Essay #15: Murder and the Imagination

An Excerpt from "The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness."

What follows is an excerpt from the introduction of my new book The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness, which is published this week.

Rejoice evermore!

So Scripture commands us. But how can you rejoice in a world of so much darkness? At a time like twilight when darkness gathers, ready to fall? The comforting bromides of belief can seem pat and complacent in the shadow of very present wickedness. Everything happens for a reason. There must be evil so there can be free will. God is in charge and will make things right in the end. No doubt. And it is some comfort too. But here we are today, and faith in the things unseen, and hope in the far-off country of our salvation don’t have the tangible immediacy of our suffering and distress.

More than this, and deeper. From our first cry to our last one, life is little more than letting go, a long goodbye. The pain, the grief, the traumas physical and emotional that scar our minds: sorrow is so woven into the very fabric of material existence that to turn our faces from it is to turn away from life itself. In the face of our mourning mortality, even Jesus wept.

And still the apostle tells us, “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say, rejoice!”

It is now twenty years since I was baptized, almost twenty years to the day as I write. In the time since, as in the time before, I have spent most of my working hours imagining murders. I’m a crime writer. I write stories of mystery and suspense about violent men without honor and dangerous women without virtue. In almost every story I write, murder provides the inciting incident, the event that propels the characters into the narrative. Murder is the problem the protagonist has to solve, the wrong that has to be righted, the threat that has to be avoided or foiled. Murder is the villainy of the villain and the proving place of whatever good there is. In such stories as in life itself, death writes the rules of the game.

I have received many letters from readers that begin with something like, “You call yourself a Christian, and yet you write about such horrible things.” And yes, I do, and I do.

“You make your living exploiting the worst in human nature,” a pastor once snapped at me.

“And a very good living, too,” I snapped back.

Well, I don’t like being snapped at. But the truth is, no, I make my living writing about what human beings are and the things they get up to, many of which are absolutely awful. It is the awful things that raise the big questions, that limn our doubts about morality and meaning, that heighten our suspicion of ourselves, and stir our secret shame at the half-hidden truth of our own nature. Humanity is revealed in its sin, because humanity is sinful.

In fact, when I stood tremulous on the brink of my conversion, wrestling like Jacob with the angel of the Lord, one of my greatest fears was that I might lose the mordant realism that makes me good at what I do. I described this anxiety in my memoir The Great Good Thing:

As a writer, I prided myself on seeing and describing the world as it was, not as I wanted it or thought it was supposed to be. I had made my living writing hard-boiled fiction about tough, cynical men and femmes fatales swept up in ugly underworlds of crime, sex, and murder. Would I suddenly be reduced to penning saccharine fluff about some little girl who lost her pet bunny but Jesus brought it back again? “Oh, God,” I prayed fervently more than once, “whatever happens, don’t let me become a Christian novelist!”

This prayer, I can now report, was answered, but answered, as prayers tend to be, in God’s own inimitable and sportive way. Because I have, I think, become a Christian novelist. But my Christianity has not looked anything like I feared it might.

On the one hand, yes, as my life has become increasingly centered on Christ, I have grown amazingly more joyful and serene and even more loving. I know this is true, because my wife tells me so, and she has an honest face. But at the same time, in an apparent paradox, my view of the world has in no way brightened beyond the bounds of realism. It has not brightened at all, not a bit. It has grown much, much darker.

The reason for this darkening vision is simple. To acknowledge the existence of God is to confront the reality of the moral order. Morality is not a fiction, or an evolutionary emanation, or a social construct, or a subjective narrative dependent on culture, time, and place. It is the human perception of a spiritual truth. Like everything else we know, we know it only in part. It presents us with complexities of understanding and arguable differences of response and localized dimensions and distortions. But for all those gray areas, there are also bright Venn intersections of perfect clarity, the areas we call good and evil. And once you have seen these, once you have admitted they are what they are, then even a sinful fool like me can shed the tears of a saint. Because the world, for all its sweetness, is not at all what it should be. The very atmosphere is riddled with corruption.

But it’s not the evil that men do that has darkened my vision since my baptism. It is the myriad ways in which the best of us, the great and the good, the privileged and the wise, teach our hearts that all this evil is really good. Abortion is a right, we say, the self-destruction of the homeless is an entitlement, terrorism is an act of justice. Like Milton’s Satan, we live in lies in order to convince ourselves that we can make a heaven out of what is clearly hell.

The terrible gift of Christianity—if it is Christianity true to Christ—is that you cannot accommodate your own sin in this way. If you embrace an ideology—no matter how popular among the clerisy, no matter how well-reasoned, no matter how intellectually elegant and sound—and you look around and find yourself drenched in the blood of innocents, you are forced to confess that your philosophy is wrong and so lose your place at the high table. And if, like me, you are nonetheless living fat and happy in a fat and happy culture where the elites and intellectuals and artists and simply everyone who is anyone believe in that ideology, you cannot hide from yourself that you are living in a fallen world.

Christianity is based on this dark vision. Christ’s life is the fulfillment of the prophecy spoken by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic, that if the best man should come into the world, the just man who prefers being good to seeming good, he will at last be seized by the unjust—in the heated defense of the ideologies that make them seem just to themselves, no doubt. He will be whipped and racked, bound and blinded and finally crucified, Glaucon said. And this, the Gospels tell us, is exactly what happened.

The Gospels don’t end there, of course. They go on to describe a mighty resurrection and a glorious ascension unlike anything ever seen before or since. On these descriptions our faith depends. Still, I have seen more than a few Christians come to understand that the grim world the Gospels describe is indeed this world, our world—and often, this realization has turned them sour inside. They become fearful that we are living in the last days—and maybe they are right. They become bitter and angry that the crucifiers still hold sway in the palaces of power—and often, they are right about this too. They become so pessimistic they cannot tell the difference between a good day and a bad one because every day takes place on the planet of our sins. In a way, I suppose, they are right yet again.

They may be right, but are they following the call to rejoice in the Lord always? To rejoice evermore?

How could they in a world of so much darkness?

This is a book about murder and the imagination. It is a study of three real-life murders and how they were repeatedly re-created in literary and cinematic narratives; in novels, plays, films, and philosophies. In a small way, I suppose it’s an answer to those who ask me why I write the sort of stories I write. But in a larger sense, it is an attempt to show how the arts, which are the heart of any culture, speak the hidden meanings of these murders into consciousness, reveal them for what they are. It’s my belief that, in the light of those revelations, we can form a response to corruption that goes beyond condemnation, sorrow, and outrage and instead answers wickedness with creativity and joy.

ORDER “THE KINGDOM OF CAIN: FINDING GOD IN THE LITERATURE OF DARKNESS” AT THE LINK.