POLICE FICTION

"The ordinary detective story has one deep quality in common with Christianity; it brings home the crime in a quarter that is unsuspected.  In any good detective story the last shall be first and the first shall be last.  The judgment at the end of any silly sensational story is like the judgment at the end of the world; it is unexpected… and he that exalted himself would be abased."

To open a book expecting to find a cosy, kindly, human story about a murdered man found in a cupboard, and find instead a lot of dull, bad philosophy about the upward progress and the purer morality.  I would rather read any detective book than that book.  I would rather spend my time in finding out why a dead man was dead than in slowly comprehending why a certain philosopher had never been alive.

Why is a work of modern theology less startling, less arresting to the soul, than a work of silly police fiction? Why is a work of modern theology less startling, less arresting to the soul than a work of old theology? 

Perhaps no philosophical work can really be so good as a good detective story.  But at any rate there need not have been such an absolute abyss between them… There must be something wrong if the most important human business is also the least exciting.  There must be something wrong if everything is not interesting.

A man called Smith goes out for a walk, and stops by a bookstall, where he sees a book called “The Great Problem Solved”.  If Smith finds that this book solves a problem in crime, he is entranced.  If Smith finds that it solves a problem in chess, he is interested.  If Smith finds that it solves the problem in the last issue of Answers, he is genuinely excited.  But if Smith finds that it solves the problem of Smith, that it explains the stones under his feet, and the stars over his head, that it tells him suddenly why it really is that he likes chess or detective stories, or anything else; if I say, Smith finds that the book explains Smith — then we are told he finds it dull.  It may be a democratic prejudice, but I do not believe this.  I think that Smith likes modern chess problems more than modern philosophical problems for the very simple reason that they are better.  I think he likes a modern detective story better than a modern religion simply because there are some good modern detective stories and no good modern religions. 

This dark and drastic quality there has been certainly in all real religions.  The ordinary detective story has one deep quality in common with Christianity; it brings home the crime in a quarter that is unsuspected.  In any good detective story the last shall be first and the first shall be last.  The judgment at the end of any silly sensational story is like the judgment at the end of the world; it is unexpected.  As the sensational story always makes the apparently blameless banker, the seemingly spotless aristocrat, the author of the incomprehensible crime, so the author of Christianity told us that in the end the bolt would fall with a brutal novelty, and he that exalted himself would be abased.
-- From Reading the Riddle, The Common Man, G K Chesterton

http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Common_Man.html#riddle