What Do Modern Mystery Novels and Medieval Mystery Plays Have in Common? Sin.

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I live in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, which has a magnificent medieval core, and I’m currently working on the fourth mystery in my Polizei Bern series, which is set in and around the city’s Gothic church, the Berner Münster.

Over the Münster’s central doors is a fifteenth-century Last Judgement scene made up of over three hundred colorful sandstone sculptures. It shows men and women who emerge from their graves, are judged by a stern Jesus, and then find themselves sent on their separate ways by the archangel Michael, the saved rising to heaven and the damned falling into hell. The sculptors had a great time with hell, portraying it in gruesome detail with flames, grinning demons, tortured souls, and a large green Satan presiding over all.

Being immersed in medieval imagery for the sake of my present writing project is probably to blame for the idea I’d like to propose, which is that modern mystery novels have something in common with medieval morality plays. These were performed all over Europe, particularly in England and France, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, just when Bern’s Münster was being built. Only five of these morality plays survive in English, but their texts—plus descriptions of similar plays—are enough to tell scholars that they were allegories about men and women’s lifelong struggle against the temptation to choose vice instead of virtue. Despite their protagonists’ bad choices and worse deeds, however, the plays all end with their heroes ultimately repenting, choosing goodness over evil, being saved by a merciful God, and going to heaven. The Church wanted the audience for these entertainments to be inspired, not terrorized.

So why compare recent crime fiction to six-hundred-year-old plays starring characters with names like Folly, Idleness, Diligence, and Mercy and heroes called Mankind or Everyman?

Well, for a start, while the seven deadly sins may not have speaking parts in our books, one or more of them is usually in control of our killers’ minds. When I’m planning a new book, one of my steps is to remind myself of the motives for murder I’ve already used in previous plots, and that comes very close to listing all seven sins. True, not many people commit murder for gluttony’s sake; in fact, the most famous glutton in our profession is probably Nero Wolfe, a detective rather than a criminal. But greed, envy, lust, and wrath are murderous emotions, and so is wounded pride. As for sloth, I’m sure I could concoct a plot where a determinedly idle character (a gamer, maybe?) kills a nagging wife or mother.

For example, Australian mystery writer Jane Harper’s most recent book, Exiles, and her previous one, The Survivors, both place envy in the center of their plots. This is not to say that Exiles gives readers a sense of déjà vu—far from it. Still, both stories revolve around small-town communities where siblings, cousins, friends, and neighbors who grew up together carry with them as adults the unresolved resentments of their years as teenagers. In another time and place, Bombay in the 1950s, Vaseem Khan’s police detective Persis Wadia investigates her first murder case and uncovers suspects who seem to be awash in greed; lust and thwarted pride also play prominent roles in her solution to the case.

Religious plays personified virtue and vice in other ways besides naming their cast after sins. Some had their hapless representative of humanity—named Humanum Genus in one play—going through life accompanied by an angel and a devil, pulled first one way and then the other. Spoiler Alert: In dramas created to convince an audience that salvation is worth sacrificing a little fun for, the angel always wins at the end. But that doesn’t keep the devil from being crucial to the plot. This dramatic juxtaposition of the right and wrong ways of behaving reminds me of certain pairs of protagonists in detective stories, like Bolitar and Win, Spencer and Hawke, or Pascoe and Dalziel. Think about how one of those men gets to snuggle up to his angel only because the other man ends up doing the dirty work required to solve the case and ultimately bring a murderer or two to justice.

Jack Reacher is an interesting case of crime solver who remains on the side of the angels despite a pretty spectacular body count after twenty-eight books. In morality-play terms, Reacher is like the archangel Michael, holding the scales of justice in one hand and a sword in the other. He can get away with all the violence he inflicts because the villains he fights are always evil incarnate: not just terrorists, assassins, and mobsters, but brutes who make snuff films or hunt people for sport. Reacher’s victims have professions or hobbies so heinous that the reader’s conscience can rest easy when these demons are cast into the metaphorical pit of hell at the end of every thriller.

In most mystery novels, as in morality plays, it is necessary for good to prevail, and that means starring roles for the seven cardinal virtues: temperance, diligence, patience, charity, kindness, chastity, and humility. When I read this list, I immediately think of one of Dick (and now Felix) Francis’s heroes. Quiet, hardworking souls, they rarely inflict violence, but no one doubts their dogged courage, largely because in almost every book they are forced to endure and rise above extreme pain. And there’s no rule saying virtuous characters can’t be clever, which the Francis figures always are.

When it comes to personifying virtue in crime fiction, however, I think the prize has to go to Louise Penny for creating Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. His crime team and we readers—not to mention most of the town of Three Pines—all love him because of (and sometimes in spite of) his godlike qualities. Another police detective who approaches pure virtue is Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti, although when it comes to closeness to God, Brother Cadfael has the advantage. As an ex-Crusader, at least Cadfael gets to have a sinful past. A modern version of Cadfael can be found in Julia Spencer-Fleming’s heroine Clare Fergusson, an Episcopalian priest and ex-Army helicopter pilot. (I won’t mention other clerical detectives here, since Jane Willan did that for Crime Reads in April 2018!) But since morality plays are all about the Last Judgement, I mustn’t forget Margaret Maron’s beloved Deborah Knott, a North Carolina district judge with a bootlegger father.

Most detectives we encounter in crime fiction, however, aren’t personifications of God, Saint Michael, the seven deadly sins, or the cardinal virtues. They’re confused, often-tempted, and periodically sinful beings like Humanus Genus: flawed men and women with a desire for justice tempered by disillusionment. I’d say this description fits now-retired LAPD cop Harry Bosch (“Everybody counts or nobody counts”) and Texas Ranger Darren Matthews, along with Dublin Murder Squad detective Antoinette Conway and Chicago’s V.I. Warshawski. Plus many, many more, including my own Polizei Bern detectives, Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli.

Returning to morality plays a final time, I’d like to remind you of the words “Man proposes, but God disposes,” first written by fifteenth-century clergyman Thomas à Kempis. In Josephine Tey’s brilliant classic, Miss Pym Disposes, a likeable and intelligent psychologist uncovers a murder, solves it, and ultimately passes judgment on the guilty party, only to discover that she is not as omniscient as she believed.

We readers deeply enjoy stories where detectives bring criminals to justice—but sometimes the books in which they fail to do so are more exhilarating. Detectives, too, have to avoid the sin of pride.

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