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Excerpts from 3D Freedom, Chapter 10: Detective Fiction
Just follow along here, and let’s see where we end up:
Character A murders someone, and, though he doesn’t realize it, we see he is doomed to fall further. Evil compounds in the darkness, and his hidden deed imprisons him in that darkness as surely as if he has murdered himself, which of course, in a way, he has. Bummer – and it’s not even tragic, because we have no sense of his having fallen from a great height. We come upon him in media res, and he seems a worm doomed to digging deeper – not a tragic hero at all.
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But imagine yourself actually in the story, as someone who has been acutely affected by Character B’s demise. Your next move would probably be to demand, from the author, some sort of justice. In this two-dimensional, story universe, that probably will look something like the eye-for-eye, tit-for-tat sort of justice that preceded the coming of Christ. Balance needed to be restored, so some sort of payment – actual money, or punishment – was exacted from the criminal, and all was, if not well, at least restored to equilibrium. For a while. Now and then, reciprocal eye-for-eyeing threatened the social order of a tribe, or community, to the extent that the people rounded up a victim to sacrifice as sort of a backfire to stop the flames of bloodlust.
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To play the game well, the author must play by some rules, or we’ll take our marbles and go home. This is a sort of game played between us for our mutual delight. The author’s delight is different from ours – more slogging and anticipatory. We have all the fun of opening the surprise package to find a much smaller, less arduous dose of uphill climbing than he had in making it, plus, a swift and thrilling ride to the bottom, which he can only experience vicariously through our enjoyment. The limit to foreknowledge which makes the game fun for us is precisely what he gave up in preparing the story. He is, sadly, too omniscient to enjoy the fun of being in the game with us. Still, he has looked forward to our fun, so we should get back to it.
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Restoring the life of the Victim was, after the Resurrection, the new normal. Because the Victim has access to eternal life, I can stop short of taking his killer’s life and then waiting for the killer’s relatives to come kill mine in an endless do-loop of titting and tatting. Because Christ can make even the killer into a new man, society could realize, if not a net gain, at least a neutral position in lives by the trade. It’s a hope, anyway, that made more people stop and think before killing again. Suddenly, for Christians, both Victim and Killer were more fully-realized as human beings…even, brothers.
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How shall Hope enter the story? In the form of the detective! All is dark, but he is a character who brings light into that darkness, because he envisions a future in which the killer has been unmasked. Over and over it has happened, in his experience, so he fully expects it to happen again. (One does wonder why people keep inviting detectives back to dinner parties…) He walks in confidence, even while still clueless. He will look at every Fact he can round up, believing that Facts are wonderful things that, like seeds, contain the light of Reality from beyond the sphere of Here-and-Now. From, in fact, that future he is imagining. That future, far from being ghostly and unreal, is laying all around him in the form of Facts – just waiting to be assembled rightly into a signpost that points to the murderer.
Find out how hope really enters the story! Read the full chapter in 3D Freedom. (Add “Ostermann” to the title search on Amazon, as my books are rather buried there!)
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