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We may be washed in the blood of the lamb
so that we shall be washed free of our taint of sin. With cash,
big wads of it, being imported into the USA, there’s a need
that’s somewhat similar. The authorities call it money
laundering. And for someone who is not keen to have his laundry
subject to close inspection what could be better than to have a
bank of one’s own in the far mid-west, under the pure white
snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains? In a town that
epitomizes small-town America.
Towns like Colorado Springs have pure
water and pure detectives; detectives who are the main-stay of
their family and their church. Detectives such as Sam Sloan. And
detectives such as Sam Sloan have wives who share their souls.
Robert L Wise introduced Sam and Vera Sloan in his first mystery,
THE EMPTY COFFIN, now Vera has grown. She has been to college and
studied criminology - she wants to join the local Police
Department and work with her husband. She is so insistent on her
desire to work that she seems to be threatening to reject the
Biblical injunction to obey her husband.
God, though, does not intend to give Vera
the chance to become disobedient. For only a short while after
banker George Alexander is found dead in a snow-drift, Sam Sloan
first disappears and then is reported dead. Intentionally or not
echoing The Blues Brothers, Vera goes on a mission from God to
find her husband’s killers.
Vera takes her second choice of job now
that she has to pay her way, although luckily that is with the
All-Star Detective Agency, which means that she can continue her
investigations. This is doubly lucky as the local PD seem at best
ignorant of what Sam was doing, and possibly evasive. Before long
Vera has to head off for New York City, taking her teenage
daughter along with her. Cara can’t be too happy to visit the
Big Apple and then find that she is expected to sit in hotel
rooms, but she is both a daughter of the church and of her mother
and she obeys.
Vera’s criminology classes seem to
have involved many hours of practical study of lock-picking and
electronic bug planting, which she now puts to good use. In fact,
at this point the book almost becomes a techno-thriller, before
the final shoot-outs and revelations. Which is quite odd, because
elsewhere this is an explicitly Christian novel - where the
characters stop and pray in order to gain inspiration for their
next action.
In the USA, this Christian sub-genre has
an enormous market. I first came across it because my hosts on a
visit had been given an out-grown pile of children’s books
for their own off-spring and I read a couple, but THE DEAD
DETECTIVE is the first adult novel of the type I have read.
Unfortunately, and contrary to the earlier examples of clergyman
authors like Victor L Whitechurch and Ronald Knox, Bishop Wise’s
plotting is not very good, and his attempts to cover the gaps in
the plot are perfunctory. There may be many Christians who want to
read detective stories written for them, but if this is what comes
their way they will be like sheep who look up and are not fed. For
over two thousand years critics have condemned the Deus Ex Machina
- how much worse is the Deus Ex Minnesota?
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