I Wanna be a Paperback Writer

April 8, 2008 by djackson.

A taste for detective fiction seems to be a dirty little secret for us preacher-types.

Eugene Peterson devotes a whole section to “Mysteries” in Take & Read: Spiritual Reading, An Annotated List. He even includes a work called The Puritan Pleasure of the Detective Story by Erik Routley, a Scots minister who assembles a roster of famous pastors and theologians, all fans of the whodunit. It is interesting to think about why. Peterson opines that “right and wrong, so often obscured in the ambiguities of everyday living, are cleanly delineated in the murder mystery.” (The world standing at a permanent moral attention, eh Nick Carraway?) Not so far from the confession of E. L. Doctorow’s Father Everett Pemberton, “I just read the damn things when I’m depressed. The paperback detective speaks to me. His rod and his gaff they comfort me. And his world is circumscribed and dependable in its punishments, which is more than I can say for Yours.” Job, it seems, could’ve benefited from a few dective novels as he reclined on the ashes.

Anyway, I am pondering this today because, as a longtime devotee of the genre, I recently discovered the work of Walter Mosley. My introduction came in the form of his anthology, Six Easy Pieces, which I found while browsing the stacks at the local public library. Mosley’s sleuth hero, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, is an African-American in L.A. in the ‘60’s. He operates without a policeman’s badge or private eye’s license (or a clerical collar!), regards the police as a bigger hazard than his suspects, and makes up his own mind about dispensing justice. His sidekick Raymond “Mouse” Alexander (dead by gunshot as the book opens) is no Doctor Watson or even Archie Goodwin but a homicidal loose cannon on the pitching deck of Easy’s life.

In fact, it would be interesting to compare him with Nero Wolf. In the volume mentioned above, Peterson exegetes Rex Stout’s whole body of work as a meditation on contemplative spirituality. To quote:

The barest sleuthing quickly discerns Nero Wolfe as a type of the church’s presence in the world. The most evident thing about him, his body, provides an analogue to the Church. His vast bulk is evidence of his “weight,” recalling the etymology of the biblical “glory.” More than anything else, he is there, visible. He must be reckoned with. He is corpulent or nothing. And the Church is the body of Christ. Along with an insistence on bodily presence there is a corresponding observation that there is nothing attractive about that body. His body is subject ot calumny and jokes. His genius is in his mind and his style. He does not fawn before customers, nor seek “contracts.” Wolfe will not leave his house on business, that is, accommodate himself to the world’s needs. He is a center around which the action revolves, a center of will and meditation, not a center of power or activity. He provides a paradigm for Christian spirituality that, while reticent and reserved, is there in vast presence when needed.

Peterson goes on in that vein and I recommend reading his notes in full, but I want to pursue a different point. If Nero Wolfe is the church it is the Western church, the white church, the church of Eugene Peterson maybe and even the Pope. How, then, might Easy Rawlins and his lawless sidekick Mouse reveal the edgier church of, say, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright?

I should probably begin with the points of contact. Peterson says that Wolfe “is there and needed because there is something wrong in the world (murder and other criminal extremes.” In the same way, Easy’s uneasy existence makes its demands on him because he lives in a world rife with injustice. The church remains central to African American life (as it grows more and more marginalized among Anglos) because its members live in a world where many things continue to be very wrong indeed - and the wrong is visible, unbotoxed, spin-free and without airbrushing.

Wolfe may not seek clients and contracts, but Rawlins finds himself unable to avoid them. If Wolfe still inhabits a medieval universe (the pope, remember?) and parks his ponderous and pondering self at the acoustical sweet spot for the music of the spheres, Easy Rawlins lives amid modernity’s mad rush of everything to everywhere, a world where order is still in the making and men must be God’s co-creators.

Wolfe lives the liturgy of the hours - meals at set times and no business talked at the table. Twice a day he ascends to the top floor to grow orchids. Easy, on the other hand, goes at life like a Charismatic on Red Bull. He struggles to establish a straight life in his respected position as plant manager at an inner city school but friends continue to seek him out and he finds himself unable to turn them away. This would make Rawlins the church militant, sacrificial (to too great an extent, perhaps) of her own contemplation of God because the world demands that she be his incarnation. Indeed, the one pastor in the book, the Reverend Medgar Winters of Winter Baptist Church, works the same way. His secretary tells the detective,

Medgar gives of himself like some kind of saint. He meets fifty people in this room every day. And they’re all askin’ for somethin’. they want money or a soapbox or for him to travel fifty miles to talk to a roomfull’a people who don’t even care. They cry on his shoulder. They confess their sins. And he takes it all in, Mr. Rawlins. Twelve hours every day, seven days a week.

For Reverend Winters, as for Easy Rawlins, this nonstop availability leads to bad choices, and Mosley does not flinch from revealing this fact. At the same time, he invites us to consider the possibility that the spiritual safety in self-restraint may be a luxury unaffordable to those surrounded by crisis.

Nero Wolfe doesn’t get on all that well with the cops, and nor does Easy Rawlins. But again, there is a distinction. Wolfe deals with the police because they seek him out. He takes on high-profile cases that garner much official attention and energy. Wolfe always knows his rights, faces the official force without fear, bullies them when they threaten him and uses their efforts to his own ends. For Rawlins, this inimical relationship takes on an entirely different cast. First of all, he seldom meets the police because he investigates the deaths of poor black people and generally finds that to be an uncrowded venue. In one case, he phones the force to report clues he has uncovered in a case of arson. He asks for the one African American in the precinct.

When he wasn’t there I talked to another policeman; I forget his name. I forget because he was of no help. He told me to come in the next afternoon and file a report. When I said I thought it might be more important than that, he hung up.

In a later chapter, Easy looks into the murder of a teenage prostitute. One of his leads sneers that Rawlins obtained evidence from the victim’s apartment that should have gone to the police. “I got the mother’s permission to search Jackie’s house,” Easy shoots back, “There was no police notice telling me not to look around.” Later another suspect asks if this isn’t a police job. “You’d think so,” Easy agrees, “but I haven’t seen one cop looking into it and I bet you haven’t either.” In the indifference or hostility of the official authorities Easy becomes the de facto voice - and arm - of justice.

If, then, Nero Wolfe is the Church above the world, Easy Rawlins is the church beneath it, unafraid for her own dignity and, though refusing to go where she is ordered, always willing to go where she is needed.

I could go on but I’ll finish with a few observations about Easy’s sidekick, Mouse. Raymond Alexander is dead before the first page of the book begins, but his bullet-punctured body and absentee corpse and glittering gray eyes haunt every page. As I read about Mouse, I thought of an article in the current issue of Books & Culture. William Edgar of Westminster Theological Seminary writes,

One of the defining trickster characters to emerge in the African American experience was the so-called “bad nigger.” On the surface, he was a threat to the surrounding, legitimate society, because he was free to defy his oppressors with unruly behavior. Yet, as John Roberts argues in Trickster to Badman, the “bad nigger” is not a bad person in any traditional sense. His goal is neither destructive nor deviant. He is a hero because he is able to challenge the solidarity required for white dominance to succeed. He finds a wedge to pry open the paternalism of his oppressors.”

Mouse stands in this tradition, whether Mosely consciously draws on it or not. He is a “bad man” in the coolest sense of bad. Though small in stature, he frightens the men he meets because he radiates a willingness to break all the rules in pursuit of his own understanding of the good. Yet women love him - feel safe around him and will make great sacrifices on his behalf, perhaps because they sense that the good he seeks is higher than the rules he violates in achieving it.

Easy is ambivalent about Mouse. He admires him, grieves his death almost to the point of self-destruction, attempts a time or two to emulate him, yet in the end rejects overtures to enter the same kind of life. To use terms from literature more familiar to me, Rawlins is the Hemingway Hero, the tough but callow youth still being formed, while Mouse is the Code Hero, the scarred veteran who offers to show the way but tells no lies about the price to be paid or the limited rewards to be gained.

So if Nero Wolfe is the pope, perhaps Easy Rawlins and Mouse Alexander are the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. For those of us who struggle to digest Reverend Wright’s inflammatory, irresponsible, and factually flawed allegations about the actions of the U. S. government, it might be helpful to realize that a man who preaches in an Easy Rawlins world cannot afford the luxury of a Nero Wolfe homiletics. The preacher who spends his life going out may suffer occasionally from too little going in, too much demand for revolution may allow too little luxury for recollection. But both kinds of preachers are reading spiritual mysteries, and perhaps both can contribute to important solutions.

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