A world without God.

I am going to state that I am a mystery book fan. There is no apology needed for that, I simply prefer the genre to others. Why? Because murder mysteries are written like the way I used to do research: you collect data, you analyze it, you construct a hypothesis that fits all the data and you test your hypothesis till you reach the correct explanation. Which is: WHODONEIT?

There are other elements to the craft of writing these books: the drawing of interesting characters, the description of interesting scenery, the unfolding of the story, the description of human interactions and occasionally: the pushing of political or other philosophical points of view. When this last gets too pushy (usually on the Socialist side) I throw the book away. The last few years, some mystery writers began to include a homosexual character (male or female), who is presented as a paragon of virtue. Whether this is done because the writer has become an adherent of homosexual propaganda (even if not the practice), or practice, or is doing this to please Editors of that persuasion is never clear, but I skip such pages

Lately I have been reading "Careless in Red," an Elizabeth George book, featuring Inspector Lynley of New Scotland Yard. It is a long tome of 725 pages and I am to page 230. It is about a recent England (Cornwall, to be exact) of different attitudes, different people, a different country than the old English mysteries. In this book, Inspector Lynley begins the story as a hopeless, unwashed vagabond, who hikes the Cornish coast in a hopeless daze following the senseless murder of his wife and unborn son. He comes upon the corpse of a young man, who has been murdered and the story begins. The characters are drawn with great care to exclude any sense of hope, decency or even love. There is no honor for parents, sons and Fathers are bitter enemies, family loyalty is a conspiracy to cover up unsavory deeds and downright evil. Even sex is an exploitation of others, a joyless, temporary coupling that ultimately inflicts pain and leaves people bitter. God and religion are conspicuously absent and the church is just a distant object and a part of the past, no longer part of life. The only reference to bringing up children with God is the teenage girl, who is prohibited from praying by her curmudgeon of a Grandfather, who promises to extinguish all such nonsense as praying in his granddaughter.

To some degree, an Author projects his or her inner self into a world that's created in a book or poem and I wonder the pain and despair that Elizabeth George creates in this book. Is it a reflection of how she experiences the world? One thing is for sure: God does not need to send these characters to Hell, they have created one already and are suffering in it. I do not know if the book changes its tune in the two thirds I have not read at this point. And I do not know if I will finish it, in spite of the riveting skill Ms George has as a writer. After all, I do not need to experience Hell in this world.

It is no surprise that our Liberal Papers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and the Tampa Tribune) have lots of nice things to say about this book. They are part of the same world that Ms George creates so skillfully.