Madonna Murders, The

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2004 by Erb, Peter C

The Madonna Murders. By Pamela Cranston. Oakland, Calif.: St. Huberts Press, 2003. 327pp. $14.95 (paper).

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, a striking number of clerical murder mysteries were published, and of these a significant number take up Anglican themes. The popularity of the genre may in some way be the result of the fine work of P. D. James, although her work does not, properly speaking, fit the category (except perhaps, in a sense, her The Black Tower and Death in Holy Orders), and in any case her novels far outstrip those of the general class in the same way that Umberto Eco s The Name of the Rose is distanced from the many pulp-marketed medieval whodunits. James is, of course, as she has often humbly expressed her hope, a "serious novelist," and cannot thus be simplistic-ally linked with the mass appeal of most Anglican detective fiction, but we need not as a result denigrate examples of the latter, such as Pamela Cranston's first novel, The Madonna Murders. Cranston writes in good company, including that of D. M. Greenwood and Kate Charles, to take only two recent British women writers as examples. Unlike Greenwood, however, who skirts the women's ordination issue by fashioning her sleuth as a committed deaconess, Cranston sets her Andrea West as a theology professor at an Episcopal seminary in Berkeley, California struggling (in the first chapter) with a theologically conservative and politically well-situated female student. And unlike Charles, whose early work took up the anguish of the gay man's call to pastoral ministry by treating homosexuality as bisexuality and thus allowing change in sexual orientation to her character, Cranston sets aside the question of pastoral calling in this respect and redirects the pain to the "rejected" woman-her sleuth no less-who suffers because of her lovers initial confusion as to his orientation.

As a first novel the piece has its shortcomings: the fundamentalist and the seminary administrator to whom we are introduced in the first chapter are stereotypes, as is the heroine's opening lecture with requisite visual aids and rambles on jung, academic freedom, and attacks on the "religious glaucoma" of the right (although this is a California lecture, we must recall, and the whole section may be intended as ironic). The often too blatant asides, such as the treatment of perspective immediately prior to the much more nuanced Russian choirs "Gospodin," are problematic, as are the too-fabricated central character relationship and too-multivalent conspiracies.

But all this may be overlooked; Cranston's sleuth has enough breadth oi character to be developed in further novels, and the reader is assured by this first piece that its lapses will be repaired in later compositions. Moreover, Cranston knows that the writing of clerical detective fiction is not the same as manufacturing a "zip novel" or a "best-seller" thriller-that the genre requires an introduction to major faith questions, and to achieve this end, she turns to an Orthodox theme: the murders occur under the gaze of the Holy Mother and her Son depicted on a miraculous "Icon of Kazan." Whether the icon is authentic and what one is to understand by religious authenticity are questions left to open the reader into greater mystery than the puzzle of who killed whom. And there are other questions as well, religious questions asked without the stained-glass voice so resonant in much poor religious fiction: Who is a father? How are goodbye and forgiveness the same? What of the death of the good? What is the relationship between icon and idol? And what is the significance of each of the epigrams from Metropolitan Anthony Bloom's Meditations: A Spiritual Journey for the respective chapters that they mark in Cranston's work?

PETER C. ERB

Wilfnd Laurier University

Waterloo, Ontano