system.9 The vast majority of current television dramas that focus on police work can be classified as procedurals, including the series we will consider below, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.10

7.  Mittell, Genre and Television, 124. 8.  Eddy von Mueller, ‘The Police Procedural in Literature and on Television’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 97. 9.  For this issue, see Mueller, ‘The Police Procedural’, 104–106; Mittell, Genre and Television, 131–34. 10. Mueller notes, The procedural multiplies and disperses its protagonist, or rather the protagonal function is served not by an individual, but most often by the combined efforts of a regularly constituted group  – a squad, a pair of patrol officers, a task force. And it is seldom by genius alone that killers are caught. Genius, when it appears in the procedural, always needs to call for back-up. Largely on these grounds, I  would provisionally bar from procedural rank most of the police dramas or novels centered on such specialized or ex officio operatives such as psychopathologists (Profiler, Criminal Minds), forensics experts (CSI, Quincy, Bones) and consulting amateurs (Cracker, Medium, Monk) [original emphasis]. (‘The Police Procedural’, 98)

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Fourth and finally, we should note that all texts, whether they are in the Bible or on television, are rhetorical, in that they attempt to persuade their readers or viewers to accept certain presuppositions or claims as a condition or outcome of that engagement. For example, a reader could not meaningfully engage with the Exodus narrative if they did not, at least for the duration of reading, accept at the level of the narrative that God is able to control the forces of nature. If they did not accept this narrative component, they would be unable to encounter the grand themes and overall claims the narrator is attempting to transmit. Similarly, if a viewer is unwilling to accept the basic tropes of the procedural which include the assumptions that the criminal justice system is an organized mechanism made up of specialized personnel whose goal is to investigate crime and dispense justice equitably, then they will not be attuned to the persuasive points the episode tries to make. To put it another way, texts expect certain things from readers, but readers also expect certain things from texts.11 More specifically, viewers of television and film come to their texts with certain expectations. As Steve Neale notes: It is likely that audiences will have some idea in advance of the kind of film (or play or programme) they are going to watch. They will have made an active choice to either watch or, if their preferences dictate, to avoid it. They will have done so on the basis of information supplied by advertising, by reviews and previews, perhaps by a title (such as Singin’ in the Rain) or by the presence of particular performers. They are therefore more likely to bring with them a set of expectations, and to anticipate that these expectations will be met in one way or another.12

I would disagree with Mueller’s judgement regarding both Criminal Minds and CSI, as these seem to include virtually all of the components of his own definition of ‘police procedural’. His objection seems rooted in the specific talents of certain members of the investigative teams, but this alone is insufficient to dismiss them from the genre of procedural. 11.  For example, a faithful attendee of a synagogue will likely expect to hear the Torah chanted in Hebrew, and, depending on the day, will expect to hear a drash (a ‘study’ – a brief interpretation, often with didactic or ethical content) on a specific Torah portion that will probably incorporate readings from traditional Jewish interpreters. 12.  Steve Neale, ‘Studying Genre,’ in The Television Genre Book, ed. Glen Creeber, 2nd  edn (London:  British Film Institute; New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 3. For a social psychology approach to this issue, see Sonia Livingston, Making Sense of Television: The Psychology of Audience Interpretation, 2nd edn, International Series in Social Psychology (London: Routledge, 1998), especially 33–50. See also Ranjini Rebera, ‘Polarity or Partnership? Retelling the Story of Martha and Mary from Asian Women’s Perspective’, Semeia 78 (1997):  93–107. Rebera observes that soap operas in Asia that are viewed communally provide a shared framework for initiation into, or reinforcement of, a system of ‘symbolic language’, which serves an identity function: ‘The telling of the story becomes

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Based on this view, we may ask the question:  what can audiences expect from police procedurals? In his analysis of the classic television series Dragnet, arguably the basis for every modern procedural, Jason Mittell examines several traits of the show and concludes, ‘As the foundation for the television police genre, Dragnet linked the textual conventions of downplaying violence and crimes occurring offscreen with cultural assumptions of ideological closure and authentic truth.’13 Mueller concurs, and further notes:  ‘By centralizing the collective labor or professional agents of the state – specifically, police workers – the police procedural ultimately validates the practices of an industrialized, bureaucratic apparatus for the prevention of crime, the pursuit and capture of offenders, and the (attempted) maintenance of public order.’14 In other words, viewers of police procedurals expect not to see violent crimes rendered on camera normally, but assume they will be offered a realistic portrayal of police procedure, the solving of the crime in question by the arrest or apprehension of the guilty party and a presentation of the criminal justice system as effective. All of these expectations are shared by the procedural that is the focus of this chapter:  Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (hereafter SVU). Premiering in 1999, SVU is a spin-off of creator Dick Wolf ’s juggernaut Law & Order series, one of the classic examples of a television police procedural. In contrast to the original series, SVU focuses exclusively on ‘sexually based offenses’ that are ‘considered especially heinous’.15 In the opening narration of each episode, the contexts for the series are laid bare:  ‘In New  York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.’ Pragmatically, this is all the viewer needs to know about almost every episode. That is, neither a detailed history of the series nor specific information about characters is necessary to understand most episodes, nor the episodes I will examine below. Before examining specific examples of sexually violent behaviour in SVU, I  would like to comment on why I  have chosen the specific examples we will discuss. In my attempt to categorize the violence and sexual abuse displayed in Hosea 1–2 and Ezekiel 16, I  encountered difficulty. The role played by the

a vehicle for understanding attitudes, cultural taboos, relationships in family and kinship networks, and many patterns of social behavior’ (ibid., 95). 13. Mittell, Genre and Television, 142. 14. Mueller, ‘The Police Procedural’, 99. 15. Given this focus on sexual violence and the presence of a strong female protagonist, does SVU present an unambiguous feminist viewpoint? Lisa M. Cuklanz and Sujata Moorti, ‘Television’s “New” Feminism: Prime-Time Representations of Women and Victimization’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 4 (2006):  302–21, examine feminist engagement with rape and sexual violence in the first five seasons of SVU, and conclude that the series’ portrayal of female characters is not unambiguously feminist: ‘SVU storylines couple feminist premises and assumptions with an indictment of so-called female traits’ in female characters (ibid., 303).

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deity – our ‘Divine Unsub’ – in the acts of sexual violence depicted in these texts renders this violence unique; it is neither considered in scholarly discussions of gender violence nor portrayed in the typical police procedural. Nevertheless, on closer inspection, Hosea 1–2 and Ezekiel 16 can be seen to display forms of sexual aggression that are recognizable in contemporary culture, based on their shared underlying motivations and the cultural functions that they serve. In the case of Hosea 1–2, analogies can be drawn between the sexual violence depicted in the biblical text and the cultural phenomenon of marital violence, or, as Irene Hanson Frieze refers to it, ‘intimate terrorism’.16 This particular type of violence is distinguished by its setting within a long-term, often marital, relationship, as well as the characteristic cycle it follows. Frieze notes that this cycle usually begins during the ‘dating stage’, which is characterized by emotional intensity and possessiveness on the part of the male participant.17 This possessiveness marks the extreme jealousy and feelings of inadequacy felt by the male, and will eventually lead to minor incidents of violence, usually followed by apologies, gifts and sometimes sexual encounters that may both reinforce and augment his violent tendencies. Violence will recur, and as the relationship continues, ‘the intervals between the violent episodes [get] shorter and shorter, and the violence [becomes] more and more severe’.18 Eventually, a horrible pattern is established: Violence is now routine, and the woman lives in constant fear that something she might do will initiate another incident of violence. He is violent to the children as well as to her. He destroys her possessions. She may experience severe injuries. Her self-esteem lowers as she hears repeated comments from him about the things she does wrong and about negative features of her personality. He tells her that no one else would ever accept her. His abuse may include belittlement of her, both privately and in front of other people.19

The options for women at this point in the cycle are few. They can leave, but leaving an emotionally devastating relationship like this is often more difficult than one

16.  See Irene Hanson Frieze, Hurting the One You Love:  Violence in Relationships (Belmont, CA:  Wadsworth, 2005), 96–115. Intimate terrorism is sometimes characterized by spousal rape; see Raquel Kennedy Bergen, Wife Rape:  Understanding the Response of Survivors and Service Providers, Sage Series on Violence against Women (Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage Publications, 1996), especially 11–63. I  would like to thank my colleague Dr Heather Lambert for sharing her expertise in the area of sexual violence with me. My insights into this issue would have been paltry indeed without her generous assistance. 17.  Frieze, Hurting the One You Love, 98–100. In this chapter, I  focus on intimate terrorism within heterosexual relationships, where the perpetrator is the man; Frieze also mentions occurrences of intimate terrorism perpetrated by women in heterosexual relationships and also by partners in same-sex relationships (ibid., 117–19, 124). 18. Ibid., 100. 19. Ibid., 100–101.

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might imagine for a number of reasons – psychological, social and financial. If she leaves, her partner often follows her, only to become her stalker. If she stays, then it is certain the violence will continue, and even if she tries to fight back, she runs the risk of further harm to herself and/or her children, or even death. The overlap between ‘intimate terrorism’ and the account of gendered violence in Hosea 1–2 should be obvious.20 In earlier biblical texts, God is characterized as a ‘jealous’ deity (e.g. Exod. 20.5), just as he plays the role of the jealous spouse in Hosea’s marriage metaphor; Gomer’s/Israel’s purported promiscuity thus leads to an escalation of threats against both herself and her children.21 And, in Hos. 2.9-13, the language of violence is employed as a behavioural deterrent and punishment:  ‘Now I  will uncover her shame in the sight of her lovers and no one shall rescue her out of my hand’ (v. 10). At the same time, Hos. 2.14-23 depicts the typical apologetic behaviour by the abusive spouse in the aftermath of violence: ‘Therefore, I will now persuade her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her . . . There she shall respond as in the days of her youth’ (2.14-15). The cycle that Frieze outlines is already evident in the text, and by this point in its progression, one would normally hold out little hope that Gomer, or Israel, would be able to leave this emotionally and physically abusive relationship.22

20. For works on Gomer and/or the (metaphoric) violence in these chapters, see Gerlinde Baumann, Love and Violence: Marriage as Metaphor for the Relationship between YHWH and Israel in the Prophetic Books, trans. Linda Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 85–104; Sharon Moughtin-Mumby, Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008), 206–68; Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, Just Wives? Stories of Power and Survival in the Old Testament & Today (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 91–115 (especially 103–15); T. Drorah Setel, ‘Prophets and Pornography: Female Sexual Imagery in Hosea’, in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Letty M. Russell (Philadelphia:  Westminster Press, 1985), 86–95; Yvonne Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in LiteraryTheological Perspective, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 212 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); Renita J. Weems, ‘Gomer: Victim of Violence or Victim of Metaphor?’ Semeia 47 (1989): 87–104; Weems, Battered Love, 45–52; Gale A. Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2003), 81–109; Gale A. Yee, ‘Hosea’, in Women’s Bible Commentary:  TwentiethAnniversary Edition, ed. Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 299–308. 21.  The issue of who makes these threats in Hosea 2 is complicated by the fact that the marriage metaphor necessarily conflates God and Hosea. That is, for the metaphor to work properly, God and Hosea must be seen in tandem, and as such, the most we can say in terms of the identity of the speaker at the outset of chapter 2 is that it is either God or Hosea, or both of them. 22.  In ‘Hosea’, Yee specifically addresses the ‘strategy’ God employs ‘to curb his “wife’s” actions’, and then connects this ‘strategy’ with the kind of intimate terrorism I see in the text of Hosea (304).

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As an example of how ‘intimate terrorism’ is depicted in SVU, let me discuss an episode titled ‘Persona’ (season 10, episode 8).23 The episode opens with a woman named Mia Latimer (played by Clea DuVall) asking for the morning-after pill in a pharmacy, saying ‘I can’t have his baby’. She then claims that she was raped. When the evidence does not support her claim, Detectives Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) suspect her husband has abused and raped her, a claim she initially denies. She eventually admits that her husband has abused her for years and controls her every action. At one key point, Benson visits Mia in her home and convinces Mia’s neighbour, Linnie Malcolm (Brenda Blethyn), to help her persuade Mia to press charges. Mia tries to leave the house, but Linnie and Benson stand her in front of a mirror and make her look at all the contusions and lacerations on her body, which her husband has inflicted. Mia tells them tearfully, ‘He always says he’s sorry, he always brings me flowers’, but Linnie counters this, saying, ‘He always says he’ll never hurt you again, until he does.’ Benson adds, ‘He’s not gonna change. You have to.’ Finally, Mia admits that her husband wanted to have sex with her in order to impregnate her, and to this end, he kept track of her menstrual cycle and knew when she was ovulating.24 When she refused to have sex, he beat her and raped her. After arresting Mia’s husband, Benson manages to get her to a woman’s shelter, but because her husband controls all her money and she has no family, it all proves too much for Mia, so she recants her testimony and moves home. Soon after, as Benson is staking out her apartment in the laundry room Mia shares with her neighbour, Mia’s husband kills her. The episode shows, in startling detail, the psychological and physical effects of ‘intimate terrorism’ upon its victims.25 And, although Hosea 1−2 does not explicitly name the sexual abuse inflicted on Gomer as intimate terrorism, it is apparent that the cycle of violence defined within this text coheres with Frieze’s definition. As such,

23.  The episode originally aired on 25 November 2008. In the episode, the Latimer case actually serves as a prelude to the main focus of the episode, which centres on Mia’s downstairs neighbour, Linnie Malcolm. Fingerprints recovered at Mia’s house show that Linnie murdered her husband in 1974, and when confronted, she claims she was the victim of domestic abuse and repeated spousal rape. She never told the police about her abuse when she was arrested, and escaped from police custody. After being rearrested, she eventually admits that she escaped because she was pregnant and wanted an abortion, which she could not have received in prison. At her trial, she is found guilty of escape, but the prosecutor indicates that due to extenuating circumstances, she will only ask for a sentence of probation. The episode ends, however, with Linnie’s current husband telling her he will never forgive her. 24.  Frieze describes this type of activity as ‘surveillance’, a behaviour akin to stalking (Hurting the One You Love, 102). 25.  The psychological, emotional and physical effects of intimate terrorism may include a loss of self-esteem and hope, post-traumatic stress disorder and a spectrum of physical illnesses associated with elevated levels of stress, including chronic pain, migraine headaches, stammering and stomach ulcers (see ibid., 102, 105–106).

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the examination of violence between a husband and wife in the SVU episode invites us to return to Hosea with a new perspective on both the characters therein and their actions. As with Hosea 1–2 above, the account of abuse in Ezekiel 16 is likewise difficult to define in relation to modern analogues, given the central role played by the deity in this account of sexual abuse and intimate terrorism. Nevertheless, I would suggest that an appropriate equivalent to the gendered violence in Ezekiel 16 is the use of rape as a weapon of war. First, it is important to note that rape has little or nothing to do with sexual arousal or intimacy. Rather, as Ruth Seifert notes: Rapes do not have much to do either with nature or with sexuality. Rather, they are acts of extreme violence implemented, of course, by sexual means. Studies show that rape is not an aggressive manifestation of sexuality, but rather a sexual manifestation of aggression. In the perpetrator’s psyche it serves no sexual purpose but is the expression of rage, violence, and dominance over a woman. At issue is her degradation, humiliation, and submission. To be sure, this violent act is carried out by sexual means.26

Seifert also examines what she calls the ‘societal function of rape’, and concludes that rape ‘regulates unequal power relationships between the sexes:  it serves to maintain a certain cultural order between the sexes or – when this order becomes fragile – to restore it’.27 Thus, rape is used to demonstrate power, to control victims. Rape during war, though, can convey a plethora of additional meanings. First, it can be used to affirm notions of masculinity among those who rape. Perpetrators understand that their ability to rape marks them as being more ‘manly’ than the men whom they have defeated. Put another way, the men who rape during warfare employ rape to symbolically indicate that they now have power over their vanquished foes in the most intimate way possible. Men defeated in war may themselves be targets of rape, but it is more common for the women in their community or their families to be the victims of sexual violence perpetrated by the enemy. The men who rape during warfare are therefore both attacking the symbols of fecundity and future within a defeated population and perpetuating the patriarchal assumption that women ‘belong’ to men. Through the act of rape, they thus assert their masculinity over and against their defeated enemies. Second, and building on that last point, rape as a weapon of war can be used to denigrate or destroy an opposing force’s culture through wreaking havoc with their familial structures. Finally, it can also be employed as a public way of addressing disorder and what those in power may see as discordant behaviour, that is, rape can be

26.  Ruth Seifert, ‘War and Rape:  A Preliminary Analysis’, in Mass Rape:  The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 55. 27. Ibid., 57.

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used as a punitive means of ‘correcting’ behaviours that threaten the ‘order’ of a particular political or military discourse.28 Catherine A.  McKinnon has also noted that rape during certain periods of conflict must be viewed as ‘genocidal rape’. Focusing on the Serbian-Croatian war of 1991–95, she writes: Like all rape, genocidal rape is particular as well as part of the generic, and its particularity matters. This is ethnic rape as an official policy of war in a genocidal campaign for political control. That means not only a policy of the pleasure of male power unleashed, which happens all the time in so-called peace; not only a policy to defile, torture, humiliate, degrade, and demoralize the other side, which happens all the time in war; and not only a policy of men posturing to gain advantage and ground over other men. It is specifically rape under orders. This is not rape out of control. It is rape under control. It is also rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape to kill and to make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape as an instrument of forced exile, rape to make you leave your home and never want to go back. It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and told to others: rape as spectacle. It is rape to drive a wedge through a community, to shatter a society, to destroy a people. It is rape as genocide.29

This emphasis on control, humiliation and degradation is also found in other geographic areas and contexts in which rape is used as a weapon of war, most notably, the epidemic of rape seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).30 This geographic focus will be important to the episode of SVU we will discuss shortly. The actions of God in Ezekiel 16 carry a functional analogy to the motivations, practices and results of rape used in war.31 That is, the sexual violence discussed 28. For further reflections on some of these options, see ibid., 58–64. 29.  Catherine A. McKinnon, ‘Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights’, in Mass Rape:  The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 190. 30.  To understand the use of rape as a weapon of war in the DRC, see Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, ‘Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC)’, International Studies Quarterly 53 (2009):  495–518; Sara Meger, ‘Rape of the Congo:  Understanding Sexual Violence in the Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 28 (2010): 119–35; Sophocles Kitharidis, ‘Rape as a Weapon of War: Combating Sexual Violence and Impunity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Way Forward’, African Human Rights Law Journal 15 (2015): 449–72. 31.  For works on the marriage metaphor in this and other chapters in Ezekiel (most notably Ezekiel 23), see Gerlinde Baumann, Love and Violence: Marriage as Metaphor for the Relationship between YHWH and Israel in the Prophetic Books, trans. Linda Maloney (Collegeville, MN:  Liturgical Press, 2003), 135–66; L. Juliana M. Claassens, ‘Transforming God Language: The Metaphor of God as Abusive Spouse (Ezekiel 16) in Conversation with

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and displayed in Ezek. 16.35-41 exhibits the motivations of humiliation and degradation, as well as a punitive element, in that God wishes to punish Jerusalem for her actions. In terms of practices, there are also parallels between this biblical text and the underlying functions of wartime rape, namely, the inclusion of the loaded phrase ‘uncover your nakedness’ that, in the context of Ezekiel 16.35-37, implies some form of forced sexual intercourse.32 Therefore, O whore, hear the word of the LORD: Thus says the Lord GOD, Because your lust was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your whoring with your lovers, and because of all your abominable idols, and because of the blood of your children that you gave to them, therefore, I will gather all your lovers, with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated; I will gather them against you from all around, and will uncover your nakedness to them, so that they may see all your nakedness.

As Joseph Blenkinsopp notes in his commentary on Ezekiel, these verses occur following the indictment of the ‘whore’ wife, and represent the verdict and ‘punishment for an adulterous and murderous wife, including exposure (cf. Hos. 2.10; Isa. 3.17) and stoning (Gen. 38.24; Deut. 22.21-24)’.33 The abusive nature of the punishment here does not escape Blenkinsopp, as he comments that ‘the violence of the language is . . . deliberately offensive’.34 God gathers together a group of Jerusalem’s former lovers – both the ones she loved and the ones she hated – to enact sexual abuse against her. The intended results of this abuse are similar to the desired outcome of rape used as a tool of war: God wishes both to assert his male dominance over and against the enemy and to control female sexuality by using

the Portrayal of God in The Color Purple’, Scriptura 113, no. 1 (2014):  1–11; Linda Day, ‘Rhetoric and Domestic Violence in Ezekiel 16’, Biblical Interpretation 8, no. 3 (2000): 205– 30; Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes, ‘The Metaphorization of Woman in Prophetic Speech: An Analysis of Ezekiel 23’, in A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets, ed. Athalya Brenner, Feminist Companion to the Bible 8 (Sheffield:  Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 244–55; Moughtin-Mumby, Sexual and Marital Metaphors, 156–205 (especially 169–89); Erin Runions, ‘Why Girls Cry:  Gender Melancholia and Sexual Violence in Ezekiel 16 and Boys Don’t Cry’, in Screening Scripture:  Intertextual Connections between Scripture and Film, ed.  George Aichele and Richard Walsh (Harrisburg, PA:  Trinity Press, 2002), 188–212; Mary E. Shields, ‘An Abusive God? Identity and Power/Gender and Violence in Ezekiel 23’, in Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible:  A Reader, ed. A. K.  M. Adam (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2001), 129–51; Weems, Battered Love, 58–64; Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 111–34. 32. The phrase ‘uncover [someone’s] nakedness’ is normally a euphemism for engaging in sexual relations, and is found most prominently in the law codes of Leviticus 18 in relation to unlawful sexual acts. 33. Joseph Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, IBC (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1997), 78–79. 34. Ibid., 79.

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rape as a public ‘warning’ to other women. This is made clear in God’s words to Jerusalem in 16.41: ‘They shall burn your houses and execute judgments on you in the sight of many women.’ Drawing comparisons between God’s treatment of Jerusalem in Ezekiel 16 and the use of rape as a weapon of war yields some valuable observations. In the context of Ezekiel, God’s initiation of rape serves a dual purpose, which is akin to the uses of rape during warfare. First, and obviously, the divinely initiated sexual assault demonstrates God’s power and ability to punish the actions of Jerusalem. Further, though, it demonstrates his masculine superiority over other nations. That is, by forcing those other nations to rape Jerusalem, God is showing that he is in charge of them, that he effectively controls their sexuality, just as he controls Jerusalem’s. Thus, the issue of Jerusalem’s unfaithfulness – seen here as discordant behaviour – is resolved brutally and publicly, as is any potential challenge to God’s power and claim to sole worship. The issue of rape during warfare is likewise at the centre of an episode of SVU’s eleventh season, titled ‘Witness’ (season 11, episode 16).35 The title of the episode refers to Nardalee Ulah (played by Saidah Arrika Ekulona), a reluctant witness to the rape and assault of a woman named Lainie (Diora Baird). She is persuaded to testify in court, despite the fact that she is an illegal immigrant from the DRC. At one point, she describes her brutal treatment at the hands of the Interahamwe – itinerant civilian, paramilitary execution squads – to Assistant District Attorney Alex Cabot (Stephanie March), and we thus learn why she is so reluctant to testify. She tells Alex that five men came to her village and raped both her and her fiveyear-old daughter while her husband was forced to watch. Her husband eventually ran away and left them at the mercy of their attackers. Six days later, her daughter died of complications from the gang rape. After the rapists left the village, her husband returned and forced her to leave their house because of the shame he would endure as the result of her rape. Nardalee managed to find her way to a refugee camp, but the Interahamwe raided the camp. Accusing her of aiding local rebels, they took her back to their camp. At this point in the scene, Nardalee completely breaks down. Later in the episode, she testifies not only to the attack she witnessed, but also reveals more details about her own brutal treatment in the DRC.36 35. ‘Witness’ originally aired on 17 March 2010. 36. Nardalee’s account, with its horrific descriptions, serves to allay the denial of female subjectivity Ruth Seifert mentions in her work on wartime rape. As Seifert explains, By being marginalized, suppressed, or even ‘naturalized’, rape as an extreme and structural act of violence against women disappears from the cultural memory (when rape is seen as an unfortunate but ‘natural’ by-product of war, for example, beyond further analysis, or when, despite the innumerable instances of it, it is interpreted as an atypical ‘slip’ on the part of insane hordes). The experiences, the reality, and thereby the subjectivity of women are being denied. (‘War and Rape’, 67)

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At the end of the trial, the rapist is convicted, and Nardalee is granted a U-Visa (a special Visa given to victims of serious crimes who are aiding law enforcement agencies) to stay in the United States. Nonetheless, she decides to return to the Congo to help other rape victims. Inspired by Nardalee, Alex requests a leave of absence to work with the United Nations International Criminal Court to prosecute sex crimes in conflict areas. Throughout this episode, Nardalee’s harrowing story testifies to the brutality of rape as a weapon of war, and the impact that it had on herself, her daughter and her husband. This reinforces the point I made above, that rape is not motivated by sexual desire, but by a desire for power and control. Those who raped Nardalee and her daughter in front of her husband were engaged in a performance of masculine dominance, much in the same way that God’s abusive puppetry in Ezekiel 16 (using other men to sexually violate his bride) is an attempt by God to assert his male puissance over both his ‘whore’ wife and her lovers.37 In both cases, it is the assertion of male superiority, be it religious, political or military, that lies behind the use of sexual violence within conflict situations. Put differently, rape is the means by which masculine dominance is sought. After surveying two specific biblical examples of sexual violence, their modern analogues within contemporary culture and how those analogues are engaged in SVU, I will return to my original question: why would consumers of texts be more willing to accept or excuse acts of sexual violence and abuse in one domain of culture (the Bible) and yet be reticent about doing so in another (television procedurals)? That is, why are sexually violent accounts in biblical literature often deemed to be beyond our critique, or even justified, whereas comparable violence depicted in popular media (especially television) is often the target of criticism and regulation? Some scholars have opined that, in our postmodern age, religion can and should be seen as but one form of our larger cultural existence, and thus only one source of meaning among many.38 Given this, and as I mentioned at the start of this chapter, it seems inadequate to claim that the biblical stories are sacred, and that sexually violent imagery within these stories should therefore be accepted, or at least be beyond our critique.39 37. In his discussion of rabbinic views of Leviticus 18 and 20, David Brodsky comments that ‘penetration is a form of “conquest” of the Other’. Certainly, this intention seems to be present in both Ezekiel 16 and the SVU episode under discussion. See David Brodsky, ‘Sex in the Talmud:  How to Understand Leviticus 18 and 20,’ in Torah Queeries:  Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, ed. Gregg Drinkwater et  al. (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2009), 158. 38. For example, see Conrad Ostwalt, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 43. 39.  I am grateful to the editors of this volume for calling my attention to Linda Day’s excellent pedagogical piece, ‘Teaching the Prophetic Marriage Metaphor Texts’, Teaching Theology and Religion 2, no. 3 (1999): 173–9, which details four different ways in which one might not only introduce students to passages like those I am examining, but also preserve the ‘shock value’ of the marriage metaphor (see especially 177–9).

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One way of answering the question above is to note that procedurals like SVU provide something sorely missing from biblical texts such as Hosea 1–2 and Ezekiel 16; namely, the perspectives of the victims of sexual violence, including their ability to seek out justice through the criminal justice system.40 As such, viewers of SVU and other similar procedurals can track the consequences of sexual violence more comprehensively than they can in the more thoroughgoing androcentric domain of biblical literature. This additional narrative element, this more rounded rendering, provides for the possibility of empathy on the part of the viewers due to the normalized focus on telling the victims’ stories as well as allowing the viewer to see and hear the victims’ account. Moreover, viewers also witness other characters in the procedural showing compassion for the victim, or outrage over the violence perpetrated against them. And finally, procedurals such as SVU have a marked emphasis on seeking justice for victims of gender violence, thereby reinforcing the injustice of this crime. None of three these elements are evoked in the biblical accounts of sexual violence, including the texts from Hosea and Ezekiel I  have been discussing.41 Put differently, because of the expectations viewers have about procedurals – including the solving of the crime and an effective criminal justice system  – and because these procedurals typically grant them insights into the

40.  It is unclear to me whether Cuklanz and Moorti claim that ‘victim voices and perspectives’ are lacking from prime-time television in general, or if this lack is also evident in SVU (see ‘Television’s “New” Feminism’, 307). If the former, then I would agree; but if the latter, I would disagree vehemently. 41. It is important to note that it is not only the biblical text that masks the subjectivity of women and their voices; secondary scholarly literature can also do so. For example, in commenting on Hos. 2.6-15, Gary V. Smith claims, It is important to realize that God is actually acting in grace rather than in anger. He will symbolically hedge his wife, like a farm animal within a confined area with stone walls and fences made of thornbushes. This is for her own good and for the good of their relationship (cf. 3.3). It will protect her from straying off and returning to love other gods. (Hosea, Amos, Micah, The NIV Application Commentary [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001], 60; emphasis mine) This comment is indicative of the way in which Smith objectifies women in Hosea. That is, he never considers the perspective of Gomer in his treatment of Hosea 1–3. He sees her, and by extension God’s wife, as passive characters, acted upon rather than having any agency. They are treated like misbehaving children, as defective possessions, not as actual persons with their own experiences, voices and motivations. This denial of subjectivity to Gomer is all the more obvious since Smith takes pains to emphasize the biographical impact God’s command to marry Gomer had on Hosea (see especially 46 and 53), and then focuses almost entirely on the theological axis of the marriage metaphor, ignoring the human toll it takes on Gomer (62, 65). Finally, Smith flatly dismisses what he calls the ‘unusual interpretations’ put forward by ‘feminists’ like Yee and Setel (64–6).

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trauma of gender violence for its victims, they are less apt to tolerate or excuse the sexual abuse and aggression they encounter within these cultural texts.42 This claim regarding genre-specific viewer expectations and their concomitant attitudes regarding sexual violence is not merely theoretical. Recently, Stacey Hust et al. surveyed college undergraduates and asked them questions regarding their attitudes towards ‘rape myth acceptance’,43 issues of consent and their frequency of watching crime dramas such as SVU.44 Based on participants’ reactions to crime dramas, and SVU in particular, they found that ‘viewing the program is associated with decreased rape myth acceptance’; moreover, ‘viewers who are exposed to the negative consequences of sexual assault in the Law & Order programs are more likely to adhere to sexual consent decisions’.45 In other words, watching police procedurals like SVU can encourage viewers to understand the motivation of rape as a desire for power on the part of the perpetrator, rather than an act encouraged by the victim’s behaviour. Additionally, these procedurals can emphasize for viewers the importance of listening to one’s sexual partner regarding matters of sexual consent. These results resonate with my earlier claim that, due to expectations based on genre, television viewers may have less tolerance for episodes of sexual violence they see in police procedural series than they do for analogous forms of such violence depicted in biblical texts.46 Hust et al. conclude by noting that ‘[e]xposure to the Law & Order franchise supports previous studies that demonstrated that exposure to crime dramas can have positive effects. Given the Law & Order producers’ conscientious efforts to not glamorize rape and to portray punishment of the crime, they have essentially created a program that could be used to reduce sexual assault’.47 In other words,

42.  The limiting function for viewers’ expectations inherent in the genre of police procedurals is noted by Cuklanz and Moorti in their discussion of the depiction of gender diversity within SVU:  ‘The program’s location within the paradigm of the prime-time detective genre means that it cannot represent feminism or women in a complex manner’ (‘Television’s “New” Feminism’, 304). 43.  Rape myths are those widely held (false) beliefs and misperceptions about sexual violence, including the belief that rape victims are somehow to blame for their assaults, and that rape cannot occur between partners in a relationship. See Stacey Hust et al., ‘Law & Order, CSI, and NCIS: The Association between Exposure to Crime Drama Franchises, Rape Myth Acceptance, and Sexual Consent Negotiation among College Students’, Journal of Health Communication 20, no. 12 (2015): 1371. 44. Ibid., 1373. 45.  Ibid., 1377. Their understanding of the series is heavily influenced by the work of Cuklanz and Moorti. 46. To be fair, the authors admit that ‘[a]lthough it appears that the media plays a role in determining attitudes and behavioural intentions related to sexual assault, the direct order of effects cannot be determined’ (ibid., 1378). In other words, they are unable to prove a definitive causal relationship based on the data they gathered. 47. Ibid.

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SVU has created a ‘televisual’ environment in which rape and sexual assault are viewed negatively, and where rapists face consequences via a system of justice that allows the victim both voice and agency. Moreover, the viewer is allowed to experience the subjectivity of the victim as well as track the arc of justice for them. These three environmental components are, unfortunately, not present within the biblical texts we examined above. That is, these texts render voiceless the female victims of sexual violence; they are silent throughout their stories. We as readers are not privy to what happens to Gomer after her abuse and reconciliation with her husband in Hosea 1–2. Likewise, we are not told of Jerusalem’s post-traumatic struggle after the sexual violence enacted upon her in Ezekiel 16. We do not know if either of these female figures seek or achieve justice. Finally, with regard to the fate of their abusers/rapists, it seems quite clear that there are no repercussions for the violence they inflict, especially on God’s part. These claims, stories and ambiguities lead to difficult questions for scholars and people with a biblical faith. Should our expectations for dignity, humanity, safety and, above all, justice not be higher for biblical literature than for television shows? Should we not place a higher bar for compassion and righteousness in the Bible than the one found in SVU? Should we not be able to say of the Bible, ‘These are our stories’? I want to end this chapter by thinking about how we might begin to address these questions. First, the authors of Hosea 1–2 and Ezekiel 16 gloss over the intimate terrorism in these texts by evoking the perpetrator’s promises of reconciliation with their ‘errant’ spouse (Hos. 2.19-20; Ezek. 16.60-63). Yet these promises of future harmony are a woefully inadequate response, serving only to eclipse the violence of events, while also suggesting that the ends justify the means. As I mentioned above, these acts of reconciliation are uttered within the midst of the violence, but this theme continues throughout both prophetic books. In Hosea, there are several passages in which God turns away from the wrath and punishment evoked in chapters 1–2. Most famously, God exclaims in 11.8-9, ‘How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . . My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger.’48 Similarly, in Ezekiel 36–37, the prophet announces that Israel will soon return from exile (36.8), a new covenant will be established (36.26-31), the land to which they return will be like a new Eden (36.35) and, most significantly, the possibility of corporate resurrection is raised for the covenant community (37.1-14). While these outcomes are powerfully moving, they represent the endpoint of a process that includes the violent sexual acts I described above, and as such, the reconciliation and liberation they promise is fundamentally tainted. Second, in order to counter the tendency of biblical texts to neglect the sexually abusive experiences of its female characters, we can take a leaf out of television programmes such as SVU and attempt to heighten the subjectivity of biblical victims of gender violence by reading the text from their perspectives.

48. See also Hos. 14.1-7.

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One way to do such a reading is to engage fictional and/or poetic reimaginings of biblical women. For example, in her book, I Am . . . Biblical Women Tell Their Own Stories, Athalya Brenner takes on the first-person persona of biblical women, not only to excavate their inner thoughts and desires, but also to highlight the intersection of ancient biblical texts and ‘modern and postmodern concerns’.49 Similarly, Norma Rosen composes fictional stories that engage both biblical women and the traditional Jewish interpretations surrounding them in an attempt to ‘bring these powerful figures from our past into contemporary perspective’.50 Her stories reflect an attempt to rectify what she identifies as a frustration that the ‘power of ancient biblical narrative is often marred . . . by the peculiar voicelessness of the women, Matriarchs powerful enough to deflect the course of covenantal succession, yet almost never the enactors of narrative’.51 Finally, in Lady Parts: Biblical Women and the Vagina Monologues, Kathryn D. Blanchard and Jane S. Webster collect a number of first-person, performative incarnations based on stories of biblical women in the style of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, a play that explores issues of sexual identity, expression and embodiment through the stories of multiple characters. Lady Parts extends this focus on exploring embodied female experience to include biblical women, with the understanding that ‘women’s stories, whether in the Bible or in real life, are human stories that must be heard in order for the world to be made whole’.52 Each of these examples seeks to fill the deficit existing within biblical characterizations of women by adopting the literary strategies of re-situation or retelling; thus, by imaginatively supplementing the paucity of information about female characters in biblical texts, these contemporary works and others like them invite readers to reconsider those female characters and the ways in which the Bible elides their subjectivity. Third, we can start to consider how readers who use the biblical library as a resource for ethical thought and moral action might approach troublesome 49. Athalya Brenner, I Am . . . Biblical Women Tell Their Own Stories (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), x. 50.  Norma Rosen, Biblical Women Unbound (Philadelphia and Jerusalem:  The Jewish Publication Society, 1996), x. 51. Ibid., ix. 52.  Kathryn D. Blanchard and Jane S. Webster, ‘Introduction’, in Lady Parts:  Biblical Women & the Vagina Monologues, ed. Kathryn D. Blanchard and Jane S. Webster (Eugene, OR:  Wipf & Stock, 2012), 25. This is similar to the work done by Rebera when she asks non-literate Asian women to retell or re-enact biblical stories using their own customs and traditions. She notes, Creating safe avenues for exploring scripture and doing theology will therefore give the silenced women of the Bible a voice, and, at the same time, give women of today the freedom to claim their identity within their understanding of the message. Such understandings will also release Asian women to re-image their relationship with God and with community, in new and different ways. (‘Polarity or Partnership?’, 97)

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texts such as Hosea 1–2 and Ezekiel 16. There are various works that deal with ethics and ethical readings of biblical literature, but for our purposes, the work of John Barton is particularly helpful. In his book Ethics and the Old Testament, Barton examines 2 Samuel 11, the story of David and Bathsheba, and asks how a disturbing and unflattering narrative such as this could possibly help one’s moral life. He writes, ‘Stories can feed our moral life by providing us with visions of how real human beings can live through various crises and trials and remain human, that is, recognizably continuous with ourselves as part of the human race.’53 That is, ‘there is something narrative can do with moral truths that cannot be done through ethical injunctions, and that is to give them what might be called an existential force’.54 This twin emphasis on ‘existential force’ and narrating examples of humans undergoing crises not only allows the development of imaginative empathy for characters, it also encourages readers to engage with flawed characters and the often terrible actions they perform. As Barton notes: If we are to take stories like the story of David seriously as an ethical resource, then we shall have to understand the moral life as fed by reflection on the way narrators capture the essence of human persons in the way they tell their story, leading us to enter into the lives of those persons and understand what we share in common with them because we too are human. General moral principles are bound to operate in such stories, and they can be extracted and discussed. But the ethical interest of the stories do not lie there. It lies in the interplay of such principles with the flawed characters of the protagonists in the stories, producing complex actions in which we can recognize our own moral dilemmas and obligations.55

In other words, if we want to employ biblical literature as a resource for ethical rumination and moral undertakings, we must find a way to recognize ourselves and our contexts in that literature. And to do so requires that we not only read those texts closely, but engage all aspects of them, including those that we may find revolting. Because, if we turn a blind eye to horrific events like those I examined above, then, to use Barton’s terms, we will be unable ‘to enter into the lives of those persons and understand what we share in common with them’.56 Similarly, and in conclusion, David M.  Gunn and Danna Nolan Fewell echo a point I  make above:  ‘Texts are not objective representations of reality, but representations of particular value systems. How we respond to such value systems is determined by our own values.’57 That is, depending on their own social 53. John Barton, ‘Ethics and Story’, in Ethics and the Old Testament, 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, 2002), 31. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 36. 56. Ibid. 57. See David M. Gunn and Dana Nolan Fewell, ‘Readers and Responsibility’, in Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 191–2.

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location(s) and experiences, some readers will encounter stories of sexual violence in the Bible and recoil, while others might ignore them, and still others might see in them a just punishment for the behaviour ascribed to the victim. Gunn and Fewell then ask what ‘people who believe in social equality and yet for whom the Bible is a source of religious authority’ might be able to do when faced with the complicated matter of reading troubling and even contradictory texts in the Bible, and propose the following answer58: We can learn to recognize our own world in the text [much like Barton exhorts us to do]. We can try to relate to all the characters and not just the heroes [just as Brenner, Rose and Lady Parts encourage us to do]. We can listen to more than one voice and particularly to those faint, niggling voices that whisper ‘all is not right with the world’.59

The ultimate goal, then, is to cultivate empathy for and grant subjectivity to the victims of sexual violence in the biblical narratives, in the same way that SVU pushes it viewers to recognize the subjectivity of the victims of sexual violence depicted in its episodes. As Gunn and Fewell put it: If we realize that the world of the Bible is a broken world, that its people are human and therefore limited, that its social system is flawed, then we might start to see more clearly our own broken world, our own human limitations, our own defective social systems. And who knows? Maybe we shall find ourselves called to be the agents of change.60

Given the increasing awareness of the frequency of sexual assault on college and university campuses, as well as the recent advent of the #MeToo movement, which highlights the sexual harassment and violence that women in various fields of employment have been forced to endure, it is high time to revisit the presence of divinely enacted and/or endorsed sexual violence in the Bible. For many of us, just because these are ‘our stories’ does not mean that we should ignore the ‘heinous’ and ‘vicious’ acts found therein. Instead, we need to grapple with them and hear the voiceless victims within these texts so that our ‘Divine Unsub’ (God) and the sexually violent actions he perpetrates will not be ‘unknown’ any longer.

Bibliography Baaz, Maria Eriksson, and Maria Stern. ‘Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC)’. International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2009): 495–518. 58. Ibid., 204. 59. Ibid., 205. 60. Ibid.

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Barton, John. ‘Ethics and Story’. In Ethics and the Old Testament, 19–36. 2nd edn. London: SCM Press, 2002. Baumann, Gerlinde. Love and Violence: Marriage as Metaphor for the Relationship between YHWH and Israel in the Prophetic Books. Translated by Linda Maloney. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003. Bergen, Raquel Kennedy. Wife Rape: Understanding the Response of Survivors and Service Providers. Sage Series on Violence against Women. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996. The Bible and Culture Collective. The Postmodern Bible. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Blanchard, Kathryn D., and Jane S. Webster, eds. Lady Parts: Biblical Women and the Vagina Monologues. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012. Blenkinsopp, Joseph. Ezekiel. IBC. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1997. Brenner, Athalya. I Am . . . Biblical Women Tell Their Own Stories. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Brodsky, David. ‘Sex in the Talmud: How to Understand Leviticus 18 and 20’. In Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, edited by Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser and David Shneer. 157–69. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Claassens, L. Juliana M. ‘Transforming God Language: The Metaphor of God as Abusive Spouse (Ezekiel 16) in Conversation with the Portrayal of God in The Color Purple’. Scriptura 113, no. 1 (2014): 1–11. Clanton, Dan W., Jr. ‘ “These are Their Stories”: Views of Religion in Law & Order’. Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 4 (2003). Available online https://www.utpjournals. press/doi/abs/10.3138/jrpc.4.1.005 (accessed 13 April 2018). Clanton, Dan W., Jr. Daring, Disreputable, and Devout: Interpreting the Hebrew Bible’s Women in the Arts and Music. New York: T&T Clark, 2009. Clanton, Dan W., Jr. ‘On the Job and among the Elect: Religion and the Salvation of Sipowicz in NYPD Blue’. In Understanding Religion and Popular Culture, edited by Terry Ray Clark and Dan W. Clanton, Jr., 89–103. London: Routledge, 2012. Clanton, Dan W., Jr. ‘Pop Culture and the Bible’. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation, edited by Steven L. McKenzie, 2:114–23. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cuklanz, Lisa M., and Sujata Moorti. ‘Television’s “New” Feminism: PrimeTime Representations of Women and Victimization’. Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 4 (2006): 302–21. Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Day, Linda. ‘Teaching the Prophetic Marriage Metaphor Texts’. Teaching Theology and Religion 2, no. 3 (1999): 173–9. Day, Linda. ‘Rhetoric and Domestic Violence in Ezekiel 16’. Biblical Interpretation 8, no. 3 (2000): 205–30. De La Torre, Miguel. Reading the Bible from the Margins. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2002. Dijk-Hemmes, Fokkelien van. ‘The Metaphorization of Woman in Prophetic Speech: An Analysis of Ezekiel 23’. In A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets, edited by Athalya Brenner, 244–55. Feminist Companion to the Bible 8. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd edn. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

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Frieze, Irene Hanson. Hurting the One You Love: Violence in Relationships. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2005. Gunn, David M., and Danna Nolan Fewell. ‘Readers and Responsibility’. In Narrative in the Hebrew Bible, 189–205. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Hust, Stacey J. T., Emily Garrigues Marett, Ming Lei, Chunbo Ren and Weina Ran. ‘Law & Order, CSI, and NCIS: The Association between Exposure to Crime Drama Franchises, Rape Myth Acceptance, and Sexual Consent Negotiation among College Students’. Journal of Health Communication 20, no. 12 (2015): 1369–81. Kitharidis, Sophocles. ‘Rape as a Weapon of War: Combating Sexual Violence and Impunity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Way Forward’. African Human Rights Law Journal 15, no. 2 (2015): 449–72. Livingston, Sonia. Making Sense of Television: The Psychology of Audience Interpretation. 2nd edn. International Series in Social Psychology. London: Routledge, 1998. McKinnon, Catherine A. ‘Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights’. In Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, edited by Alexandra Stiglmayer, 183–96. Translated by Marion Faber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Meger, Sara. ‘Rape of the Congo: Understanding Sexual Violence in the Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo’. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 28, no. 2 (2010): 119–35. Mittell, Jason. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004. Moughtin-Mumby, Sharon. Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Mueller, Eddy von. ‘The Police Procedural in Literature and on Television’. In The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson, 96–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Neale, Steve. ‘Studying Genre’. In The Television Genre Book, edited by Glen Creeber, 3–5. 2nd edn. London: British Film Institute; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Ostwalt, Conrad. Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination. 2nd edn. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Rebera, Ranjini. ‘Polarity or Partnership? Retelling the Story of Martha and Mary from Asian Women’s Perspective’. Semeia 78 (1997): 93–107. Rosen, Norma. Biblical Women Unbound. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1996. Runions, Erin. ‘Why Girls Cry: Gender Melancholia and Sexual Violence in Ezekiel 16 and Boys Don’t Cry’. In Screening Scripture: Intertextual Connections Between Scripture and Film, edited by George Aichele and Richard Walsh, 188–212. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002. Sakenfeld, Katherine Doob. Just Wives? Stories of Power and Survival in the Old Testament and Today. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Schroeder, Joy A. Dinah’s Lament: The Biblical Legacy of Sexual Violence in Christian Interpretation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Seifert, Ruth. ‘War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis’. In Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, edited by Alexandra Stiglmayer, 54–72. Translated by Marion Faber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Setel, T. Drorah. ‘Prophets and Pornography: Female Sexual Imagery in Hosea’. In Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, edited by Letty M. Russell, 86–95. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985.

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Sherwood, Yvonne. The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in LiteraryTheological Perspective. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 212. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Shields, Mary E. ‘An Abusive God? Identity and Power/Gender and Violence in Ezekiel 23’. In Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible: A Reader, edited by A. K. M. Adam, 129–51. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2001. Trible, Phyllis. Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Overtures to Biblical Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Weems, Renita J. ‘Gomer: Victim of Violence or Victim of Metaphor?’ Semeia 47 (1989): 87–104. Weems, Renita J. Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets. Overtures to Biblical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. Yee, Gale A. Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. Yee, Gale A. ‘Hosea’. In Women’s Bible Commentary: Twentieth-Anniversary Edition, edited by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, 299–308. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012.

Chapter 10 P O I R O T, T H E B OU R G E O I S P R O P H E T:   A G AT HA C H R I S T I E’ S B I B L IC A L A DA P TAT IO N S Hannah M. Strømmen

Agatha Christie’s canon from the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction is sometimes said to be surpassed in popularity only by the Bible. But is a large and faithful readership the only connection between the ‘Queen of Crime’ and the ‘Book of Books’? In this chapter, I argue that Christie’s popular detective hero, Hercule Poirot, becomes a mode of adapting religion to the modern world of Europe after the First World War, a world regarded by Christie as well as many scholars as increasingly secular. The question Christie’s crime fiction asks, and that Poirot forms an answer to, is: how to affirm a collective anxiety about an unstable middle-class world, while promoting a religious sensibility that can endure in a secularizing century?1 Agatha Christie is one of the dominant figures in the Golden Age of crime fiction, an age associated predominantly with the interwar years.2 Multiple suspects, the clue-puzzle form, murder as the central crime, the enclosed nature of the scene of crime, a focus on the middle and upper-middle classes and the dearth of references to wider political issues are all features that define her corpus.3 It is in the domestic spaces and local communities of the bourgeoisie that victims and perpetrators abound. The world Christie depicts reflects a stratum of society experiencing the increasing living standards in 1920s Britain, and the growing leisure culture of the 1930s.4 But it is also a Europe that is haunted by the trauma 1. Throughout the chapter, I include the original publication date of Christie’s novels in brackets the first time each novel is mentioned in the text. Any page references are based on later editions of the novels, the full publication dates and details of which can be found in the bibliography at the end of this chapter. 2.  Although its distinctive features both precede and exceed this time period. See John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (Abingdon:  Routledge, 2005), 35. Christie herself wrote into the 1970s. 3. Stephen Knight, ‘The Golden Age’, in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 77–8. 4.  Gary Day, ‘Introduction’, in Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, vol. 2:  1930– 1955, ed. Gary Day (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 15.

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of the trenches and the prospect of a world that can never be the same again5 – a world morally out of kilter. Detective work for Christie is, as Stephen Knight points out, ‘a process of exorcising the threats’ that middle-class society ‘nervously anticipates within its own membership’; it is work marked by the tensions of a competitive individualist world6 and a bourgeois humdrum exterior that obscures the dark passions and proclivities of the unknowable individuals we encounter as neighbours, colleagues, family and friends. The Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, is the exorcist extraordinaire in the thirty-three novels and sixty-five short stories Christie wrote about him between 1920 and 1975. In Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, Callum Brown calls the twentieth century the ‘secularising century’.7 He refers to the ‘dissolution of the religious in British culture’ as ‘one of the greatest cultural changes of all time’.8 But, while Brown traces the ‘diminishing place of Christian culture in Britain’ in the twentieth century,9 he shows that this was no straightforward decline of religion. For one, the very concept of ‘religion’ ‘was constantly being questioned, and seemed to be changing, during those one hundred years’.10 Brown points to 5. Christie’s character Arthur Hastings (who is frequently the narrative voice) is a prime figure for this sense of nostalgia for a lost world. In the first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), Hastings appears at the country house where the murder takes place after being invalided from the Front in 1916. Hastings repeatedly laments a disappeared past, often reflected in the fact that ‘good old-fashioned’ servants are ‘dying out’ (71, 179; see also Dumb Witness [1937], 89). By the time of the final novel, Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, set back at the country house at Styles, Hastings refers to the time of the first novel as the good ‘old days’ (1975, 14). There are myriad references throughout the Poirot books to ‘nowadays’, to the ‘stress and hurry of the modern world’ (The Labours of Hercules [1947], 374), to a new time when many women have jobs (e.g. The Hollow [1946], 308) or to cocktails representing modernity (Three Act Tragedy [1935], 33); Poirot declares himself ‘not in tune with the modern world’ (Mrs McGinty’s Dead [1952], 11). The ‘modern version of the Bible’ is also decried in favour of the ‘fine prose and blank verse’ of the Authorised (King James) Version (Hallowe’en Party [1969], 157). In After the Funeral (1953), there is an impassioned speech along the lines of ‘What’s the country coming to?’, the rant ranging from not being able to get good servants to defenceless women being killed (98). Poirot himself is tarred by a similar sentiment in this novel, when he is seen as an ‘upstart foreigner’ by one of the other characters (218). A  similar rant can be found in Taken at the Flood (1948), which also involves the racist abuse of Poirot (487). At the same time, one of the characters in Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) quotes the Bible (‘Their old men dream dreams and their young men have visions’; Joel 2.28; cf. Acts 2.17) in order to emphasize the necessity of moving forward, of not sticking too pigheadedly to tradition (293). 6. Knight, ‘The Golden Age’, 82. 7. Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow : Pearson, 2006), 1. 8. Ibid., 6. 9. Ibid., 5. 10. Ibid., 1.

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the way in which religious ideas continued to circulate and be negotiated in social and cultural discourses.11 In Christie’s crime fiction, and particularly in the figure of Hercule Poirot, we find one such circulation of religious ideas. Poirot is by no means obviously or ostentatiously religious. He is referred to as a Catholic by birth (Labours of Hercules, 363),12 his religious practice is rare13 and his religious sentiments are far from flamboyant. Perhaps understandably, then, scholarship on Agatha Christie has neglected to account for the ways in which acute anxieties raised in the interwar years about morality, society and the individual become interwoven in Christie’s fiction with the imagining of a peculiarly prophetic persona in the figure of Poirot. Read as an adaptation of a biblical prophet figure, Poirot’s trenchant sense of justice, powers of revelation and ability to restore order by identifying proper guilt can be understood as a strategy for translating the biblical prophetic corpus into a secular idiom.14 In this way, Christie demonstrates the continuous need for (appropriately adapted) prophetic figures in society as well as the continued relevance of the Bible in the twentieth century. My aim in this chapter is to convey the way in which Christie presents Poirot as a prophetic boundary figure, ‘standing between the world of the sacred and secular’.15 To demonstrate this I first present the explicit ways in which Poirot is presented as a prophetic figure. I then convey the ways in which Christie adapts

11. Ibid., 14. 12.  In Taken at the Flood, Poirot refers to himself as ‘a good Catholic’ (360). And in Hallowe’en Party he expresses a regret that he did not study theology rather than go into the Belgian police force (26). Again, in Elephants Can Remember (1972), he is referred to as Catholic (294). In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), Poirot refers to himself as ‘the father confessor’ because people confide their secrets in him (167). 13.  Twice we see Poirot enter a Catholic church in Taken at the Flood (477) and an Anglican one in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940, 122), and only in the latter is it for an actual service. And, when cursing on one occasion, in Poirot Investigates (1924), he invokes ‘the Virgin Mary and every Saint in the calendar’ (135). 14.  John Scaggs (Crime Fiction, 7–9) discusses the way the Bible has been seen as a source for crime fiction. He cites Dorothy L.  Sayers’s 1928 introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror where she identifies four stories as early ancestors of the genre: two Hebrew Bible stories dating from the fourth to first century BCE from the book of Daniel; one story from Herodotus dating from the fifth century BCE; and one story drawn from the Hercules myth. Scaggs refers to the apocryphal story of Daniel and the Priests of Bel as an early prototype of the ‘locked-room mystery’, and goes on to discuss the way in which the story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4) can be read as an example of how crime fiction creates an idea about controlling crime. The concept of the ‘mark of Cain’, which God put on Cain after discovering he had murdered his brother (Gen. 4.15), is a ‘reassurance to all those who abide by the law, as it suggests that the criminal is always identifiable as “other” than themselves’ (9). 15. David L. Petersen, The Prophetic Literature: An Introduction (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 6.

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this prophet figure to the modern world through, first, making him a distinctly bourgeois figure in a post-and-interwar context; second, framing his inquiries as rational observations of the local and domestic as prominent sites for evil; and last, referring repeatedly to biblical figures as archetypes of human nature.

Poirot as Prophet The prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible contains a complex array of figures. Foretelling the future is popularly associated with the prophets, even if not always an integral part of biblical prophetic narratives.16 More common to prophetic literature is the idea of being called to a particular task and appearing as an intermediary between God and humans.17 John Sawyer mentions ‘miracle-working, prediction of the future, visions, and eccentric behaviour’ as central features of the prophetic traditions.18 While Poirot does not exactly perform miracles,19 his crime-solving abilities are frequently associated with foretelling the future; he repeatedly makes proclamations on issues of morality and justice; he claims to be divinely called for a particular task and thus functions as a human-divine intermediary; and he is habitually mocked for his eccentricities of behaviour and appearance. Despite the fact that his religiosity is downplayed in a confessional sense, there are multiple explicit allusions to Poirot as a prophet, many of them linking Poirot’s abilities to solve intricate crime puzzles with skills of prophetic prediction. Already in the first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles published in 1920, Poirot is identified as ‘a true prophet’ by his trusted companion, the cheerfully dim Captain Hastings (239). In Murder on the Links (1923), Poirot proves to be ‘a fairly true prophet’ due to his predictive skills concerning a love affair that becomes an unexpected happy outcome of the central tragedy (315). Reflecting on ‘le bon Dieu’ in Murder in the Mews (1937), Poirot ascends the ‘Mount of the Prophet’ (359–61). There he meets the soon-to-be murderer and warns her to leave before the murder takes place. In other words, he foresees the crime about to take place and seeks to intervene before it is too late. In The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) he denies  – with mock humility  – his own prophetic abilities, while admitting he is always right (112). Regarding a significant missing kimono and uniform in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Poirot states that he will ‘make a prophecy’, which  – no surprise  – proves to be correct (222). When he convinces Norman Gale in Death in the Clouds (1935) to pretend to be a blackmailer to elicit the truth from another character, Poirot assures him that ‘nothing will occur other

16. Ibid., 5. 17. Ibid., 6–7. 18.  John F.  A. Sawyer, Prophecy and the Biblical Prophets (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1993), 16. 19.  Although in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Poirot’s friend M. Bouc declares that if Poirot solves this case, he, M. Bouc, will ‘believe in miracles’ (257).

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than what I  have prophesied’ (219). There are multiple explicit, if not hugely substantial ways, then, in which Poirot is presented as a prophetic figure. Christie constructs this prophetic role through Poirot’s abilities as supreme puzzle-solver – always knowing more than other characters and more than the reader, as if in exclusive consultation with a divine voice that keeps him two or three steps ahead of the hoi polloi. In this sense, Poirot is certainly a prophet who succeeds, building up an authoritative as well as comforting status in his ability to solve all  – however impossibly complicated  – puzzles. With the ‘remarkably resilient pattern’ established as to crime, puzzle and solution, with Poirot becoming allseeing in tying up the loose ends at the finale, the reader is offered a ‘satisfying completeness’, as Martin Priestman puts it.20 Prophecy in the Bible, Sawyer explains, does not only mean ‘prediction (foretelling)’, but also ‘proclamation (forthtelling)’.21 Famously – and formulaically – Poirot proclaims all the answers to the questions the given crime has raised at the end of the story, a therapeutic, prophylactic moment in which order is restored as the guilt of the murderer is revealed once and for all and all others – including the reader – can cathartically draw a sigh of relief. As Stephen Knight claims, while the quest for the killer in Christie’s work involves a ‘searching inquiry into threats and tensions’ – and it is this inquiry that drives the narrative – the final revelation has ‘ethical force’.22 Poirot’s proclamations of right and wrong throughout the novels are unswerving in their expressed belief in justice being put first,23 that there can be no justified murder,24 no avoidance of the truth25 and no inconsequential victim.26 This tendency to proclamation is caught up in another prominent feature of biblical prophecy, namely, the idea of being called ‘to a certain task’.27 As David Petersen notes, call and commissioning narratives appear in several prophet books (e.g. Isaiah 6; Jeremiah 1; Ezekiel 1–2).28 As if echoing such a prophetic role, Poirot too insists on being called by God to reveal truth and ensure justice. In The Mystery of the Blue Train, for instance, he is asked why he is investigating the murder of a young woman when he has retired from his profession. He responds by pontificating in his familiar Francophone English that ‘this affair, the good God

20.  Martin Priestman, Crime Fiction from Poe to the Present (Plymouth:  Northcote House, 1998), 19. 21. Sawyer, Prophecy and the Biblical Prophets, 1. 22.  Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction 1800–2000:  Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 91. 23.  See, for instance, Hallowe’en Party, where the importance of justice over mercy is emphasized (198, 290). 24. This belief mostly takes the understated form of him ‘not approving’ of murder. See, for example, Hallowe’en Party, 119. 25. In Hallowe’een Party he says, ‘For me, it is truth I want. Always truth’ (276). 26. The exception comes at the end of the Poirot corpus, as I will discuss later below. 27. Petersen, Prophetic Literature, 6. 28. Ibid.

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thrust it upon me’ (173). In a theological discussion with Hastings in Peril at End House (1932), Poirot declares that he is ‘convinced that le bon Dieu created Hercule Poirot for the express purpose of interfering. It is my metier’ (130). Standing, then, ‘between the world of the sacred and secular’,29 Poirot promotes himself as one who, thanks to God, knows when people tell lies (The Mystery of the Blue Train, 323). In The Mystery of the Blue Train, Poirot allies himself with the divine when he describes life as a train: ‘Trust the train, Mademoiselle, for it is le bon Dieu who drives it.’ The whistle of the engine came again. ‘ “Trust the train, Mademoiselle”, murmured Poirot again. “And trust Hercule Poirot – He knows” ’ (383). As such, Poirot functions as an intermediary between the divine and the human world. But Christie does not simply supplant a pseudo-prophetic figure into a twentieth-century context through such references to Poirot’s foretelling, forthtelling and divine calling. She adapts him by more actively translating a biblical prophetic idiom into the modern world she reflects in her crime drama. One way in which Christie accomplishes this is by placing Poirot squarely within the muted melodrama of bourgeois milieus.

A Bourgeois Bible To understand how Christie adapts Poirot’s prophetic persona within a modern framework it is necessary to outline the bourgeois world in which she places him. The boom in industry and retail, the erosion of differences between white collar and manual workers and the blurring of class lines were all significant features of the interwar period.30 Poirot reflects these changes in being both staunchly democratic in his insistent regard for all lives as equally valuable, and at the same time as an unapologetic exemplar of the growing middle classes, with his fastidiousness about his appearance and comfort. John Scaggs highlights the way Christie’s readers were mostly respectable suburban readers, often women, who shared Christie’s upper-middle-class, property-owning, bourgeois ideology and were keen to have their views of the world confirmed.31 This social context forms an important backdrop for Christie’s crime fiction as she explores the societal and cultural changes taking place in the interwar years and onwards. Alison Light argues that detective fiction after the First World War should be understood primarily as ‘a literature of convalescence’.32 What might be expected to be ‘one of the most aggressive of literatures, became distinctly pacific’ in the interwar years.33 While Christie’s stories are full of crime they are light on blood and gore, seeking

29. Ibid., 7. 30. See Day, ‘Introduction’, 1–27. 31. Scaggs, Crime Fiction, 38. 32.  Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 69. 33. Ibid., 70.

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‘to exclude from the positively Edwardian world they create all the devastation of the Great War and the social and economic upheaval of 1920s and 1930s depression’.34 Light diagnoses the ‘loss of appetite for melodrama’ following the war as a reaction to the notions of mastery and heroism that had governed ideas of English character and played such a central part in the rhetoric of the Great War.35 The world stage is swapped and replaced with the local, the quotidian and the parochial. This shift from global-political to individual-local is aptly demonstrated in Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. The novel stages the tensions between ‘old England’ and ‘new’ trends and attitudes. The character of Alistair Blunt represents the British government and ‘good sound Conservative finance’ (29). Blunt stands for the good old England, without whom ‘the end of stability, of common sense, of solvency’ might ensue, even the end of ‘this England of ours as we know it’ (115). Blunt’s niece Jane Olivera and her boyfriend Howard Raikes represent in turn a new generation who criticize Blunt and the political establishment, calling for change. The change they call for comes in the words of Rev. 21.1: ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ (115). They oppose men like Blunt, ‘men who hark back to the past – men who want to live as their fathers lived or even as their grandfathers lived! You’ve got a lot of them here in England – crusted old diehards – useless, worn-out symbols of a decayed era. And, my God, they’ve got to go! There’s got to be a new world’ (60). When Blunt turns out to be the murderer, Poirot hesitates as to whether he can agree with Blunt’s justification that he did it for the good of England. The banker asks Poirot not to reveal the truth for the good of the country. But he breaks two axioms Poirot abides by. The first is that Poirot does ‘not take sides. I am on the side only of truth’ (135). The second is that he does not distinguish between ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’ lives. Blunt has failed to see that Poirot is not concerned with nations or causes but with private, so-called ordinary individuals. Rebuffing the language of sacrifice so prevalent in the First World War, Poirot’s stance distinguishes between the politics of public causes and the private individuals who deserve protection against such murderous potential. It is from singing Psalm 140 that Poirot experiences a revelation: ‘Hercule Poirot essayed in a hesitant baritone. “The proud have laid a snare for me”, he sang, “and spread a net with cords: yea, and set traps in my way . . .” ’ (122). Reading a passage from 1 Samuel, where God rejects the disobedient Saul as king over Israel, he makes the connection between Blunt as ‘ruler’ and his downfall: ‘Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord he hath also rejected thee from being king’ (122). Poirot is in the service of ‘the Lord’ in bringing justice to those who have rejected the word of God – regardless of a ‘greater good’. Every individual is in this context accountable to the ‘word of God’, and so what scripture denotes in this passage is the judgement of the individual

34. Scaggs, Crime Fiction, 48. 35. Light, Forever England, 71.

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before a God who reflects Poirot’s regard for all life as equally valuable; the global and public shrinks to the individual and local. Poirot, however, is not obviously on the side of the new generation either. Earlier he has been labelled a ‘bloody little bourgeois detective!’, which he concedes is not an inaccurate description (110). In virtue of his bourgeois nature, his Bible too is given to bourgeois tendencies. ‘Poirot sighed. He said: “The world is yours. The New Heaven and the New Earth. In your new world, my children, let there be freedom and let there be pity . . . That is all I ask” ’ (164). While conceding to the new generation with their radical imagery of a new world, he demonstrates a palpable desire for moderation and modulation of Revelation’s radicalism. Freedom and pity become placeholders for a bourgeois religiosity, a religiosity that is balanced, moderate and private rather than radically political and public. This desire for a non-radical religion modified by reason is displayed also in Evil Under the Sun (1941). When a character remarks on the peace and harmony of the beach she shares with fellow holiday-makers, Poirot responds, ‘It is romantic, yes,’ before adding, ‘It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget, Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun’ (19). Avoiding the impression that Poirot is a fanatical proclaimer of evil, however, Christie quickly sets up a stark contrast between his brand of religious rhetoric and the fanatic clergyman also present on the scene. While the clergyman later points (wrongly) to one of the female characters as ‘a focus of evil’ and ‘evil personified!’, linking her to ‘Jezebel and Aholibah’ (210),36 Poirot is able to see discerningly beyond misogynistic appearances and religious zeal, identifying the real perpetrator. Altogether, then, Christie’s prophetic figure is neither radical nor heroic, but a moderate presence properly adapted to a bourgeois sensibility and a religiosity that is compatible with modern values of tolerance, individualism and freedom.37 Not only does Christie zoom in on the middle to upper middle classes in her crime fiction, however, she also has her prophetic detective play into an obsession with close forms of social observation; Poirot’s insight into the domestic details of the so-called ordinary bourgeoisie emphasizes the potential evil lurking in seemingly benign spaces – and thus the need for a prophet figure. As I will go on to show in the next section, the way to identify such evil is grounded in the supremely

36.  Another character, Mrs Ferrier, is similarly decried as a ‘Jezebel’ in The Labours of Hercules (180). 37.  Understanding the Bible, and the prophets, as non-dangerous and moderate is underscored in a scene where a religious fanatic describes a vision. The character who he tells this vision to, Miss Carnaby, is embarrassed at the ‘glistening’ eyes and ‘twitching’ lips of the religious man, ‘breathing hard’; but when he says the vision was of the prophet Elijah, Miss Carnaby is described as breathing a sigh of relief: ‘Elijah was much better, she didn’t mind Elijah’ (Labours of Hercules, 336–37). Another example of ‘bad’ religion is in Hallowe’en Party where a young child is convinced she should be sacrificed in a ritual killing (314). Poirot says of the murderer, gardener Michael Garfield, that he would have killed ‘so that he should have a new Garden of Eden’ (335).

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cerebral faculties that characterize Poirot, thereby secularizing his prophetic powers of (visionary) judgement.

Prophetic In-Sights The second way in which Christie adapts Poirot as a prophet figure to a modern context, then, lies in fanning the idea that evil is embedded in the domesticities of the bourgeoisie.38 The possibility of exorcising evil emerges from close observation of domestic scenes: Poirot’s role as a prophet is to save further lives from evil, but this task is cast in a distinctly rational form, with an unwavering confidence in the cerebral powers of deduction. Poirot’s interest in the domestic details of the middle classes might be seen to be a reflection of the passion for facts and statistics particularly seen in the 1930s, with the founding of Mass Observation in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrison and journalist Charles Madge.39 Mass Observation attracted observers to report on the private realm – ordinary aspects of daily life and social behaviour. Emphasizing the factual and objective, Mass Observation raised the question as to the significance of facts – how to ‘read’ facts.40 The Poirot books can be seen as part and parcel of this passion for facts and inquiry into the private realm of ‘ordinary’ people. If there is one lesson to be learnt from Christie’s corpus it is that there is no such thing as an ordinary person – or at least that benign appearances may not only deceive but be deadly. Evil lurks everywhere, perhaps even especially where it is not to be expected. It is among those who ought to know one another that estrangement and suspicion arises in Christie’s crime dramas:  it is people ‘one knows’ who are potentially murderous. Scaggs pertinently points out that Christie’s characters are mostly, and indeed, must be ‘decent respectable people’, precisely so as to be not suspect in any obvious way.41 Murders take place within domestic spaces and by ‘homely’ means, such as ordinary poisons (arsenic for dosing the dog, cyanide for wasp nests) or commonplace items kept in the house, such as a kitchen pestle, meat skewer, golf club and paper weight.42 Arguably Christie’s style of crime fiction serves as eminent leisure literature for a growing reading public but at the same time stokes modern anxieties about the secret and dark depths of the ‘ordinary’ individual.43 Murderers are people who ‘go about, 38. Christie’s novels constantly refer to the presence of ‘evil’. See, for instance, Evil Under the Sun (19, 28, 298), Peril at End House (133, 238), Murder on the Orient Express (29), Death on the Nile (91) and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (21). 39. Day, ‘Introduction’, 18. 40. Ibid. 41. Scaggs, Crime Fiction, 46. 42. Light, Forever England, 94. 43.  Designating the first four decades of the twentieth century, literary modernism normally signifies a break with what was conceived of as traditional modes of representation and realism, and experimenting with an innovative aesthetic, often self-conscious in style.

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nicely spoken, nicely got up and looking like everybody else’ (Hallowe’en Party, 110). In this regard Christie is indeed, as Light argues, a ‘popular modernist’.44 The community members that begin to suspect one another and the families that are fractured by crime all point to a bourgeois façade that readily cracks. ‘With people’, as Poirot puts it, ‘one never knows’ (Elephants Can Remember, 229). The threat to society comes from ‘within’.45 Here are only individuals that cannot rely on longheld community connections, familial ties or neighbourly trust – anyone might prove to be a murderer. What is at stake in the minute facts and observation of actions and inventories, as Christie presents it, is nothing less than life and death. Poirot could be seen as a humanly embodied, prophetically inflected Panopticon, observing in order to save people from themselves and from ill-behaving individuals.46 He accomplishes this because he is not only adept at close observation into private spaces but is able – beyond any of his fellow humans – to endow his observations with significance. Conforming to a spirit of rational inquiry that characterized the period more broadly,47 Poirot is able to give rational and intelligible explanations that string together seemingly random bits of information and thereby produce an unequivocal account of events and people. Scaggs suggests that the central place of clocks, timetables and chronology is another marker of a modern industrialized society – a society at odds with the pastoral idyll that the Golden Age longs for.48 Poirot is not able to alter the structures of modern life, but he is able to make sense of the ‘ideologically pointed inventories’ that litter modern homes, and thus to ‘put them in their place’.49 Observing the ‘interplay of characters and emotions’, he can find the ‘truth’ (The Hollow, 253). Endowing facts with significance and weaving a consistent narrative of culpability is

While these features do not characterize Christie, the modernist concern with fragmentation and loss of stability might be said to be present in Christie’s fiction. As Mary Ann Gillies and Aurelia Mahood, Modernist Literature: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 3, put it:  Traditional beliefs and stabilities had been undercut by forces in the nineteenth century that continued to be of relevance in the twentieth century. Twentiethcentury literature registers the impact of nineteenth-century revolutions in science, political economy, and psychology, the cumulative effect of educational reforms, the changing position of women, and rising nationalist movements both at home and in the colonies. The sense of a loss of moorings was pervasive’. 44. Light, Forever England, 64. 45. Scaggs, Crime Fiction, 46. 46. Scaggs suggests this point but in relation to Miss Marple (ibid., 45). 47. Day, ‘Introduction’, 17. 48. Scaggs, Crime Fiction, 51. 49. K. D. M. Snell, ‘A Drop of Water from a Stagnant Pool? Inter-war Detective Fiction and the Rural Community’, Social History 35 (2010): 41.

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precisely what Poirot does, thereby dispersing a more abstract anxiety as to the secret lives and behaviours of those around us. Christie’s novels rarely describe the punishment of the criminal,50 nor are they interested in opening up broader questions of dispersed responsibility and societal causes of crime.51 The obsessive focus throughout, rather, is on the minor details and domesticities of individual people’s lives while simultaneously endowing the modern material world with meaning in the form of clues, signs and evidence eventually woven into a complete narrative. Poirot’s impeccable rational methods, however, do not make him heroic or antithetical to religiosity. In fact, as discussed earlier, his crime-solving skills meld the sharply rational with the prophetic-visionary. Susan Rowland argues that while Sherlock Holmes was the epitome of masculine reasoning in earlier detective fiction, Poirot fractures this ‘heroic mould of masculinity’ with his concern for domestic detail.52 Parodic and rather farcical,53 he is, like many of the biblical prophets, an eccentric figure, from his ‘patent leather shoes to his egg-shaped head and the immense moustache’ (Labours of Hercules, 11). In this sense, Christie might also be said to be challenging the idea of the biblical prophet figure as a specifically masculine messenger of God on a grandiose scale laden with gravitas. Poirot’s ‘prophetic call’ to intervene in domestic matters and local family and village events playfully shifts the prophetic figure from a large-scale social arena to the small-scale moral issues that are centred on the ordinary lives of the individual and his or her local circles. Christie provides a form of continuity, however, and forges a universal framework from these local, incidental and individual crimes through references to biblical archetypes.

50.  Scaggs discusses the way in which this is a feature of crime fiction in general since its formalization after Edgar Allen Poe (Crime Fiction, 44). Scaggs goes on to suggest that crime fiction most often promotes a ‘passive, albeit unwitting, acceptance of the dominant social order’ because it rarely questions societal forces or the legal system. Going further, he writes – drawing on Roland Barthes – of the plaisir involved in conforming to the dominant ideology promoted by the text. 51.  This is made explicit in a comment a young psychology student makes in the novel Hickory Dickory Dock (1955), when he accuses Poirot of having a ‘narrow’ and ‘oldfashioned’ view of the law: ‘It is the causes that are important, M. Poirot’ (original italics). While Poirot insists that he agrees with the student, it is clear that he is not interested in psychological causes of crime in any intricate or in-depth sense (61–63). 52.  Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell:  British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (Basingstoke:  Palgrave, 2001), 19. In The Labours of Hercules the comparison is made between Hercule Poirot and his Greek namesake, Hercules. The reference to Poirot as a ‘modern Hercules’ is a deliberate juxtaposition between the ‘naked figure with bulging muscles, brandishing a club’ and the more cerebrally endowed Poirot (17). 53. Light, Forever England, 73–74.

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Biblical Archetypes The third way that Christie constructs Poirot as a relevant prophetic figure is through the recourse to biblical characters that serve as ‘archetypes’. In the simplest sense, an archetype is a typical example of a person or thing, or pertains to an original that is mimicked.54 It is in this sense that Christie posits biblical characters and stories as archetypal. While there is no explicit discussion of the concept of biblical archetypes, there is, I  argue, an implicit understanding throughout the novels of the Bible furnishing archetypal examples of human nature. In Death on the Nile (1937), Poirot confronts the young American heiress who has stolen her friend’s boyfriend with the parable told to King David by Nathan the prophet in the wake of David’s adulterous relationship with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 12.1-4): She hesitated for a moment, biting her lip impatiently; then, as Poirot did not seem disposed to speak, she broke out:  ‘Of course the whole thing was very unfortunate. But these things happen, Monsieur Poirot.’ ‘Ah! Yes, they happen, Madame.’ He paused. ‘You are of the Church of England, I  presume?’ ‘Yes.’ Linnet looked slightly bewildered. ‘Then you have heard portions of the Bible read aloud in church. You have heard of King David and of the rich man who had many flocks and herds and the poor man who had one ewe lamb. That was something that happened, Madame.’ Linnet sat up. Her eyes flashed angrily. (78–79)

Criticizing her for greedily and ruthlessly taking the one thing that meant everything to her friend, Poirot makes Linnet Doyle’s actions a moral crime akin to taking ‘the poor man’s one ewe lamb’ (81). Linnet’s response is angry and dismissive, implicitly deeming the Bible irrelevant to her own situation. But Poirot persists, diagnosing her discomfort as guilt, and the sure knowledge that her friend – rather than herself – has ‘right on her side’ (81). The story in 2 Sam. 12.1-4 is used as an archetype, in which characters – such as the rich man who mercilessly takes the poor man’s beloved lamb  – recur in the ordinary lives of individuals in the modern world. Linnet is further linked to the story of Naboth’s Vineyard (1 Kings 21) by one of the characters, Mrs Allerton, to probe the idea of whether she might be a Jezebel ‘type’, willing to kill for material gain (111).55 For Poirot, then, the Bible is far from irrelevant or anachronistic. It may be only quietly and intermittently invoked, but his ability to uncover the secrets of the individual lends an authority to his comparison, as if the allusion is itself a revelation of a

54.  See ‘archetype’ in Cambridge Dictionary, available online https://dictionary. cambridge.org/dictionary/english/archetype (accessed 6 February 2018). 55. In 1 Kings 21, Naboth refuses to give his vineyard to King Ahab. When Ahab’s wife Jezebel finds out she deviously arranges for Naboth to be (falsely) accused of cursing God and the king and then has him stoned, so that Ahab will gain the vineyard for himself.

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deeply founded truth – not only about the particular person but of human nature as a whole. The idea of biblical archetypes is also significant in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. Here the story of a family coming together for Christmas is framed by allusions to the story of the prodigal son from Lk. 15.11-32. ‘Types’ of people are aligned with biblical characters, assuming the relevance of biblical stories as a universal model for recurrent forms of characterization and action. Poirot describes one of the female characters as ‘the kind of individual who is capable of taking the law into her own hands – though never through selfish motives’, a judger and an executer, à la Jael and Judith (233).56 In The Big Four (1927), Hastings becomes Judas when he unintentionally betrays Poirot (178), and later in the novel, Hastings, Madame Olivier and Poirot invoke themselves collectively as Samson (Judges 16) when they consider taking down themselves and their enemies with them (265). In Christie’s last Poirot novel, Curtain:  Poirot’s Last Case, the apocryphal figure of Judith appears again, in the form of Hastings’s daughter (whose name is Judith). Hastings worries that his daughter is the killer and reflects on her looking ‘like her namesake before she cut off the head of Holofernes’ on the night of the murder (207). The explicit association is made between this modern young woman – ‘sure of herself, modern, independent’ (123) – and her biblical archetype, the beautiful widow who beheads Holofernes, the army commander who is threatening her people. But the archetype of Judith is only temporarily embodied by the character who bears her name. Instead, this archetype is transferred to Poirot, who has discovered the identity of the murderer and ends up killing him, before he himself dies. Breaking his long-held belief that murder is never justified, Poirot in the end becomes the ‘Judith’ figure, saving ‘humanity’ from a ruthless and sadistic murderer, as is said of Judith, ‘strictly on the highest moral grounds for the good of the community’ (152).57 The theme of rightful murder in this case, then, could be said to be intensified by the allusion to Judith because she signifies an archetypal heroine. As saviour of the Jews by virtue of her killing the enemy general Holofernes, she signals the possibility of rightful murder; in Poirot’s words, by having ‘saved other lives – innocent lives’ (239). As an archetype of heroism, her courage and violence can be transferred to other people – here, Poirot himself. The archetype of Judith does not wholly exonerate Poirot’s actions: he admits in the final pages that he is not entirely sure that his actions have been right (239). Arguably, however, the allusion to Judith functions as a pointer to what Poirot calls a ‘state of emergency’, where a life must be taken to save the lives of others (239). As deliverer of justice

56. The story of Judith and Holofernes is a popular biblical story for Christie, appearing also in Hallowe’en Party (156–57). Jael (Judges 4–5) is mentioned here too. 57. This question is foregrounded also in Christie’s Appointment with Death (1938, 113– 14), in relation to Jesus’s temptation by Satan (Matt. 4.1-11; Mk 1.12-13; Lk. 4.1-13). Later in the novel, Eccl. 4.1 is quoted to emphasize the novel’s theme of unfairness at the powerful causing suffering, and to express that ‘below the decencies and conventions of everyday life, there lies a vast reservoir of strange things’ (116).

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his persona is cast in the archetypal character of Judith, and the book of Judith becomes the framing narrative to the final Poirot novel, providing a model of justice that elasticizes Poirot’s previously unbending stance on killing. The allusion to Ecclesiastes 1 in the novel title Evil Under the Sun confirms this theme of biblical archetypes with the title itself propagating the idea that there is nothing ‘new’ about modernity when it comes to evil and human nature.58 What Poirot adds to the fragmentary nature of individual cases of crime, then, is a universalization of human nature through references to characters and stories from the biblical archive that are given an archetypal status. As archetypes, biblical figures can be invoked and mapped onto characters in a modern context, ensuring the status of the Bible as an archive of human nature.

Societal Serpents In conclusion, it seems as if it is precisely in the modern, seemingly increasingly secular world that Christie insists on the need for a prophetic presence, and further, for the continuous need for a Poirot figure and his biblicisms. In the aftermath of the war, Light suggests detective fiction depicts a universe that is increasingly secular, largely amoral and anti-sentimental. In this postwar world, the non-heroic and de-consecrated go hand in hand.59 But a desacralized world becomes a fruitful locus for Christie to foreground the need for a religious sensibility adapted to the period.60 In the face of ‘the metamorphosis of the everyday and the comfortable into the unfamiliar and the sinister’,61 a prophetic figure is crucial. If we understand Christie’s work ‘as one huge advertisement of the murderousness of English social life and of the desperate need to convert to pleasure all those anxieties which an existence like that of the post-war middle classes could produce’, then part of that conversion takes place due to Poirot’s prophetic role.62 For Light, this is a world in which ‘nothing is sacred’.63 Nevertheless, I argue that precisely because of this sense of the absence of the sacred, Christie forges a religious prophetic expression that is imperative to retrieve order and reinstate moral harmony, if only temporarily. The serpent in the Garden of Eden is a metaphor that aptly captures the retrieval of order and reinstatement of harmony that Christie enacts at the end

58.  Christie’s other famous sleuth, Miss Marple, similarly makes pronouncements about types of human nature, suggesting, as Scaggs points out, that the detective does not need special technical skills in rooting out a master criminal, but rather the tools of close observation, experience of people and common sense can solve a clever crime or a simple crime done cleverly (Crime Fiction, 42–43). 59. Light, Forever England, 71. 60. Ibid., 88. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 87. 63. Ibid., 67.

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of every crime novel. W. H. Auden’s influential essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, from 1948, put forward the suggestion that crime fiction reflects a Christian worldview in presenting murder like a serpent into Eden, thereby fixing guilt on the one identifiable murderer who can thus become a scapegoat.64 This imagery is explicitly conveyed in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. The story ends with a miniature garden modelled as the Garden of Eden.65 But, as opposed to the biblical Eden, this is a ‘new version – without any serpent’, where the protagonist couple are inserted into the garden, mirroring an Adam and Eve who are, in this version, ‘definitely middleaged’ (250). Adam and Eve here again form biblical archetypes for Christie’s story, but here the garden becomes a space to reinstate innocence. Thanks to Poirot, the garden can be remade as the ‘serpent’ has been removed. Every Christie novel ends with the ‘serpent’ in society correctly identified, absolving all others of guilt. In each of her novels, the sigh of relief is palpable as ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ – representing humanity – are allowed to inhabit the garden again, now devoid of the serpent.66 Christie’s characters stand in for a broader human nature that is always potentially guilty, but because her crime dramas play out on the local scale there is always one identifiable guilty party who serves as the serpent that must be ousted. K. D. M.  Snell suggests this idea when he likens the detective to a parish clergyman weeding out ‘the nasty, the malevolent’ from where it does not belong.67 As Snell goes on to admit, however, the clergy are frequently portrayed as weak in Christie’s fiction, thus allowing evil to gain a foothold.68 He argues that it is an outsider, ‘a secular agent external to the church’, who must appear and reveal the truth, thus restoring moral order.69 But it is Poirot’s prophetic skills that place him on the edge of the communities he ‘saves’; he is indeed an outsider figure in his supreme and superior insights into the configurations of human nature and the complex congeries of human action. But he is a prophetic outsider figure. Christie’s is both a bleak and a redemptive vision. The Bible Christie transposes into the modern world is distinctly bourgeois, while at the same time sustaining a darkly sinister view of the unknowability of the local and the supposedly familiar.

64. W. H. Auden, ‘Guilty Vicarage’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber, 1948), reprinted in Detective Fiction:  A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin Winks (Vermont: Countryman Press, 1988), 24. 65.  See Snell for further discussion of the importance of rural settings in Christie’s writings. Snell argues that ‘the villages often serve as miniature havens or Edens, in which murder incongruously disrupts the setting. Murder is out of place and rectitude needs to be restored’ (‘Drop of Water’, 25). 66.  Knight critiques Auden’s idea of the serpent and Eden, suggesting that it does not account for the obsessive nature of the recurrent search for signs of guilt (Crime Fiction 1800–2000, 107). This obsessive recurrence could be said to be reflected in the relentless writing of new Poirot stories. 67. Snell, ‘Drop of Water’, 26. 68. Ibid., 38. 69. Ibid., 39.

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The world Christie presents is a fallen – or rather collapsed – one in which people are not merely not innocent, but all potentially guilty, all given to evil. The world is not a place lacking in perfection, as if paradise gave way to an ordinary garden. Rather, the present world-garden is deeply sinister and broken, evil haunting the most ordinary and seemingly benign spaces. The work Poirot does is to identify the serpent and oust him or her from the garden. But because, as a biblical archetype, the serpent reappears always in different forms, this is an endless project. In this sense, Poirot cannot be anything but a failed, and at the same time absolutely necessary, prophet figure. Evil cannot be ousted once and for all, only temporarily, and therefore repeatedly. There is, then, a continuous need for a figure such as Poirot – and a continuous need for Poirot stories. In this way, Christie hints at the incessant need for prophetic figures such as Poirot to demand and deliver a justice that is always reachable but equally inevitably rescinding. As Brown suggests, analysing the cultural spaces in which religious ideas and imagery can be found might offer a more nuanced picture than statistical data concerning the negotiations of the meaning and significance of religiosity in the twentieth century.70 Christie’s Poirot is part of a cultural negotiation of religion which has proved hugely popular, albeit considered perhaps most frequently lowbrow. Snell concludes that Christie’s novels ‘speak to an apparently secularized situation, with the church and its minister impotent and irrelevant to the sustaining of historical notions of morality and action’71; while this might seem correct at first glance, it is clear when examining her work more closely that deeming her corpus simply secular or secularized is insufficient. ‘Speaking to a secularized situation’ entails here a simultaneous invocation of the ‘biblical’ as an authoritative, archetypal corpus that represents the universal features of a human nature shot through with (propensities for) evil. Poirot’s prophetic persona straddles the secular/sacred boundary in his commitment to rationality, a bourgeois sensibility and a moderate form of religiosity. In this way, Christie reimagines religion as relevant for the individual in the local sphere rather than in an overtly politicized sense. Her biblical canon is formed of universal archetypes that remain current for understanding human nature – for determining continuity and universality in a world that is experienced as fractured, threatening and discontinuous. The quaint association surrounding Christie’s canon with the Golden Age of crime, with English villages, and her ‘curiously sanitised and bloodless corpses’72 might seem to place this author at a considerable distance from what Yvonne Sherwood calls the ‘acutely visceral and corporeal’ prophetic literature.73 If the Hebrew prophetic literature is full of ‘blood and flesh and sex’,74 and in a style that

70. Brown, Religion and Society, 36. 71. Snell, ‘Drop of Water’, 39. 72. Scaggs, Crime Fiction, 43. 73.  Yvonne Sherwood, Biblical Blaspheming:  Trials of the Sacred for a Secular World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 291. 74. Ibid., 150.

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sends ‘meaning ricocheting in all directions’,75 then Christie’s crime fiction and its adaptations of the biblical prophetic role might indeed be singularly prudish, comforting and conventional. Christie retrieves formal aspects of biblical prophecy and reproduces them in Poirot, but goes on to transpose biblical prophecy into a distinctly bourgeois register, framing social justice within the contexts of the ordinary, private lives of the bourgeois individual. At the same time, with all its insistence on the private and parochial, the Poirot stories are a peculiarly public franchise, published widely, translated ubiquitously and featuring in popular TV adaptations.76 These stories, then, make mainstream the disturbing sense in which our homes and traditions become ‘radically unfamiliar and strange to us’.77 They both evoke this disturbance and offer a prophetic figure that can intervene and restore harmony. Knight suggests that it is this cashing in on ‘personal unease and possible danger’ in a formulaic and repeatable way that is the key to Christie’s longlasting success.78 The very fact that the restoration of harmony and identification of guilt is, however, a temporary fix – there can be no lasting harmony or end to crime – is what sets the machinery of anxiety back in motion. It is what ensures that the prophetic formula is compulsively called for yet again, guaranteeing a biblical archive that will remain relevant as long as there is a biblically inflected human nature given to serpentine temptations.

Bibliography Auden, W. H. ‘Guilty Vicarage’. In The Dyer’s Hand and other Essays. London: Faber, 1948. Reprinted in Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robin Winks, 15–24. Vermont: Countryman Press, 1988. Brown, Callum G. Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain. Harlow : Pearson, 2006. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, [1920] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Links. London: HarperCollins, [1923] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Poirot Investigates. London: HarperCollins, [1924] 2001. Christie, Agatha. The Big Four. London: HarperCollins, [1927] 2002. Christie, Agatha. The Mystery of the Blue Train. London: HarperCollins, [1928] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Peril at End House. London: HarperCollins, [1932] 2015. Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. London: HarperCollins, [1934] 2007.

75. Ibid., 295. 76. Snell, for instance, writes that with her over eighty detective novels, Agatha Christie ‘is the best-selling writer of books of all time. Over two billion of her books have been sold (some estimates are twice that). Only the Bible may exceed this. Her works have been translated into over 110 languages, with about 6400 separate translations, making her the most translated novelist in the world’ (‘Drop of Water’, 21). 77.  Sherwood, Biblical Blaspheming, 283. Sherwood draws attention to the relentless destruction of houses in Amos (Amos 3.15; 5.19; 6.9-11; cf. 6.1 and 5.11). 78. Knight, Crime Fiction 1800–2000, 92–93.

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Christie, Agatha. Death in the Clouds. London: HarperCollins, [1935] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Three Act Tragedy. London: HarperCollins, [1935] 2002. Christie, Agatha. Death on the Nile. London: HarperCollins, [1937] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Dumb Witness. London: HarperCollins, [1937] 2002. Christie, Agatha. Appointment with Death. London: HarperCollins, [1938] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. London: HarperCollins, [1938] 2007. Christie, Agatha. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. In Agatha Christie, Poirot: The War Years. London: HarperCollins, [1940] 2003. Christie, Agatha. Evil Under the Sun. London: HarperCollins, [1941] 2001. Christie, Agatha. The Hollow. London: HarperCollins, [1946] 2002. Christie, Agatha. The Labours of Hercules. London: HarperCollins, [1947] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Taken at the Flood. In Agatha Christie, Poirot: The War Years, Omnibus Edition. London: HarperCollins, [1948] 2003. Christie, Agatha. Mrs McGinty’s Dead. London: HarperCollins, [1952] 2002. Christie, Agatha. After the Funeral. London: HarperCollins, [1953] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Hickory Dickory Dock. London: HarperCollins, [1955] 2002. Christie, Agatha. Cat Among the Pigeons. London: HarperCollins, [1959] 2002. Christie, Agatha. Hallowe’en Party. London: HarperCollins, [1969] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Elephants Can Remember. London: HarperCollins, [1972] 2002. Christie, Agatha. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. London: HarperCollins, [1975] 2013. Day, Gary. ‘Introduction’. In Literature and Culture in Modern Britain. Vol. 2: 1930–1955, edited by Gary Day, 1–27. London: Longman, 1997. Gillies, Mary Ann, and Aurelea Mahood. Modernist Literature: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Knight, Stephen. ‘The Golden Age’. In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, 77–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991. Petersen, David L. The Prophetic Literature: An Introduction. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. Priestman, Martin. Crime Fiction from Poe to the Present. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998. Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Sawyer, John F. A. Prophecy and the Biblical Prophets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Sayers, Dorothy L. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. London: Victor Gollancz, 1928. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Sherwood, Yvonne. Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Snell, K. D. M. ‘A Drop of Water from a Stagnant Pool? Inter-war Detective Fiction and the Rural Community’. Social History 35 (2010): 21–50.

Chapter 11 ‘ A D A N G E R OU S W O R L D’ :   T H E H E R M E N E U T IC S O F A G AT HA C H R I S T I E’ S L AT E R N OV E L S J. C. Bernthal

In 1971, Agatha Christie, who had entered her eighties, was among the signatories of a petition to the Roman Catholic Church. Christie was an Anglican, and was beginning to move away from religious devotion, but she had strong opinions about Christian religions and their place in British and European culture. The petition called on the Pope to reconsider replacing the Tridentine Mass rite, which was in Latin, with a pared-down rite in English. The old rite, claimed petitioners, had inspired countless artistic and cultural achievements, and should not be cast aside. Perhaps as a result of this petition, Pope Paul VI granted Roman Catholic churches in Britain permission to use the traditional Latin Mass, in what has become known as the Agatha Christie Indult.1 The name suggests that, of the many signatories (including Nancy Mitford and Iris Murdoch), Christie is seen to best encapsulate this idea that religion and ceremony have important roles to play in sculpting and preserving tradition. Commentators have long associated Christie with the conservative love of tradition for its own sake. Connecting her ‘traditional’ novels2 with the Latin mass itself, David Grumett argues that the truth underlying the mystery is, like the divine ‘truth’ of the mass, presented by Christie with ‘a degree of opacity’ only fully resolved through correct interpretation.3 Grumett leaves unspoken the suggestion that there is only one solution to a crime novel and one ‘truth’ in a religious service. The ‘degree of opacity’, however, creates a certain ambiguity and flexibility in the text’s presentation of sources, whether scriptural or social. This chapter explores Christie’s use of literary and generic traditions in her later novels, reading them in dialogue with traditional and contemporary biblical interpretations. Christie’s religious background was more eclectic than her 1. David Grumett, Material Eucharist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 297–98. 2.  Grumett’s use of the term ‘traditional’ to reference Christie’s novels refers to their formal style and perceived social conservatism. 3. Ibid., 298.

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cultural background:  her mother flitted between spiritualist religions while her husband was a Roman Catholic. Christie, who read The Imitation of Christ daily from childhood, was familiar with a range of prophetic, scriptural, hermeneutical and instructive texts, and drew on these throughout her career. Nevertheless, she considered her responsibilities as a writer to be social, not religious; she said she had to ‘hold up a mirror to the world’4 and not, as P. D. James would later put it, ‘to propagate the faith or explain my own spiritual life’.5 As such, after the devastating upheavals of the Second World War, Christie responded to her readers’ demands for a new kind of detective fiction, both reassuringly familiar and socially responsible. She moved away from the lighthearted, puzzle-based plotting that characterized the ‘Golden Age’ of 1920s and 1930s crime fiction,6 but retained the traditional problem-investigation-resolution structure to explore human morality in an uncertain age of restructuring. Increasingly, as the authority of detective ‘saviour’ figures diminished, Christie turned to biblical allusions to create moral frameworks, as she essentially invented a new subgenre within classical detective fiction. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first considers Curtain:  Poirot’s Last Case (1975), a novel written during the Second World War for posthumous publication. In Curtain, Christie scrupulously complies with Ronald Knox’s well-known set of ‘Ten Commandments’ for Golden Age crime writers, but devastatingly portrays her series detective Hercule Poirot as a murderer. In turn, she presents each of the biblical Ten Commandments in crisis, highlighting the moral shortcomings of crime fiction in its interwar form and the urgent need for new directions in a genre where Good was supposed mathematically to triumph over Evil – a genre that had been heralded as a form of secular theology.7 Moving on, the chapter then considers the loss of prophecy in Christie’s 1960s and 1970s fiction, the fallibility of detectives and the presentation of characters who claim to have access to ultimate truths. Christie uses biblical references to show these characters’ shortcomings. For example, in By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968), a woman who claims to be doing ‘the Lord’s work’ is inspired to commit serial homicide on the basis of a misremembered quotation from the Gospels that she has taken out of context (183).8 The crime is resolved, but the mysteries around 4. Agatha Christie, Passenger to Frankfurt (London: Collins, 1970), 1. 5.  Quoted in Peter C. Erb, Murder, Manners, and Mystery:  Reflections on Faith in Contemporary Detective Fiction (London: SCM Press, 2004), 23. 6. Space does not permit me to debate the question of what constitutes the Golden Age of crime or detective fiction. For simplicity’s sake, I am using the term synonymously with interwar crime fiction produced in Great Britain. 7.  Charles Nicholas Martin Baldock, ‘The Religious Imagination in British Popular Fiction and Society, 1900–1945’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2009), 191. 8.  Throughout the chapter, I include the original publication date of Christie’s novels in brackets the first time each novel is mentioned. Any page references are based on later editions of the novels, the full publication dates and details of which can be found in the bibliography at the end of this chapter.

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the quotation’s meaning, and how it came to be applied in the way that it has, are not. The final part of the chapter looks at eschatology and new world projects, an ever-topical concern in the decades following the Second World War. In several late Christie novels, the crimes revolve around individuals trying to start new religions or political movements; dogmas and ideologies become blurred, but the bottom line is always personal wealth. By alluding in thematic and narrative terms to the Garden of Eden, the fall of Lucifer and the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Christie provides a recognizable Western Christian cultural context for her ethical questions around extremism and metanarratives. Her traditional forms and her interaction with religious interpretative traditions allow her to explore the ambivalences of restructuring in an increasingly secular society, fundamentally compromised by international conflict.

Beyond the Ten Commandments It would be unfair to characterize Golden Age detective fiction as a great escapist game, but that is certainly how the most successful authors, including Agatha Christie, had their work marketed between the wars.9 Indeed, several sets of ‘rules’ for writing detective fiction were concocted in the 1920s, one of the best known being Ronald Knox’s ‘Ten Commandments’, formulated in 1928. Knox was a crime writer and a Roman Catholic priest, and his ‘commandments’ were, like most rules for the genre, tongue-in-cheek mockeries of his colleagues’ gaudiest excesses. Examples of Knox’s commandments include:  ‘All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course . . . No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used . . . No Chinaman must figure into the story . . . Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.’10 The tone and spirit is evidently one of fun and fair play. There is a sense in which British detective fiction valued its absolute self-containedness, its currency as a staple of interwar life with its own distinct rules, removed from the messy shadows of war and the realities of recession. As numerous studies have shown, the literature did much more than distract and amuse,11 but the fact remains that it was marketed and largely discussed in those terms.12 Detective fiction between the wars was widely valued for the same reason it was widely disparaged: because it provided a set of ‘everyman morality tale[s]’,13 9. Martin Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder (London: HarperCollins, 2015), 369–72. 10. Ronald A. Knox, ‘Father Knox’s Ten Commandments’, Diogenes Club (1999), available online http://www.diogenes-club.com/knoxrules.htm (accessed 31 January 2017). 11. Alison Light, Forever England: Literature, Femininity and Conservatism between the Wars (Abingdon: Routledge, 1991); Samantha Walton, Guilty but Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 12. Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder, 369–82. 13. Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: Harper, 2011), 437.

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complete in themselves and, apparently, unengaged with everyday concerns. Some commentators worried that clergymen, who should be focused on cultivating their congregations for the messy realities of life, were being given a rosy view of the world in which Good and Evil were clearly delineated and resolution guaranteed.14 As Peter Erb has noted, Christian theology, and religion more generally, is on some level about the question of God and the problems of faith: these are not puzzles but divine ‘mysteries’, which are ‘never expendable and never concluded’.15 Erb compares crime writers to the New Testament letter-writers, offering knowledge and illumination but also, in the case of modern crime fiction specifically, a sense that there are wider questions that remain unresolved when the book or letter has ended.16 The easier, and more direct, questions of guilt and innocence in Golden Age detective fiction soon gained it a reputation for offering a kind of nonreligious alternative to faith; a rational and secular theology in an era devastated by international conflict, where fundamental questions about why and what are ignored as irrelevant.17 All that matters, or so it goes, is apportioning blame and enjoying resolution. Dorothy L. Sayers famously gave up writing detective fiction towards the end of the Golden Age to focus on theology. She argued that the murder mystery format was too limiting, and did not allow writers or readers to deal with any important questions. One problem for Sayers was the general lack of the Divine in detective fiction’s secular theology. ‘If we wipe out God from the problem’, she claimed in a 1935 review, ‘we are in very real danger of wiping out man as well. Unless we are prepared to bring our murderers to the bar of Eternity, we may construct admirable jig-saw puzzles, but we shall certainly never write a “Hamlet”.’18 There are two things going on here:  as the Second World War approaches with increasing inevitability, Sayers rejects the idea that a novel can perform an important social function if the text itself lacks psychological or political depth; she also expresses her own religious conviction that divine context in morality tales is a matter of ethical urgency. Arguably, Christie dealt the death blow to the Golden Age in 1939 with the publication of And Then There Were None, in which all the major characters are at the same time murderers, victims and investigators. She wrote its elegy, however, a few years later in the form of Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. In Curtain, Christie plays scrupulously fair by the standards of Knox’s ‘Ten Commandments’, but illustrates a world in which the Ten Commandments purveyed through Moses in the Pentateuch (Exod. 20.1-17; Deut. 5.6-21) hold no sway. These Commandments

14. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939), 50. 15. Erb, Murder, Manners, Mystery, 26. 16. Ibid., 27. 17.  Baldock, ‘The Religious Imagination in British Popular Fiction and Society, 1900–1945’, 191. 18.  Dorothy L. Sayers, Taking Detective Stories Seriously:  The Collected Reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers (Perth: Tippermuir, 2017), 264.

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formed the most basic laws for living after the exodus, with the first four concerning Israel’s proper respect for YHWH and the other six concerning communal and social arrangements. Christie was not alone in feeling that wartime Britain had lost its grasp of the fundamental values promoted in the Pentateuch. Many, however, like the commentator David Kyles who argued that war had ‘unleashed a pagan flood [sweeping] away many a sacred sanction’,19 were more ostensibly polemic. As a crime writer, Christie was able to make social commentary form the fabric of her plots. In Curtain, breaking the biblical commandments is presented as almost a precondition for modern, or war-conscious, life. Inevitably, because of the genre, there is murder, theft, adultery and false testament. The story concerns an Iago-like villain, Stephen Norton, who manipulates other people into committing murder, because it gives him a sense of power. As the novel progresses, even the recurring detective characters become implicated; Poirot’s assistant Captain Hastings tries to commit murder, his daughter commits adultery and tries to disown her father and Poirot himself lies in a court of law for the greater good. These are the commandments most obviously broken in the novel and, notably, they are among the ones Jesus himself singles out (Matt. 19.17-19). Finally, Poirot commits the ultimate crime, shooting dead the villain who, legally, cannot be stopped or punished. Poirot shoots Norton in the head, writes a confession to Hastings, and suffers a fatal heart attack. In his confession, Poirot demonstrates internal conflict: I do not believe that a man should take the law into his own hands . . . But on the other hand, I am the law! . . . I have always been so sure – Too sure . . . But now I  am very humble and say like a little child ‘I do not know’ . . . I prefer to leave myself in the hands of the bon Dieu. May his punishment, or his mercy, be swift! (220)20

Here, Poirot’s godlike powers of ratiocination – after all, Golden Age detectives were famously infallible – are framed as vanity, spiralling to a point of crisis. He believes that he embodies ‘the law’, but also knows that this is dangerous, and ultimately gives himself up to God’s judgement by evoking the words of Christ in Matthew’s gospel, who commanded the faithful to ‘humble [themselves] as little children’ in order to receive the love of God (Matt. 18.4). Poirot is not unlike Norton who, he says, embodies ‘the lust of the sadist and the lust of power. He, Norton, had the keys of life’ (203–204). The extremely fleshly word ‘lust’ makes Norton’s sin decidedly earthly, and Poirot indicates a correlation between immorality and success in ‘life’. There has been, he says, ‘too much of that

19.  Quoted in Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain:  Understanding Secularisation (London: Routledge, 2002), 87. 20. In this and subsequent quotations, ellipses in square brackets indicate where I have omitted material from the narrative. All other ellipses are in the original text.

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in the world of late’ (203). Despite judging him, Poirot, too, is guilty of worldly sins. In the war-conscious Curtain, both the villain and the detective illustrate dangerous extremes in the pursuit of power, while their creator self-consciously responds to rules or commandments covering both the genre and Christian morality. The novel’s final words are provided by Captain Hastings, thinking about Norton’s head wound. Previously, he has noticed how strangely symmetrical the wound was (186), and Poirot, of course, is obsessively orderly. ‘Queer’, writes Hastings, ‘it’s just come to me . . . The mark on Norton’s forehead – it was like the brand of Cain’ (221). Cain, the first murderer, according to Genesis, was marked by God, ‘so that no one who came upon him would kill him’ (Gen. 4.15). As Poirot states that God, and not he, is the proper judge, the bullet-wound can be read not so much as evidence of murder or execution as of branding: he has identified and judged a murderer, as the law cannot do. The mark of judgement is neat and symmetrical, so distinctly Poirot’s, not YHWH’s – but if we take Poirot and Norton to be two sides of a coin, then the bullet-wound might also be the visible sign that God says his prophets must ‘fix’ upon their foreheads when they have understood his commandments (Deut. 11.18). The novel, and therefore Poirot’s career, ends with an ellipsis, denoting uncertainty where, traditionally, there has been resolution. Presuming himself to embody the law, Poirot has found it wanting and indicates the need, and therefore the felt absence, of some greater moral authority, known through scripture.

The Loss of Prophecy Curtain was not published until 1975, thirty-five years after it was written, and as such it has never really been given its critical dues. A masterpiece of the genre, it effectively exhausts the functions of the Golden Age form and raises all the ethical questions that make traditional detective fiction irrelevant in war-torn Britain. Christie continued to write relatively straightforward novels during the war, but afterwards, she began subtly experimenting; times, and the author, had moved on. Much of her late 1940s and early 1950s work revolves around postwar trauma: Taken at the Flood (1948) is about a WREN who cannot return to prewar gender norms; Crooked House (1949) features a conscientious objector wracked with guilt; A Murder Is Announced (1950) is based around a postwar community where every member has invented their own backstory; and the stage play ‘The Mousetrap’ (1952) explores the fine line between war heroism and mental instability. In these ambitious novels, Christie increasingly dispensed with her series detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple. When they do appear in later books, they tend to turn up at least halfway through. Elsewhere in this volume, Hannah M. Strømmen has convincingly argued that Christie presents Poirot as a bourgeois prophet, reflecting biblical archetypes in a secular genre. In this secular genre, Strømmen argues, a prophet figure is essential, and Christie draws on ‘universal [biblical] archetypes’ to illustrate this need. There is much evidence to support this

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important argument, but I am claiming that, after the war, Christie created a new genre of crime fiction which grew to be explicitly concerned with national ethics and self-consciously reactive to old traditions, including biblical interpretation. As already stated, Christie knew her Bible and was comfortable with surrounding literature and traditions, but she rarely used them to any great effect in her literature. The key to her writing has always been accessibility, and in her relatively straightforward pre-1939 mystery novels all literary and cultural references are carefully explained for the benefit of diverse readers. No knowledge of the Bible is required to solve a Christie whodunit, just as no knowledge of Greek myths or the plays of William Shakespeare is necessary. While biblical, Shakespearean and classical clues abound, their significance is always explained to the reader at the outset. In this sense, the Bible was part of a cultural tapestry that made up an authorial shorthand to character: when one character quotes biblical aphorisms in And Then There Were None (1939), the significance is not in the content of her quotations but in the fact and manner of their delivery. And Then There Were None is a novel written by Christie on the verge of war in which nine murderers are executed by a mad judge over a single weekend. One of the most disturbing characters within the novel is Christian extremist Emily Brent. She is always holding her Bible, and prefers it to human company, but rarely opens it. Instead, she passes judgemental remarks, ‘[e]nveloped in an aura of righteousness’ (7), and occasionally comes out with quotations:  ‘The Lord is mindful of his own’, she reassures herself. ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night’ (160; emphasis original). At this point in the novel, the reader already knows that this self-described emissary of the Lord’s will is a deluded killer, and is anticipating her death, which occurs within pages. The content of the quotations, easily divorced from their biblical context, serves only to show the character’s hypocrisy, and the irony that her extreme hermeneutics have led not to her security but to her downfall.21 The use of small biblical quotations in Christie’s later novels illustrates her reliance on biblical themes and narratives in constructing plots. By the Pricking of My Thumbs features an inscription on a gravestone, which is ‘hard to make out’ but ‘definitely biblical’: ‘It looked like “Whosoever . . .” and then “offend least of these:” and “Millstone” ’ (156). The words have been unconfidently carved, ‘done by someone who wasn’t quite sure [of] the words he wanted to remember’ (156). The allusion is to the New Testament, and could refer to the words of Christ in either of these passages:

21.  ‘The lord is mindful of his own’ comes from Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio ‘St Paul’, and is based on Ps. 115.12, which concerns the promise that YHWH will raise his armies against idolaters. ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night’ is a direct quotation of Ps. 91.5 in the Authorised (King James) Version, promising rewards for those who have defended YHWH in the face of persecution. Brent’s refusal to acknowledge that her own persecution is a result of her actions and not her faith, combined with some biblical misquoting, makes her a hypocrite.

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Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matt. 18.4-6) It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. (Lk. 17.2)

The Authorised (King James) Version is quoted here, for reasons that will become apparent. The novel’s protagonist is a vicar’s daughter called Tuppence, who is roughly as old as the century. Wanting to find out who was offended and why these words would be put onto a gravestone, she seeks out a Bible, to find the full verse. Tuppence  – who is ostensibly on holiday but actually chasing a murderer  – is dismayed to find no Gideon Bible in her hotel room. She announces to her husband Tommy, ‘No Bible’ (174), and a rather didactic conversation ensues. ‘Do you want a bible?’ Tommy asks, to which she replies: Well, I do rather. I was brought up properly and I used to know my bible quite well, as any good clergyman’s daughter should. But now, you see, one rather forgets. Especially as they don’t read the lessons properly any more in churches. They give you some new version where all the wording, I suppose, is technically right and a proper translation, but sounds nothing like it used to. (175)

Tuppence decides to ‘ask the [local] vicar’ who is bound to have a ‘proper’ Bible:  ‘the Authorised Version’; ‘I shall just go into the church and look at the Bible’, she says (175). The vicar is confused by her request to see the Bible, and worried that she might be trying to steal it. Reassured that she is not a criminal, he is unable to find a copy of the scripture; all he can offer her is a scholarly edition of the New Testament in Greek (176). Despite being the local agent for religion on an everyday level, the vicar views scripture as something to be studied and pored over, not to be read – this is remarkable, and surely implausible, in a church. Tuppence, belonging to a prewar Anglican tradition, is unable to find a Bible, even in a place of worship, that can be put to practical use; the only available options are texts she sees as either compromised or only partially accessible to scholars of ancient languages. These are impractical Bibles. If consulting the Bible as a scholarly, rather than practical, text is quixotic, a more extreme way of reading it comes from the novel’s villain, who had some of its words inscribed on the gravestone. An elderly woman called Mrs Lancaster, who has killed several children, she reveals her reasons towards the end of the novel. Unable to have children, she thought she was ‘cursed’. After studying the scriptures, she believed she had ‘to atone’ through ‘sacrifices’; the children she killed ‘would be offered up’, she says. ‘It was so happy to release them so that they’d never know sin like I knew sin’ (176). Inspired by the metaphor Jesus used in Matt. 18.4-6 and Lk. 7.2, Mrs Lancaster has killed several children so that they could

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‘receive’ God in a state of purity. She has also killed witnesses because, by posing a threat to her continued success, they are ‘offend[ing] these little ones’. She accepts that she is a ‘killer’, but does not see this as evidence of sin. Rather, she claims to have transcended sin:  ‘Killer Kate . . . You know my nickname? Yes, but I’ve sublimated that. I’ve become a killer of the Lord. It’s the Lord’s will that I should kill you. So that makes it all right. You do see that, don’t you? You see, it makes it all right’ (185). The repetitive justification indicates that this character has not even convinced herself. She cannot confront her own baseness, but seeks to ground it in the ultimate authority of scripture or even a divine call. Tuppence is shocked to reflect that, by Mrs Lancaster’s own logic, ‘she is a perfectly normal, reasonable human being’ (187). We might recall the ‘Agatha Christie Indult’ mentioned above, and the clear distinction between upholding religious texts as explicit directives and valuing them as elements of a thriving, peaceful culture. Like prewar Christie, By the Pricking of My Thumbs takes place in a world in which the Bible is most actively interpreted by people acting in the name of hate and destruction. Yet this is increasingly a world in which biblical interpretation must be ‘sleuthed’ and decoded; where application is more relevant than accurate translation. The ambling postwar village is one in which the sleuth, though steeped in religion since childhood, is unsure of her Bible; where memorials are inscribed from memory; where the priest has no idea about scripture or its significance, and religious maniacs are the only people who have memorized it. Unlike Emily Brent, who quotes her Bible but never reads it, Mrs Lancaster is fundamentally influenced by her own interpretation of biblical instructions. Prophecy and agency have fallen into an uneasy conflagration, something illustrated in the late Christie novels by casual references to discredited prophets from history. In By the Pricking of My Thumbs, a doctor’s black bag is compared to the sealed box of prophecies owned by real-life self-proclaimed prophet Joanna Southcott, which her followers believed would not be opened until the world’s end (18).22 The small reference to Southcott in a novel in which an extremely religious person murders indiscriminately because of how she has interpreted the Bible creates a detailed world where prophecy has become inadequate and dangerous. Similarly, the title of Endless Night, published the previous year, comes from a poem by the self-proclaimed prophet William Blake; it is a book in which a socially mobile youth kills in order to own a house and keep an exotic lover. Selfproclaimed prophesy enters into dialogue with the basest of mortal sins. The detectives, however, remain essentially moral. Poirot and Marple no longer possess divine knowledge or infallibility, but they are aware of the existence of

22.  Joanna Southcott (1750–1814) was a self-described prophet from Devon, England. She composed various prophecies, and believed herself to be gifted with a number of supernatural abilities. Her box of prophecies was opened in 1927 and found to contain eclectic, un-prophetic items, including a lottery ticket, a toy pistol and an etching of the Thames. See Frances Brown, Joanna Southcott’s Box of Sealed Prophecies (Cambridge:  The Lutterworth Press, 2003), 204.

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Good with a capital G and Evil with a capital E. In the final Marple novel, Nemesis (1971), Marple is said to have ‘a very fine sense for evil’ because she can recognize it where others cannot (186). In this novel, Marple has been commissioned by a dead friend to investigate a decades-old murder and clear his son’s name. The son has the suitably angelic name Michael Rafiel. In her commissioning letter, she is told to ‘Let justice roll down like waters, / And righteousness like an everlasting stream’ (41). The quotation is from Amos 5.24, and here the deceased friend speaks as a prophet transmitting the words of YHWH. In a later-twentieth-century context, the water imagery evokes the Flood, with its connotations of purification and a fresh start after the major destabilizations and depravities of war and its aftermath. Marple here is equipped as an agent of ‘justice’ (never capitalized); she describes herself several times as ‘an emissary of justice’ (332), serving ‘the cause of justice’ (20). Justice here is the coming of the fairest and most final judgement, so desperately needed in uncertain times. According to A. N. Wilson, Christie is ‘quite overt [in Nemesis] about the extent to which she is writing a redemption myth’.23 The novel’s title itself comes from a name given to Marple by her dead friend, and identifies her with the Greek goddess of retribution. Marple, an elderly spinster, declares herself Nemesis twice: once to a solicitor, and once to the murderer, while she is knitting: ‘Miss Marple pulled down the mass of pink wool . . . “One of my names”, she said, “is Nemesis . .  . Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end” ’ (327). Marple’s pursuit of truth is described using the religious language of ‘pilgrimage’ (97); she is not some external authority figure, but is on a journey of her own. She spends much of her mission in an alien town in conversation with an archdeacon, because in her life, she points out, ‘things do rather revolve round the church’ (148), and she describes her only qualification as ‘[a] flair for Evil’ (145; emphasis original). The italicized ‘flair’ is ambiguous: it might mean that Marple can ferret out Evil, or that she is invested in it. Whatever her personal feelings, it is the scriptural promise of ultimate judgement from a higher source  – as prophesied in Amos 5.24 – that animates her unlikely mission. Marple eventually discovers that the victim  – significantly named Verity Hunt – was murdered by her adoptive mother, who had fallen in love with her. Verity’s only sin, according to Marple, had been the pursuit of ‘normality’ (274– 75, 328):  she wanted to marry a man, settle down and have children. In these conclusions, Marple reveals herself to be an ‘emissary of justice’ only inasmuch as she is a product of her own prewar time. Any didactic remarks Marple makes about what is ‘normal’ and correct are tempered by an oft-repeated assertion that she ‘never quite succeeded in abandoning her Victorian view of foreigners’, as well as making some quite alarmingly archaic remarks on rape (107, 182, 186, 218). Marple is therefore as fallible and judgemental as those she investigates because she too is separated from the Divine. Christie’s biographer Laura Thompson has

23.  A. N. Wilson, ‘Agatha Christie, the Mistress of all Mysteries’, Daily Telegraph, 27 August 2007.

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claimed that ‘Nemesis . . . is not really a detective story but a sombre meditation on the realities of love’.24 It is certainly not a conventional whodunit, but is entirely consistent with Christie’s ambitions for the genre, showcasing the era-specific nature of detectives’ prophecy, and the increasing need for some de-individualized moral authority.

New World Projects The common view of Christie’s murderers is that they represent evil and are, conveniently, expunged at the end of the narrative. Jim Thompson encapsulates this view when he writes that [t]he detective figure’s identification of the murderer has the ideological effect of extrapolating the diseased agent (the murderer) and thereby confirming the body politic in its sense of its own collective moral and political decency. This is because Christie’s murderers either are actuated by moral failure (greed, lust, avarice, etc., sins that are the result of consciously made decisions), or else commit their crimes because of mental derangement.25

As we have seen, however, Christie’s later novels present a world that has not been put to rights by any detective; it remains fallen. As Samantha Walton writes, ‘[T]he capture of the criminal can mark the beginning, not the end, of an uncontainable problem.’26 In The Pale Horse (1961), the resolution is palpably false. The crimes in that novel have centred around an inn called the Pale Horse, and at the end, the narrator decides to pay it one last visit. His friend, a vicar’s wife, speaks in a ‘deep and sonorous’ voice:  ‘ “Revelation, Chapter Six, Verse Eight. And I  looked and behold a pale horse:  and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him . . .” We were silent for a moment or two, and then [she] said, “So that’s that”, in the tone of one who puts something in the wastepaper basket’ (190). Other characters observe a sense of ‘anticlimax’ and decide to go to the theatre, which is also how the book begins. An apparently unstoppable criminal network has been stopped, and its epitaph alludes to the irreversible coming of death. The crimes under investigation, once resolved, have been flippantly discarded, but there is no reason that another such network will not spring up. Moreover, the Pale Horse, a reminder that final resolution is yet to come, stays standing. The murder method in The Pale Horse might have its origins in Revelation, with the four horsemen of the apocalypse who appear when the first four seals on

24. Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery (London: Headline, 2007), 473. 25. Jim Thompson, Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 132. 26. Walton, Guilty but Insane, 23.

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a scroll are opened (Rev. 6.1-8). The horse-riders have commonly been taken to represent the Antichrist (the white horse), war (the red horse), famine (the black horse) and death (the pale horse), and the symptoms of thallium poisoning, the cause of death in the novel, mirror these: they begin with the introduction of the poison, proceed through erratic mood swings, loss of hair and malnutrition and, finally, culminate in death. More prosaically, the first three victims have, in order, white hair, red hair and black hair. The crimes are committed via an organized ring based at the Pale Horse, who, for a large sum, arrange for the victims to be poisoned via their consumption of door-to-door cosmetics. In this set-up, murder has become commoditized, and the power of death lies in money. ‘The real evil’ in the novel, Rebecca Mills has suggested, ‘is capitalism’.27 Moreover, the specific criminal operation might have been stopped, but the fourth horse of the apocalypse is still there, as life continues in much the same way; it is still, as the narrator has called it, a ‘dangerous world’ (7). The restoration of order is not, as W. H. Auden suggested of older Christiean novels, the return to Eden.28 Hallowe’en Party (1969), Christie’s last coherent crime novel, also deals with this same impossibility of resolution. Twice in the novel, Poirot refers back to previous cases; at one point he speculates that a couple he brought together at the end of another book are probably not still happily married, and later he recalls that a school he saved from ruin in yet another previous book has not survived in its former state (53, 115).29 Poirot is decidedly flawed in this novel – he fails to prevent multiple murders and finds himself strongly attracted to the ‘beautiful’ man who turns out to be the murderer (140–41).30 He feels that he and the murderer are fellow performers in a ‘pageant’; they are both in the world but not of it (141). What separates them, eventually, is their ultimate views on what should become of the world in all its ugly reality. While Poirot understands beauty as justice and the protection of innocence, Michael wants beauty as something for himself. Like the Antichrist of Christian tradition, and the Devil in the gospels, Christie’s murderers can be charming and persuasive. In They Came to Baghdad (1953), Destination Unknown (1956), Endless Night (1967), Hallowe’en Party (1969) and Passenger to Frankfurt (1970), beautiful men promise their victims that they can bring around a new world; ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ in the here and now,

27. Rebecca Mills, ‘England’s Pockets: Objects of Anxiety in Christie’s Post-war Novels,’ in The Ageless Agatha Christie: Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy, ed. J. C. Bernthal (Jefferson: McFarland, 2016), 39. 28.  W. H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage:  Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,’ Harper’s Magazine (May 1948), 407–12. 29.  The novels referred to are Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) and Cat Among the Pigeons (1959). 30.  ‘One didn’t think like that nowadays. You said of a young man that he was sexy or madly attractive . . . you didn’t say of a young man that he was beautiful . . . He had features of great perfection such as a classical sculptor might have produced’ (Hallowe’en Party, 140–41).

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rather than in God’s unknowable timeframe (Rev. 21.1). Hallowe’en Party’s killer, a gardener who is, again, called Michael, has murdered several people, including children, in order to make enough money to buy and renovate a Greek island. The police foil him as he attempts to kill his 12-year-old daughter, who has fallen in love with him, and whom he has convinced to act as a willing ‘sacrifice’ (321). ‘He would have sacrificed his own daughter’, says Poirot, ‘so that he should have a new Garden of Eden’ (335). Poirot, however, knows that the world must return to a state of flawed innocence. He regrets the loss of beauty – ‘alas, there would be no garden blossoming on an island in the Grecian Seas’ – but finds solace in the idea that there will always be children, ‘alive and young and beautiful’ (335, 336). It is a bittersweet ending, in which Poirot has transferred his definition of beauty away from the man whom he first described as timelessly and hypnotically beautiful, understandable only to him, to the child who embodies the promise of continuity. It is not a perfect world but it is the best he can hope for. Michael’s many sacrifices have largely concerned drowning – in a bucket for apple bobbing, in a stream and, historically, in a well. On top of one victim whom he buried in the garden, he has built a water fountain. This all links with the book of Revelation, in which the Lamb of God is said to lead the worthy to the fountains of ‘the Spring of Life’ (Rev. 7.17); but here in Hallowe’en Party, a false prophet offers the promise only of enduring death to his victims, all the while planning to continue and thrive with godlike powers under the auspices of capitalism. Apple imagery is everywhere in Hallowe’en Party. The first victim dies bobbing for apples, she lives in a house called Appletrees and Poirot’s companion Mrs Oliver has a greedy love of the fruit, causing Poirot to reflect that ‘one didn’t seem able to get away from apples’ (63). The apple is commonly taken to be the forbidden fruit that led to the Fall in Genesis. The constant presence of apples in Hallowe’en Party thus serves as a constant reminder that we live in a fallen world. Michael, the brilliant gardener and architect, wants to recreate the beauty of the world before the Fall, but only for selfish reasons, and he is unable to achieve this without a messy investment in the sins that followed it: murder, capitalistic greed and depravity. Michael is also a false representation of Michael the archangel who, in Revelation, defeats the Devil’s dragon with the blood of the lamb (Rev. 12.7-12). Instead, he is described as a ‘follower of Lucifer the Beautiful’ (334). The classical beauty that attracts Poirot is what marks the killer as a disciple of evil, as fallen as the world he wants to transcend. It also points to the falseness of what he promises, which in turn reflects the arbitrary nature of a detective novel’s resolution. But Michael is also compared by Poirot to Narcissus (328). Indeed, the biblical references throughout Hallowe’en Party are accompanied by references to both Greek mythology and Shakespeare, whose name alone is shorthand for British cultural heritage. Michael’s daughter is called Miranda, her mother is Judith and their friend is Ariadne. Early on, all three enjoy a conversation on names with Poirot. Miranda says that her name led her to read Shakespeare and become interested in the idea of a ‘brave new world’ – Poirot says that brave new worlds

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exist only ‘for very special people’ (148, 149) – and they move on to a discussion of her mother’s name. When Judith claims that not everyone can ‘live up to [their] name’, Ariadne agrees: ‘I can’t see you in the rôle of cutting off your lover’s head’ (156). She is referring to the apocryphal tale of Judith and Holofernes, a story understood by some as the prototype of the adventure novel.31 Christie’s Judith does not exactly disagree with her friend; she comments that, in killing Holofernes, Judith carried out ‘her patriotic duty . . . for which, if I remember rightly, she was highly commended’ (156–57). It is not a good exegesis – Holofernes is not Judith’s lover, but her conqueror and potential rapist – and the characters explain their lack of awareness straight away: ‘I’m not very up in Judith and Holofernes. Apocrypha, isn’t it?’ (157). The conversation moves on to Jael, a canonical character, and it is Miranda who explains the story, because she has taught herself the Old Testament. This is considered as shocking as knowing the apocrypha, since schools, says Ariadne, no longer teach religious texts. ‘They give them ethical ideas’, instead, she says (157). The word ‘give’, rather than ‘teach’, implies a dangerous restriction of freedom in what we might call the ‘system’. Miranda explains that a rogue teacher told her to read the Bible because it had more ‘literary merit’ than modern ethical ideas, and yet another discussion of the Authorised Version’s lost glory follows.32 In Hallowe’en Party, then, the Bible is not a lost part of Britain’s cultural heritage, but something that is available to what Poirot calls ‘very special’ individuals  – here, it is Miranda whose enquiring mind grants her the benefits of scripture. Judith’s ignorance of her namesake’s story serves both to indicate a continuum – one generation has forgotten the Apocrypha, the next has forgotten the Old Testament – and, inevitably, to foreshadow her own role in the novel’s resolution. Once Judith realizes that her former lover is about to ‘sacrifice’ their daughter, she plays a part in bringing him down – although this Judith uses Poirot and the police, rather than a sword.

Conclusion If we read these late Christie novels as eschatological reflections, we can see some similarities to the contemporary eschatology Jürgen Moltmann expressed in his Theology of Hope (1964). Moltmann claimed influentially that, ‘[f]rom first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving’.33 Crucially, he argued that eschatology was not about the promise of a new world but the promise of ‘new creation of all things’

31. Ivor H. Jones, The Apocrypha (Werrington: Epworth Press, 2003), 51. 32. ‘We should at least know the fine prose and blank verse sometimes of the Authorised version’, says Miranda (157), prompting Mrs Oliver to call her ‘an astonishing child’ (158). 33.  Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope:  On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. Kames W. Leitch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 16.

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in this world.34 This perspective on eschatology has, inevitably, been considered as a reaction to ‘the modern West compromised by its justification of domination as progress’ in the harrowed aftermath of violent international conflict.35 We can see a distinct and more populist, but undeniably similar, response in Christie’s experimental later novels. This chapter has highlighted some crucial discoveries about a set of novels that are often ignored because they do not confirm easy theses about Christie’s detective fiction. They are ‘difficult’ novels because they belong to a unique, experimental and underappreciated subgenre of postwar detective fiction, in which, we might recall, the author sought to ‘hold up a mirror to the world’. It is a world crying out for divine judgement and impartial authority. It is a world in which those who claim prophetic status or absolute moral superiority turn out to embody or enable the earthliest vices. For Christie, the solution lies in continuity, and in acknowledging that scripture and religion do not have magic answers any more than detective fiction can offer genuinely watertight resolution. Christie was undeniably a traditionalist in her understandings of scripture and its value to an increasingly secular society. However, after the upheavals of two world wars, she adapted the whodunit format, re-evaluating its social function. Her later books respond self-consciously to the absence of external and infallible authority figures, and celebrate the promise of judgement and retribution – not in this dangerous world, but in the world to come.

Bibliography Auden, W. H. ‘The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict’. Harper’s Magazine. May 1948, 407–12. Baldock, Charles Nicholas Martin. ‘The Religious Imagination in British Popular Fiction and Society, 1900–1945’. PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2009. Brown, Callum G. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation. London: Routledge, 2002. Brown, Frances. Joanna Southcott’s Box of Sealed Prophecies. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2003. Christie, Agatha. And Then There Were None. London: Harper, [1939] 2015. Christie, Agatha. The Pale Horse. Glasgow : Fontana, [1961] 1964. Christie, Agatha. By the Pricking of My Thumbs. Glasgow : Fontana, [1968] 1977. Christie, Agatha. Hallowe’en Party. London: Harper, [1969] 2001. Christie, Agatha. Passenger to Frankfurt. London: Collins, 1970. Christie, Agatha. Nemesis. London: Harper, [1971] 2002. Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography. London: Harper, [1977] 2011. Edwards, Martin. The Golden Age of Murder. London: HarperCollins, 2015.

34. Ibid., 23, 33. 35. David F. Ford and Rachel Muers, The Modern Theologians: Christian Theology since 1918, 3rd edn (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 152.

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Erb, Peter C. Murder, Manners, and Mystery: Reflections on Faith in Contemporary Detective Fiction. London: SCM Press, 2004. Ford, David F., and Rachel Muers. The Modern Theologians: Christian Theology since 1918. 3rd edn. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Grumett, David. Material Eucharist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Jones, Ivor H. The Apocrypha. Werrington: Epworth Press, 2003. Knox, Ronald A. ‘Father Knox’s Ten Commandments’. Diogenes Club, 1999. Available online http://www.diogenes-club.com/knoxrules.htm (accessed 13 April 2018). Leavis, Q. D. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto & Windus, 1939. Light, Alison. Forever England: Literature, Femininity and Conservatism between the Wars. Abingdon: Routledge, 1991. Mills, Rebecca. ‘England’s Pockets: Objects of Anxiety in Christie’s Post-war Novels’. In The Ageless Agatha Christie: Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy, edited by J. C. Bernthal, 29–44. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016. Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology. Translated by Kames W. Leitch. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Sayers, Dorothy L. Taking Detective Stories Seriously: The Collected Reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers. Perth: Tippermuir, 2017. Thompson, Jim. Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Thompson, Laura. Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. London: Headline, 2007. Walton, Samantha. Guilty but Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Wilson, A. N. ‘Agatha Christie, the Mistress of all Mysteries’. Daily Telegraph, 27 August 2007. Available online http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3642276/ Agatha-Christie-the-mistress-of-all-mysteries.html (accessed 31 January 2017).

Chapter 12 A F T E RWO R D Liam McIlvanney

As a boy growing up in the West of Scotland in the 1970s and 1980s, I used to look out for a particular face in the pages of the Daily Record. It was an artist’s impression – or sometimes an identikit photo – of a man who killed three women in Glasgow in the late 1960s and was never caught. Like the sulky, bottle-blonde mugshot of Myra Hyndley, the image of this man would surface from time to time in the papers. We couldn’t get enough, it seemed, of this clean-cut, smartly turned out killer. In due course I would write a novel based on the crimes of this man and their impact on the city, but what struck me at the time, even more than that smirking, handsome face, was the killer’s name. His name was Bible John. Or at least that was the nickname coined by a Glasgow journalist called John Quinn. The third victim’s sister had spent an evening in the killer’s company and heard him denounce dancehalls as ‘dens of iniquity’ and mutter darkly about ‘women taken in adultery’. Quinn dubbed the murderer ‘Bible John’ and the moniker stuck. The Bible, as I knew from my Sunday School classes at Kilmarnock’s Old High Kirk, was a book about love and compassion. But it was also, as I remembered from endless Presbyterian sermons, a book about judgement and death, and so the killer’s nickname – with its gust of sanctimony – seemed chillingly apt. It may be an accident of West of Scotland birth that violent crime narratives and the Bible are intertwined in my imagination, but it is also – as the chapters in this volume demonstrate  – a great deal more than that. The matter of crime fiction  – deceit, betrayal, vengeance, punishment, rancour, bloody murder  – is the matter of much of the Bible. Biblical allusions, themes, tropes and templates abound in the crime fiction canon. The very cadences of the King James Version live on in the swinging rhythms of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and the jagged incantations of David Peace. Sometime this engagement with Bible themes and stories is an explicit strategy of writers who are themselves religious. This is the case with several novelists of the interwar ‘Golden Age’ period. As Joanne Drayton puts it in her biography of Ngaio Marsh:

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For the Queens of Crime, writing about murder was not a betrayal of Faith but an affirmation, the Christian theme of sin and expiation played over and over again. The murder victim was the sacrificial lamb, given up so that the agent of sin, the murderer, could be found out and exorcized. The detective was the high priest, the detective story a modern apocrypha.1

But even secular writers are drawn to this schema of sin and redemption, particularly in countries where a ‘Calvinist sense of morality’ still carries weight.2 This may be why the very titles of a writer as apparently secular as Ian Rankin – Dead Souls, Set in Darkness, The Falls, Resurrection Men, Saints of the Shadow Bible, Rather Be the Devil – elicit such a religious frisson. In 2002, Rankin presented a TV series on the nature of evil (Ian Rankin’s Evil Thoughts) and in some ways the twenty-two books in the Rebus series mount an extended exploration of the same theme. Crime fiction is seldom embarrassed by the concept of evil. The language of sin and wickedness is the crime novel’s mother tongue. Few literary villains have been as unmitigatedly vicious as the antihero of Robert Louis Stevenson’s detective novel (‘O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if I ever read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend’), but there are shades of Edward Hyde in many a crime fiction baddy.3 Here is Lawrence Dowdall, the Glasgow lawyer in Denise Mina’s recent novel The Long Drop (2017), describing the city’s criminal class to one of his clients: ‘Some of these people, he said, they’re not even trying to be bad. They just are bad, everything they do is bad . . . These people are stained, their very souls are tainted.’4 Crime fiction is peopled with characters for whom sin and wickedness are tangible and real. As Alison Jack points out here in her chapter on the Lewis trilogy, hell is not an abstract theological concept for Peter May’s protagonist; hell is where he lives. ‘Keep the stakes high’ say the fiction-writing manuals. It might be argued that the presence of religious faith, whether in writers or their characters, lessens the stakes of crime fiction. What does it matter if the guilty go unpunished in this life, so long as they get what’s coming to them in the next one? By the same token, however, faith raises the stakes for the believing culprit, whether it’s Pinkie in Brighton Rock (‘hell lay about him in his infancy’), Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos (‘That’s the man I’m going to hell for, Adrianne’) or the death-row inmate in No Country for Old Men (‘I really believe that he knew he was goin’ to be in

1. Joanne Drayton, Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime (London: Harper, 2009), 95. 2. Stefania Ciocia, ‘Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Crime Writing’, in The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction, ed. Christine Berberich (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 117–18. 3.  Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. Katherine Linehan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 17. 4. Denise Mina, The Long Drop (London: Harvill Secker, 2017), 6.

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hell in fifteen minutes’).5 Whether we share their faith or not, such characters are playing for the highest of stakes in fictions that fix our focus on the four last things. As all this might suggest, crime fiction is preoccupied with morality to an extent that many writers of literary fiction would find passé or naïve. Crime and punishment, guilt and innocence, right and wrong are the banks that channel the crime fiction river. But the morality of the crime novel is not always simple or blandly orthodox. Justice does not always require that the guilty party be punished. It’s not uncommon in the Sherlock Holmes stories for the great detective to identify the culprit while shielding him or her from the police. In some crime stories, indeed, it’s the murderer – not the detective – who restores the moral order, as in P. D. James’s ‘The Mistletoe Murder’, where a blackmailer is bludgeoned to death with a golf club, to the narrator’s tacit approval. ‘Do you swear on the Bible?’ we would ask each other as kids, when some news or rumour seemed too stunning to be true. Holy writ, gospel truth: for all its reliance on story, parable and allegory, the Bible has maintained this mystical communion with the truth. And like the Bible, the crime novel operates within the magnetic field of truth. In crime fiction, the detective’s quest is always the same; it’s a quest for the truth, for what actually happened. And like sin and evil, truth seems more graspable in crime fiction than it does in real life. ‘I think the truth is always simple’, says McCarthy’s God-fearing Sheriff Bell: ‘It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it’d be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.’6 But truth in crime fiction is rarely straightforward. Like the New Testament gospels, it comes in alternative versions. Typically, crime fiction presents us with rival accounts of the central events, in which emphases shift and perspectives change. The detective – and by extension the reader – must engage in hermeneutics, sifting the different accounts, choosing between them, forging a path to the truth. The detective as hermeneut is as old as the genre. The most exhilarating moments in the Sherlock Holmes stories are when Holmes ‘reads’ an object or a crime scene, inferring the occupation, temperament and marital circumstances of a man from the appearance of his hat and boots. In these scenes, Watson (‘You see, but you do not observe’) is not merely Holmes’s sidekick and chronicler but his disciple: Shew me thy ways, O Lord; teach me thy paths. The detective is the figure who penetrates the veil, disclosing a realm of meaning beyond the chaos of this sublunary world. Crime fiction is disturbing and consoling in equal measure. It confronts the grim and chilling things that humans do to one another. It looks the world’s brutality and suffering in the face. But it also imbues the horror with meaning. The most heinous crimes, it suggests, are committed for reasons, even if those reasons only fully engage the twisted minds of killers, and in pursuit of tangible goals. It shows how, with skill and intuition and intelligence and courage, the detective

5.  Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (London:  Vintage, [1938] 2004), 70; Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (London: Picador, 2005), 3. 6. McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, 249.

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can solve the crime, identify the culprit and reduce to some kind of order the bloody confusion of murder. The detective is the redeemer of our fallen world. Through the detective’s agency, evil deeds are brought to light and made manifest. The darkness is explained. And this, perhaps, is the key correspondence between the Bible and the crime novel: each provides what P. D. James calls the ‘comforting reassurance that, despite our apparent powerlessness, we yet inhabit an intelligible universe’.7

Bibliography Ciocia, Stefania. ‘Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Crime Writing’. In The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction, edited by Christine Berberich, 108–28. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Drayton, Joanne. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. London: Harper, 2009. Greene, Graham. Brighton Rock. London: Vintage, [1938] 2004. James, P. D. Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography. London: Faber, [1999] 2010. McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. London: Picador, 2005. Mina, Denise. The Long Drop. London: Harvill Secker, 2017. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Edited by Katherine Linehan. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.

7.  P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest:  A Fragment of Autobiography (London:  Faber, [1999] 2010), 28.

INDEX OF AUTHORS Aarne, A. 22 n.41 Akyol, M. 69 n.59 Allen, V. 96 n.11, 99, 100 n.24, 101 n.30, 102 n.36, 103, 104 n.40, 105 n.45 Alter, R. 114 n.10, 119 n.32, 122 n.35 American Film Institute. 96 Andrews, P. 24 n.47 Arvas, P. 41 n.1, 42 n.4 Ashley, M. 60, 61 Astrupgaard, C. 44 n.14 Auden, W. H. 163, 178 Baaz, M. E. 136 n.30 Baldock, C. n. M. 168 n.7, 170 n.17 Barton, J. 18 n.20, 144 Batnitzky, L. 117 n.22, 119 n.32 Baumann, G. 133 n.20, 136 n.31 Beccaria, C. 100 Bergen, R. K. 132 n.16 Bergman, K. 41 n.3 Bible and Culture Collective. 128 n.5 Blanchard, K. D. 143 Blanchot, M. 117 Blenkinsopp, J. 137 Block, M. 66 n.48 Blyth, C. 3 n.7, 42 n.8 Bondebjerg, I. 44 n.14 Boucher, A. 14, 25 Brannen, K. 67 n.49 Brenner, A. 137 n.31, 143, 145 Bridie, J. 21 Brigden, S. 63 n.26, 64 Brodsky, D. 139 n.37 Brown, C. G. 150, 171 n.19 Brown, F. 175 n.22 Burgess, A. W. 96 n.9 Campbell, G. 61 n.15, 62 n.18 Carrigan, T. 83 n.32 Celan, P. 111 n.3 Cettl, R. 99 n.19 Chidester, D. 45 n.20 Cioată, M. 10 n.5, 22 n.42 Ciocia, S. 31, 37, 39 n.16, 184 n.2 Claassens, L. J. M. 136 n.31

Clanton, D. W., Jr. 125 n.1 Clines, D. J. A. 86 n.43 Connell, B. 83 n.32 Connell, R. W. 74, 83 n.32 Cook, D. 69 n.59 Cook, M. 31, 32, 34, 38 Coupe, C. 14 n.16 Cousland, J. R. C. 18 n.21 Cowlishaw, B. R. 86, 88 n.47 Crane, S. 107 Cromwell, T. 59 Cuklanz, L. M. 131 n.15, 140 n.40, 141 n n.42, 45 Culler, J. 128 n.5 D’Agostino, R. B. 96 n.9 Damico, A. M. 73 n n.1, 3 Day, G. 149 n.4, 154 n.30, 157 n.39, 158 n.47 Day, L. 137 n.31, 139 n.39 DeBurger, J. E. 96 n.10 De La Torre, M. 128 Derrida, J. 111 n.1, 115, 116 Deselaers, P. 18 n.21 deSilva, D. A. 18 n.21, 22 n.42 Dijk-Hemmes, F. va n. 137 Douglas, J. E. 96 n.9 Doyle, A. C. 9, 12, 13 n n.12, 18 Drayton, J. 183 Dyer, R. 98 n.17, 101 n.27, 106 Eagleton, T. 128 n.5 Edwards, M. 169 n n.9, 12 Ego, B. 12 n.11 Elgvin, T. 10 n.4 Eliot, T. S. 101 Erb, P. C. 42 n.6, 168 n.5, 170 n.15 Eve, E. 21 n.34 Evenden, E. 65 n.40 Exum, J. C. 77 n.14, 84 n n.33, 85, 88 n.49 Fahy, T. 102 n.35 Faucette, B. 86, 87 n.44 Freeman, T. S. 65 n.40 Fernandez-Armesto, F. 59 n.1, 61 n.17, 62 Fewell, D. n. 144, 145

188

Index of Authors

Fitzmyer, J. A. 10 n n.2, 3, 4, 11 n n.5, 6, 8, 12 n.11, 19 n n.26, 27, 21 n.34, 22 n.42, 25 n.46 Ford, D. F. 181 n.35 Foxe, J. 61, 62, 64 Fraser, A. 62 n.20 Friedman, M. A. 20 n.29 Frieze, I. H. 132, 133, 134 Fuchs, E. 20 n.33 Gates, P. 106 Gathercole, S. 11 n.5 Gillies, M. A. 158 n.43 Glasson, T. F. 22 n.42 Gleiberman, O. 97 n.12 Goldie, D. 31 Gortner, C. W. 70 n.63, 65 Green, D. 14, 25 Greene, G. 185 n.5 Gregorek, J. 41 n.1, 42 n n.2, 4, 43 n.14, 44 Griffiths, A. 61 Gross, S. S. 87, 88 n.47 Grossman, A. 20 n.29 Grumett, D. 167 Gunn, A. 87 n.46 Gunn, D. M. 144, 145 Guthmann, E. 97 n.12 Haddox, S. 84, 86 Hallermayer, M. 10 n.4 Hanhart, R. 10 n n.2, 3 Hansen, K. T. 1 n.1, 41 n.1, 42, 43 Hantke, S. 104 Hartman, C. R. 96 n.9 Hawkes, R. 105 n.48 Heidegger, M. 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 Helles, R. 44 n.14 Holmes, R. M 96 n.10 Hust, S. J. T. 141 Hutchinson, R. 62 n.21 Isquith, E. 69 n.61 Jack, A. 3 n.6, 3 n.7 Jakeman, J. 59, 60 n.3, 63, 68 James, P. D. 186 Jaynes, J. 113 n.8 Jeffers, H. P. 14 n.16, 17 n.18 Jones, I. H. 180 n.31 Jung, C. 113 n n.6, 9, 122 n.34 Kaczynski, T. J. 102, 103 n.37 Keppel, G. 69 n.59 Kersbergen, K. va n. 66 n.44

Kierkegaard, S. 107 n.57 King, G. A. 45 n.22 Kitharidis, S. 136 n.30 Knight, S. 149 n.3, 150, 153 Knox, R. A. 168, 169, 170 Kreitzer, L. J. 18 n.20 Kyle, R. 64, 68 Lai, S. S. 44 n.14 Lan, D. 21 n.38 Landrum, J. 79, 87 La Rochefoucauld, F. de. 111, 112 n.4 Larsson, S. 1, 2 n.3, 42 n.8 Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska, E. 77 n n.15, 17, 78, 85 n.38, 91 Leavis, Q. D. 170 n.14 Lee, J. 83 n.32 Lei, M. 141 Levine, A.-J. 12, 20 n.32 Lewis, C. S. 62 Light, A. 154 n.32, 155 n.35, 157 n.42, 158 n.44, 159 n.53, 162 n.59, 169 n.11 Liljeblad, S. 22 n.42, 43 Lindsey, H. 68 Lister, C. 69 Littman, R. J. 10 n.2, 11 n n.5, 8, 21 n.34, 24 n.46 Livingston, S. 130 n.12 Lombroso, C. 101 n.29 Long, A. B. 60 n.13 Luhr, W. 99 n n.18, 20, 100 n.25 Luther, M. 64, 66 Mackinnon, T. 96 n.7 Magistrale, T. 101 Mahood, A. 158 n.43 Marett, E. G. 141 Martin, B. 73 n n.3, 4 Maslin, J. 97 McCarthy, C. 184, 185 McClure, J. A. 42 n.9 McCorristine, S. 44 n n.15, 18 McCracken, D. 18 n.21 McDermid, V. 31, 39 McDonald, M. 65 n.42 McKinnon, C. A. 136 Meger, S. 136 Meier, J. P. 21 n.34 Merriman, R. 62 n.21 Miller, J. H. 3 n.5 Mills, R. 178 Milton, J. 97, 105 Mina, D. 184

Index of Authors Mittell, J. 127 n.4, 129, 131 Mobley, G. 75, 76, 83, 85 n.40, 91 Molekamp, F. 65 n.41 Moltmann, J. 180 Moore, C. A. 10 n n.3, 4, 11 n.8, 12 n.10, 18 n.21, 19, 20 n.30, 21 n.34 Moorti, S. 131 n.15, 140 n.40, 141 n n.42, 45 Moughtin-Mumby, S. 133 n.20, 137 n.31 Moyise, S. 3 Mueller, E. vo n. 129, 130 n.10, 131 Muers, R. 181 n.35 Neale, S. 130 Nelson, J. S. 103, 104 n.42, 105 Nesbø, J. 3 n.7 Nestingen, A. K. 41 n.1, 42 n.4, 44, 46, 54 n.29 Newsom, C. 113 n.7, 119 n.32 Nietzsche, F. 116, 118 O’Gieblyn, M. 69 n.58 Oleson, J. C. 95 n.3, 96 n n.7, 8, 104 n.43 Ostwalt, C. 139 n.38 Otzen, B. 11 n n.5, 6, 8, 22 n.42, 23 n.43 Owens, J. E. 18 Pardes, I. 117 n.22, 119 n.32 Perrin, A. B. 10 n.4, 11 n.8 Peters, E. 60 Peters, T. 56 Petersen, D. L. 151 n.50, 153 Pfeiffer, R. H. 11 n.6, 20 n.32, 22 n.42, 23 n.43 Priestman, M. 153 Propp, V. 22 n.42 Quay, S. E. 73 n n.1, 3 Rabenau, M. 10 n.3 Ran, W. 141 Rankin, I. 1, 2 Rebera, R. 130 n.12, 143 n.52 Redvall, E. n. 44 n.14 Ren, C. 141 Reouven, R. 22 n.40 Ressler, R. K. 96 n.9 Rojek, J. 79, 88 Rosen, n. 143 Rosenberg, J. C. 69 n.59 Rosenzweig, F. 115 Rowland, S. 159 Rowlett, L. 85 n.36 Runions, E. 137 n.31 Saarinen, R. 41 n n.1, 3, 43 n.13, 44 n.16 Sakenfeld, K. D. 133 n.20

189

Sartre, J. P. 115 Sassoon, I. 20 n.29 Sawyer, J. F. 152, 153 Sayers, D. L. 151 n.14, 170 Scaggs, J. 149 n.2, 151 n.14, 154, 155 n.34, 157, 158, 159 n.50, 162 n.58 Schmid, D. 95 n.2, 106 Schmitt, A. 10 n.4 Scholz, S. 84 n.33, 85 Schroeder, J. A. 126 n.2 Scouller, S. F. 95 n.4 Searight, P. 66 Seifert, R. 135, 138 n.36 Sepinwall, A. 73 n.3, 80 n.23, 82, 87 n.46, 90 Setel, T. D. 133 n.20, 140 n.41 Sherwood, Y. 133 n.20, 164, 165 n.77 Shields, M. E. 137 n.31 Simkin, J. 64 n.39 Slotkin, R. 60 Snell, K. D. M. 158 n.49, 163, 164, 165 n.76 Soll, W. 11 n.6, 22 n.42 Søndergaard, H. 44 n.14 Stern, M. 136 n.30 Stevenson, R. L. 184 Stone, K. 85 n.35 Stougaard-Nielsen, J. 41 n.1, 42, 44 n.15 Stuckenbruck, L. T. 10 n.5, 21 n.34 Sutton, M. A. 68, 69 n.57 Tapper, M. 44 n n.14, 15 Taylor, C. 43 n.12 Thompson, J. 177 Thompson, L. 176, 177 n.24 Thompson, S. 22 n.41, 42, 23 n.43 Tithecott, R. 101 n.31, 104 n.44 Trible, P. 126 n.2 Uther, H.-J. 22 n.41 Wagner, C. J. 11 n.5 Walker, A. K. 95 n.1, 96 Walton, S. 169 n.11, 177 Webster, J. S. 143 Weeks, S. 11 n.5, 21 n.34 Weems, R. J. 126 n.2, 133 n.20, 137 n.31 Whitehead, S. 83 n.32 Willman, C. 103 n.38 Wills, D. 11 n.6, 22 n.42, 102, 106 Wills, L. M. 11 n.6, 22 n.42 Wilson, A. 102, 106 Wilson, A. N. 176 Wilson, D. 59 n.1, 61 n.17, 62

190

Index of Authors

Witherington, B. 63, 70 Witmer, A. 21 n.34 Yeats, W. B. 102 Yee, G. A. 133 n.20, 22, 137 n.31, 140 n.41 Yeo, D. 102 n.33

Yerby, F. 22 n.40 Zaller, R. 64 n.30, 64 n.32 Zimmermann, F. 10 n.4, 11 n.5, 6, 20 n.29, 22 n.42, 24 n.46

INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES Old Testament Genesis 2–3 4 4.15 6.6–8.22 6.7 19 24.10 24.22 24.30 24.47-48 24.51-53 29.18-20 29.27-30 34 34.12 38.24

163 151 n.14 151 n.14, 172 105 107 107 20 n.33 20 n.33 20 n.33 20 n.33 20 n.33 20 n.33 20 n.33 126 n.2 20 137

Exodus 12.19 20.1-17 20.5 20.13 21.12-17 21.23-34 21.23-25 21.24 22.16-17 22.18-19 31.14

107 170 35, 132 31 51 n.26 78 49 103 20 51 n.26 51 n.26

Leviticus 1 18 20 20.10-16 20.27 21.9 24.14 24.19-20 24.20

48, 51 n.26 137 n.32, 139 n.37 139 n.37 51 n.26 51 n.26 51 n.26 51 n.26 49, 78 36

Numbers 27.1-11 36.1-13

20 n.32 20 n.32

Deuteronomy 1.8 5.6-21 5.9 5.17 11.18 18.20 19.21 22.20-24 22.21-24 22.28-29 24.16 32.35 Judges 4–5 13–16 13.5 13.24 14 14.1-10 14.1 14.4 14.5-9 14.6 14.8 14.17 14.18-19 14.18 14.19 14.20 15 15.1-5 15.1 15.3-8 15.3 15.5 15.6 15.7 78, 91 15.8 15.11-15 15.12 15.14-15 15.14 15.15 15.18

50 170 35 31 172 51 n.26 36, 49, 78 51 n.26 137 20 35 36 161 n.56 5, 74, 75, 79, 83 76, 91 76 76 84 76 76, 77 76 75, 91 76 84 79 77 76, 77, 85, 91 78 76 76 77 79 77, 78 78, 85 78 78, 85, 91 78, 79 91 91 78 85 91

192 15.19 15.20 16 16.1 16.3 16.8 16.12 16.17 16.19 16.21 16.28-30 16.28 16.30 16.31 19–21

Index of Biblical References 78 78, 84 76, 78, 161 76 75 85 85 84, 91 78 78, 85 79 79, 91 75, 79, 85, 86 76 126 n.2

1 Samuel 15.23

155

2 Samuel 11–12 11 12.1-4 13

1 144 160 126 n.2

1 Kings 12

160

2 Kings 15.29 19.35

11 107

Job 1.13-19 1.21 2.4-6 2.7 2.9 3.4–6a 3.5 3.21 3.24-26 5.20 7.15 10.21-22 12.22 16.16 18.13 24.17 27.15 28.3 28.22 30.23 34.22 38.17

112 112 113 113 121 112 114 n.11 114 n.12 114 114 n.13 114 n.12 114 n.14 114 n.13 114 114 n.15 114 n.16 114 114 114 114 115 115 n.17

Psalms 23.4 91.5 115.12 140

38 173 n.21 173 n.21 155

Proverbs 3.31 16.18 19.15 23.21

99 98 98 97

Ecclesiastes 1 4.1

162 161 n.57

Isaiah 3.17 6

137 153

Jeremiah 1

153

Ezekiel 1–2 16

16.7-8 16.15-34 16.35-43b 16.35-41 16.35-37 16.41 16.60-63 18.20 23 36–37 36.8 36.26-31 36.35 37.1-14 Hosea 1–3 1–2

1.2 2 2.3 2.4 2.6-15 2.9-13 2.10

153 6, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 135, 136, 139, 140, 142, 144 127 127 127 137 137 138 142 35 126 n.2, 136 n.31 142 142 142 142 142

6, 140 n.41 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 140, 142, 144 126 126, 133 n.21 126 126 140 n.41 133 133, 137

Index of Biblical References 2.14-23 2.14-15 2.19-20 3.3 11.8-9

126, 127, 133 133 142 140 n.41 142

Amos 3.15 5.11 5.19 5.24 6.1 6.9-11

165 n.77 165 n.77 165 n.77 176 165 n.77 165 n.77

Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical Books Tobit 1.1-3 11 1.14 11 1.16-19 11, 22 2.2-3 24 2.3-8 11, 22 2.3 23 2.4-10 23 2.4-7 24 2.9-10 11 3.1-6 11 3.7-9 11, 21 3.8 18, 19, 21 3.9 19, 20 3.10-15 11 3.10 19 3.15 19, 20 3.17 18, 19, 21 4.1-2 11 4.20–5.3 11 5.4-7 22 5.24-22 12 6.7-9 12 6.7-8 21 6.8 21 6.10-13 12 6.12 20 6.14-15 11, 20 6.14 12, 17 n.19, 19 6.15 12 6.16-18 12 6.17-18 21 6.18 23 n.44 7.9-16 12 7.10-11 19 7.11 11, 17 n.19, 19 8.1-3 12 8.2-3 18, 21 8.3 18 n.23

8.9-18 8.9-12 8.12 8.18 8.21 9 10.7-13 10.10 11.1-15 12.1-5 12.6-22 12.11-22 13.9-10 14.1-2 14.4-5 14.12-15 14.13

193 21 12, 24 12, 19 12 20, 21, 24 12 n.10 12 21, 24 12 23 23 12 11 n.7 12 11 n.7 12 20, 21, 24

New Testament Matthew 4.1-11 161 n.57 5–7 5.38-39 5.38 5.39 14.6-11 18.4-6 18.4 19.17-19

36 49 36 36 51 174 171 171

Mark 1.12-13 1.32-34 5.1-20 6.21-28 7.24-30 9.17-29

161 n.57 21 n.34 21 n.34 51 21 n.34 21 n.34

Luke 4.1-13 4.33-35 8.2 10.25-37 10.31-32 12.15 15.11-32 17.2

161 n.57 21 n.34 21 n.34 2 2 97 161 174

John 8.1-11 9 10.20-21

37 35 n.13 21 n.34

194

Index of Biblical References

Acts 19.11-16

21 n.34

Romans 12.19

99, 36

1 Corinthians 15.51

118

James 4.2

98

2 John 1.7

52

1.12

53

Jude 5

51

Revelation 6.1-8 6.8 7.17 12.7-12 17.11 21.1

178 177 179 179 67 179