“Abner,” replied Dillworth, “how shall we know what justice is unless the law defines it?”

“I think every man knows what it is,” said Abner.

“And shall every man set up a standard of his own,” said Dillworth, “and disregard the standard that the law sets up? That would be the end of justice.”

“It would be the beginning of justice,” said Abner, “if every man followed the standard that God gives him.”

“But, Abner,” replied Dillworth, “is there a court that could administer justice if there were no arbitrary standard and every man followed his own?”

“I think there is such a court,” said Abner.

This passage, from a story entitled, “The Tenth Commandment,” in the book, Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, by Melville Davisson Post (published 1918), encapsulates, in its moral libertarianism, much of what I found fascinating, and irritating, in this collection. I would like to recommend it for some readers, but have a hard time saying what kind of readers those might be.

“Uncle Abner” is a Virginian backwoodsman living some time in the early 19th Century (I was never able to work out exactly what period. The clues were all over the map.) Most of his stories are narrated by his hero-worshiping nephew (hence the “Uncle”). Abner is a Christian of unimpeachable (frankly overdrawn) integrity and intelligence, a man without official office who nevertheless acts as an investigator whenever a murder is discovered in the neighborhood. His reading of the human heart is infallible, his observations invariably correct, his judgments infallible.

He has little regard for human institutions of justice. When he discovers a murder he’s as likely to let the guilty party off as to turn him over to the authorities, sometimes on the basis of reasoning that seemed pretty obscure to me. He seems to believe that God’s justice is active and inescapable, not only in eternity but in the present, and regards himself as God’s instrument.

In short, he’s a man many of us would like to be, and is also kind of insufferable. In addition I think his theology weak (at one point he says that the devil “is very nearly equal, the Scriptures tell us, to the King of Kings.” The Scriptures tell us no such thing).

The puzzles are interesting, some of them noteworthy in the history of mystery writing. The stories reminded me of Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries, but were less didactic in terms of theology, and the characters less rounded.

I’d like to recommend this book to adults, but I suspect most readers (even Christians) will find them a touch naïve in terms of realism. I’d like to recommend them for children, but the depictions of black people (mostly slaves at that point in time in Virginia) are not the kind I’d like to see children exposed to.

So make your own judgment.

I have to tell you, this one hurts. Being sucker-punched by someone you trusted always smarts, and my great admiration for Philip Kerr’s writing makes my disappointment—I could have said feeling of betrayal—on reading Field Gray all the more painful.

Kerr’s continuing character, World War II era Berlin-based detective/cop/soldier Bernie Gunther, is a splendid literary achievement. He’s a relatively decent man in an insanely indecent situation. He tries to do what he sees as right, but is constantly undercut by history. He’s Philip Marlowe on a meaner street, facing challenges Raymond Chandler knew nothing of.

He hates the Nazis and the Communists equally, he informs us. That suited me just fine. But what I didn’t realize (though I should have guessed from heavy hints in the last novel, The One From the Other) is that there’s one group he hates even more.

The Americans.

You see, the Americans have committed unforgivable crimes. They eat too much. They think they won the war. They see the world in black and white. They don’t always live up to their principles, which makes them hypocrites, and thus far worse than mere mass murderers. They treated Bernie real mean, arresting him in Cuba at the beginning of this book, beating him up (under the impression he was a fugitive war criminal), and imprisoning him for a while at Guantanamo (GUANTANAMO!!!!!), where it was hot and there were mosquitoes. Compared to that his treatment by the Communists, who merely put him in a death camp, mining radioactive pitchblende, obviously pales.

There is one passing reference to the Berlin Airlift in this novel. Bernie brushes it aside. Obviously the Americans did it “for themselves.”

And so he chooses a Communist agent, a murderer who has tried to murder Bernie himself in the past, over a group of American agents who have done him no harm at all. Because they’re just “Amis,” while a German, you know, is a German. Apparently it comes down to “Deutschland über alles” after all.

I’m sure Philip Kerr doesn’t want any of my filthy American money, and he may rest assured I won’t spend any more on his books.

Field Gray is a superbly written novel that I do not recommend at all.

Those of us who read both secular and Christian fiction tend to employ a double standard. There’s a full-out “excellent” category in the secular field, and then there’s “excellent for Christian fiction,” which is understood to be not quite as good as the secular stuff, but better than the average CBA fare.

(As a corollary, I find that I also have a counterbalancing prejudice. When I encounter really good Christian fiction, I think I sometimes depreciate it a little, just out of defensive critical snobbery. Something I need to watch out for. I may have done it with this book.)

J. Mark Bertrand, in his first police procedural novel, Back on Murder, shows himself qualified for a place on the shelf alongside successful mystery writers in the secular market. Perhaps not up in the highest rank (at least yet), but definitely big league.

The hero of Back On Murder is Roland March, a Houston police detective near the bottom of his profession. Once he was a star, the cop who solved a dramatic case that got turned into a best-selling book. But a personal tragedy took the heart out of him. Now he’s a time-server, the “suicide cop”–the cop who gets stuck with the unenviable job of investigating when other officers kill themselves. He’s the subject of pity and derision at headquarters. His marriage is strained.

But at the beginning of this story he finds himself, uncharacteristically, at a crime scene, a house where several gang members have been shot to death. By accident, he notices a detail that changes the whole investigation—someone has been tied to the bed in the house, and that someone is not there anymore. Suddenly March is “back on homicide,” and energized by an investigation for the first time in years. Then he’s transferred to a task force investigating the high-profile disappearance of a teenage girl. He’s disappointed until he grows convinced that the two cases are linked—the missing person on the bed, he believes, was that girl. Working with an attractive female missing persons cop, he enters the unfamiliar world of the girl’s church and faith life, puzzling like an anthropologist over the odd customs and mores of these bizarre evangelicals. Continue reading Back On Murder, by J. Mark Bertrand →