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- Title
Religious Belief in Recent Detective Fiction.
- Authors
PHILLIPS, BILL
- Abstract
Detective fiction emerged as a result of the increasing secularisation of society. The certainties expounded by the Church are reenacted through the figure of the rational investigator whose perspicacity never fails to uncover the perpetrator and return the world to its pre-lapsarian tranquillity. Often the villain whose wicked deeds must be brought to book is the leader of an obscure mystical sect, but otherwise religion, particularly of the mainstream variety, is noticeably absent. This has, however, recently changed. The detective, once the acme of rational thought and deductive flair--incarnated in the figure of Sherlock Holmes, for example--has now been replaced, on occasions, by investigators with overt religious beliefs. The explanation for this apparently inconsistent development is tied to the evolution of crime fiction over recent decades, in which both the model of the traditional hard-boiled detective and the genre itself have been questioned and deconstructed by a new generation of crime writers.
- Subjects
DETECTIVES in literature; MYSTERY fiction; POSTMODERNISM (Philosophy) in literature; CHRISTIAN fiction; VILLAINS in literature; RELIGION
- Publication
Atlantis (0210-6124), 2014, Vol 36, Issue 1, p139
- ISSN
0210-6124
- Publication type
Literary Criticism