Why I believe detective stories can be ‘good theology’
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Eleanor Bourg Nicholson
In loving memory of Mary Anne White.
As the light of early autumn streams through my window, bathing the house in tarnished gold, I find myself transported back many decades to what my children now delight in calling "the late 1900s.” I am a young girl, curled up in a window seat at the top of a massive stone house, engaged in rigorous catechetical labors. I am, in fact, a teenager reading through my grandmother’s incomparable library of detective fiction.
In claiming detective fiction as a catechetical source, I am guilty of no heresy. I bring the Golden Age of Detective Fiction itself to bear in my defense. One of the leaders of the genre was Monsignor Ronald Knox. Another was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories were first published over a decade before his defection to the Roman Catholic Church, but the author’s predisposition in favor of Popery is shown in the very first Father Brown tale, “The Blue Cross.”
Knox and Chesterton were both members of the Detection Club, a delightful literary society that also included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and E. C. Bentley. One of the most memorable products of the Club is Knox’s 1929 “Decalogue”: Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, which his fellow members accepted and then set about testing each to its breaking point in their stories.
There are many virtues to be discerned in detective fiction, including those of justice and fortitude, but I find the most foundational spiritual element to be the genre’s emphasis on reason.
Edgar Allan Poe, seen as the Father of Detective Fiction through his Auguste Dupin stories (published in the 1840s), described his labors as “Tales of Ratiocination.” Ratiocination is an inferential process which (according to St. Thomas Aquinas) “enables the knowledge of intelligible truth by advancing from one thing to another.”
Two of Knox’s commandments bear particularly on this point:
No. 2: All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
No. 6 “No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
The former commandment marks one of the primary differences between detective fiction and its sister genre, the Gothic. While preternatural and supernatural elements run rife in the Gothic, their presence in detective fiction must be explained away as quotidian by the detective before the final page.
Poe develops this theme further in “The Philosophy of Composition,” where he speaks of “denouement,” a French term that literally means the untangling of a knot:
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.
Detective fiction -or any plot “worth the name”-must be teleological. It must have its final end in view; otherwise it will not be reasonable or emotionally effective. Both Knox and Sayers supported this view of the form of the detective novels, with Sayer particularly in her playful Aristotelian analyses of the genre: “Aristotle on Detective Fiction.”
Even with the staunch resistance to things supernatural, and thus to revelation, there is considerable moral weight brought to bear here.
Detective fiction is built upon the framework of natural theology, which is why it works. We understand the world as a coherent whole; we do not countenance the inexplicable or the absurd. It is a mark of intellectual virtue to delight in Truth, and a mark of the irrational brute (at best) or the demonic (at worst) to orgy upon illogicality.
The conclusion of a detective novel relies on the rational discernment of Truth. A denouement that is not rational disappoints, or, even worse, bores!
This is not an abstract concern, but a very real, concrete reality, which will determine if an innocent man is hanged.
With the detective’s revelation of “Who Done It,” prudence, that charioteer of the virtues, can operate. This is clear both on a natural philosophical level (which is why Sayers’ use of Aristotle is so brilliant) and on a higher level through our understanding of Christian Ethics.
As Dominican theologian Servais Pinckaers defined it in his “The Sources of Christian Ethics,” this branch of theology “studies human acts so as to direct them to a loving vision of God seen as our true, complete happiness, and our final end.” Pinckaers goes on to say that this “vision is attained by means of grace, the virtues, and the gifts, in the light of revelation and reason.”
The best detectives are not unnatural automatons of social enforcement, but are enabled by a rational comprehension of the truth to call upon justice and mercy in addressing sin. While there are, of course, many examples of detective fiction that ignore the full potential of the genre, as Christians we are able to embrace and delight in it.
At the conclusion of “The Blue Cross,” Father Brown famously explains his ability to see through a villain’s disguise as a priest: “You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology.” Formed as I have been by my grandmother’s library, I see myself standing beside Father Brown (and thus beside Chesterton and Knox and Sayers and all of the Greats of the genre) when I declare: “Ah, but I’ve embraced detective fiction, and that’s good theology.”
Eleanor Bourg Nicholson is an award-winning Gothic novelist, scholar, and homeschooling mother. Read more at eleanorbourgnicholson.com.
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