In the latest issue of Books and Culture , Joseph Bottum has one of the most comprehensive reviews of mystery novels and Christianity that you’ll ever find:
Some things have changed over the years, of course: the uses of technology, the openness about sex, and, notably, the treatment of religion. Where a kind of delicate deference once ruled, popular fiction now seems typically to present churchgoing characters as suspects—thanks, as near as I can tell, to the notion that devotion is pretty suspicious, all by itself, and what’s a little homicide on top of religious mania? The quantity of casual anti-Christianity in contemporary mysteries and thrillers is more than a little disturbing, their pages full of duplicitous televangelists, fundamentalist cult leaders, and serial killers enacting complex Catholic rituals. Pick up Henning Mankell’s Before the Frost for a good example: a 2005 book that essentially equates all religion with the Jonestown suicides, from a Swedish writer whose worldwide sales are now over thirty million. (One dreads the novelistic uses to which the news from Norway will be put.) When in doubt about the murderer in an old Agatha Christie story, always guess that it’s the doctor. And when in doubt about the murderer in a recent mystery novel, always guess that it’s the Christian.
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