Full Description
The Bible has always enjoyed notoriety within the genres of crime fiction and drama; numerous authors have explicitly drawn on biblical traditions as thematic foci to explore social anxieties about violence, religion, and the search for justice and truth. The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama brings together a multi-disciplinary scholarship from the fields of biblical interpretation, literary criticism, criminology, and studies in film and television to discuss international texts and media spanning the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. The volume concludes with an afterword by crime writer and academic, Liam McIvanney.
These essays explore both explicit and implicit engagements between biblical texts and crime narratives, analysing the multiple layers of meaning that such engagements can produce - cross-referencing Sherlock Holmes with the murder mystery in the Book of Tobit, observing biblical violence through the eyes of Christian fundamentalists in Henning Mankell's Before the Frost, catching the thread of homily in the serial murders of Se7en, or analysing biblical sexual violence in light of television crime procedurals. The contributors also raise intriguing questions about the significance of the Bible as a religious and cultural text - its association with the culturally pervasive themes of violence, (im)morality, and redemption, and its relevance as a symbol of the (often fraught) location that religion occupies within contemporary secular culture.
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction - Caroline Blyth and Alison Jack
2. On the Trail of a Biblical Serial Killer: Sherlock Holmes and the Book of Tobit - Matthew A. Collins
3. Tartan Noir and Sacred Scripture: The Bible as Artefact and Metanarrative in Peter May's Lewis Trilogy - Alison Jack
4. Faith in a Cold Climate: The Bible and Violence in Henning Mankell's Before the Frost - Caroline Blyth
5. 'Understanded of the People': C. J. Sansom's Revelation as a Contemporary Cautionary Tale - Suzanne Bray
6. Where Have All the Good Men Gone? Male Anti-Heroes in the Book of Judges and American Television - Benjamin Bixler
7. 'Long Is the Way and Hard, that Out of Hell Leads Up to Light': Serial Murder as Homily in Se7en - James C. Oleson
8. The Man Who Died: Reading Death in Job with Finnish Noir - Yael Klangwisan
9. The Divine Unsub: Television Crime Procedurals and Biblical Sexual Violence - Dan W. Clanton, Jr
10. Poirot, the Bourgeois Prophet: Agatha Christie's Biblical Adaptations - Hannah M. Strømmen
11. 'A Dangerous World': The Hermeneutics of Agatha Christie's Later Novels - J. C. Bernthal
12. Afterword - Liam McIlvanney
Index of Authors
Index of Biblical References
