Notes From Underground: Undercover Detective Fiction

'Today, in the real-life web of ... diabolical darkness in which we find ourselves, good and healthy murder mysteries can inoculate the soul of the reader from the toxic mainstream. They help to expose the crimes of the culture of death, serving as undercover agents in the countercultural underground.'

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Today, in the real-life web of deceit, depravity, and diabolical darkness in which we find ourselves, good and healthy murder mysteries can inoculate the soul of the reader from the toxic mainstream. They help to expose the crimes of the culture of death, serving as undercover agents in the countercultural underground.

The culture of death is deadly but it’s also dying. Its death is inevitable because it is ultimately suicidal. Prior to its demise, however, it kills much that is good, true and beautiful. Take, for instance, modern publishing. It is now impossible for writers to be published in the toxic mainstream unless they follow the rigid template of compulsory hedonism. Homosexuality and other manifestations of sexual confusion must be present and must be portrayed positively. Traditional morality can be absent but, if it is present, it must be portrayed negatively. Characters with the wrong skin colour must feel guilty for being born into racial privilege, subjecting themselves to ethnomasochistic self-loathing. In brief and in sum, mainstream publishers epitomize the cancel culture, which seeks to cancel all dissident perspectives from the public square. The irony is that the dictatorship of relativism is the new despotic absolutism. A further irony is that the modern West is as tyrannically intolerant as previous eruptions of philosophical materialism. The Nazis burned books. The modern Nazis merely prevent books from being published.

What should be done about this eruption of tyranny?

The answer is to be found in recent history. In the Soviet Union, dissident writers could not publish in the socialist mainstream so they resorted to samizdat, which is translated literally as self-publishing. These “notes from underground” (to borrow a title from Dostoyevsky) became the grassroots resistance to tyranny. While the power of the Soviet State was being eroded from within by its own inner corruption and decadence, the fruits of a living and healthy subculture were flourishing. The same is happening today in the decadent west. As the culture of death gloats, trumpeting its power triumphalistically, it is already afflicted with the deadly disease which will kill it. It’s own too-muchness, its psychological obesity, illustrates that it is living on borrowed time.

In the meantime, however, something much healthier is stirring underground, in the grassroots. This is the age of the new samizdat, a samizdat of renewal and revival. There are so many good contemporary novelists and poets, excluded from the public square and rejected by the toxic mainstream, that it’s becoming impossible to keep track of the books being either self-published or published by small adventurous presses. The authors of this grassroots revival are writing in multifarious genres: historical fiction, fantasy, magical realism, traditional gothic, southern gothic, and murder mysteries.

In the first of a series of “notes from underground”, in which the works of this living culture of renewal will be celebrated, we’re going to look at contemporary murder mysteries.

The murder mystery novel is a genre in which women writers have excelled. Although the pioneers of the genre were men, particularly Edgar Allen Poe, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton, the golden age of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, was dominated by the so-called Queens of Crime, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. Today, a century on, a new generation of women are writing good crime fiction which is as healthy as it is deadly, in a paradoxical manner of speaking.

Fiorella de Maria excels in several genres but she is known principally perhaps for her Father Gabriel Mysteries. These are set in rural England against the backdrop of World War Two and its aftermath with a cast of characters who are almost invariably civilized people, as polite is propriety demands, even if some of them are guilty of very uncivilized crimes. This is one of the reasons that her books are such a delight. Even when they delve into the dark, they are light reading, in the best sense of the word, which is to say that they are easy-reading page-turners. And yet they have gravitas, as well as levitas. In See No Evil, the third Father Gabriel mystery, difficult questions are both asked and answered: How can we forgive others for crimes of which they are guilty? How can we forgive ourselves for crimes in which we are complicit? Is it easier to turn a blind eye than to turn the other cheek?

If Fiorella de Maria takes us into the quaintness of rural England in the 1940s, the mystery novels of the lesser-known Barbara Golder drop us into the opulent world of contemporary Telluride in the mountains of Colorado. Golder’s Lady Doc Murders feature a medical investigator, Dr. Jane Wallace, the “lady doc”, who balances the problems of her private life with her professional responsibilities, both of which become entangled in the mysterious circumstances surrounding the crimes she is helping to solve. Through her persona, the reader shares her feisty perspective of modern culture and the decadence associated with opulence which are informed by her Catholic understanding of life, people and culture.

The murder mystery novels of Lorraine V. Murray are set in a fictional Catholic parish in the burgeoning city of Atlanta. Even as the mysteries that she weaves lead us along a labyrinthine path of suspense, laced with whimsical humour, they also lead us ultimately towards solutions that both enlighten and edify the reader.

Three murder mysteries by contemporary male authors warrant an all too brief mention in this all too brief survey.

Paul McCusker’s Father Gilbert Mysteries, set in England, feature a former detective turned Anglican priest. McCusker, an accomplished storyteller, whose novels and radio dramas, such as Adventures in Odyssey, have proved hugely popular, is as adept in writing good detective fiction as he is in writing historical fiction and children’s and teen fiction. A man for all seasons who wears many hats, anything he writes is worth reading, the Father Gilbert Mysteries being no exception.

William Baer, like Paul McCusker, is an accomplished writer in many genres. Having previously published volumes of poetry and a very commendable collection of short stories, his novel, Advocatus Diaboli, shows him to be a consummate novelist also. One of the strengths of this fine work is the manner in which Baer depicts sanctity without succumbing to either the saccharin or the preachy. This is not easy. Indeed, it is much easier to portray vice than virtue; it is much easier to portray a whiskey priest than a bona fide saint. And yet Baer succeeds in portraying authentic goodness, real sanctity, without preachiness, in a gritty tour de force of a story, which has as many twists and turns as a good murder mystery demands.

Finally, S.P. Caldwell’s The Beast of Bethulia Park exposes the dark underbelly of Britain’s health system, in which the cult of the expert and the domain of the bureaucrat enable a doctor to become a serial killer. A finely wrought cast of characters, including a naïve and idealistic priest, find themselves entangled in a deadly web of deceit, depravity and diabolical darkness.

Today, in the real-life web of deceit, depravity and diabolical darkness in which we find ourselves, these good and healthy murder mysteries can inoculate the soul of the reader from the toxic mainstream. They help to expose the crimes of the culture of death, serving as undercover agents in the countercultural underground.