Although many critics, from W. H. Auden onwards, have written about the religious, and usually theological, aspects of detective fiction in general and specific crime fiction writers in particular, these essays have usually discussed Christian, and most frequently British, authors. Studies about the American-Jewish composite author Ellery Queen1 mainly concentrate on the logical, intellectual nature of his novels, his famous ‘Challenge to the Reader’ or the intricacies of literary collaboration. The two main Queen authors were known to be not particularly religious Jews and their detective protagonist is described as a ‘lean and indefatigable agnostic’ (Queen, 1935, p. 429), so their writings have rarely attracted the attention of the theologically minded.
However, Manfred Lee suffered from ‘severe writer’s block for nearly ten years’ (Akers-Jordan, 1998, p. 163), starting in the early 1960s, which led to And on the Eighth Day (1964) being actually written by the devout, former Talmudic scholar Avram Davidson from a lengthy outline by Frederic Dannay, who had been intrigued by Edmund Wilson’s articles in The New Yorker on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The result is a numinous, in places mystical, narrative with biblical and metaphysical overtones, set in a community with many similarities to the one in Qumran in the period just before the Christian era. The novel is what Anthony Boucher calls ‘not a mystery but a Mystery’ (Boucher, 1964, p. 18), a tale which is religious without being explicitly connected to any one religion, but which contains echoes of many belief systems and philosophies and asks some profound ethical questions.
Although And on the Eighth Day is in many ways unique,surprisingly few of the plot elements are actually new. Most of the devices and many of the themes may be found in the Queen corpus from 1940 onwards. However, the writing with its biblical language and cosmic uncertainty, rooted in the protagonist’s mental state due to burnout, strikes a new note. Dannay and Davidson combined to create a crime novel where the identity of the criminal is far from the most important issue facing the detective and which, while some critics remain sceptical, has been described as ‘a work of great power and imagination; tragic, profound and uplifting’ (Fuller, 2021b, n. p.).
Modern detective fiction started in an entirely non-religious context, with the first great 19th century writers, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle, being alienated from Christianity and more interested in other forms of the supernatural. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Christian authors like G. K. Chesterton in Britain and Melville Davisson Post in America started to bring God into detective fiction and to explore religious and ethical themes in their stories. Religious settings became increasingly frequent during the Golden Age and many murderous tales include corpses found in churches, chapels, cathedrals, monasteries, and convents, while the clergy figure as detectives, victims, witnesses and even murderers. In R. Austin Freeman’s well-known list from 1924 of the most enthusiastic readers of the genre, ‘theologians’ are found in first place, followed by ‘scholars, lawyers and, to a lesser extent, doctors and men of science’ (p. 11), while several British Golden Age writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Father Ronald Knox, also wrote religious books.
Although Chesterton had written a few light-hearted pieces about detective fiction from a Christian perspective at the beginning of the twentieth century, explicitly theological criticism of the genre started with W. H. Auden’s famous essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, written as a talk for a theological seminary in early 1946 and first published two years later in Harper’s Magazine. Auden spoke of crimes ideally taking place in ‘an innocent society in a state of grace’ (p. 151) and interpreted the crime as a fall from that grace leaving the afflicted community in need of truth and redemption. A. E. Murch built on this interpretation, understanding the criminal to be not ‘an enemy of society to be uncovered and brought to justice, but […] a soul to be saved; an evildoer whose sin must be brought to light for his own good’ (1958, p. 200). In the 1920s, German Jewish writer Siegfried Kracauer had written his study Der Detektiv-Roman, which he felt had a metaphysical approach to the genre (Kracauer & Löwenthal, 2003, p. 49), but it was only published in 1971 and is difficult to obtain in English. However, it was notable, not only in being written by a scholar from a non-Christian tradition, but also in seeing the detective as an almost priestly figure ‘sent into the heart of [the] community’s life to establish communion’ and restore harmony after the trauma of the crime (Kracauer, 1981, p. 37; my translation). More recently, P. D. James has claimed that detective fiction ‘claims the high ground increasingly spurned by modern literary scholarship, dealing with great absolutes – death, retribution, punishment’ (White, 1994, p. 9), while Methodist thinker Stanley Hauerwas goes as far as to claim that through reading detective fiction ‘we are made better’ as we rediscover the importance, even sanctity, of each human life (2000, p. 208). However, such theological analyses very rarely, if ever, mention the works of Ellery Queen.
While critics and scholars have, for the most part, reviewed the Ellery Queen corpus favourably, with Jorge Luis Borges going as far as to consider him ‘following Poe, the greatest detective novelist in the country which invented the form’ (Hart, 2012, p. 45), very little has been said about the religious or metaphysical content of the works. The two main Queen authors, cousins born into Jewish immigrant families in Brooklyn in 1905, both changed their Jewish names as young adults. Manford Lepofsky, known as Manny, even ‘legally adopted the most un-Jewish name he could think of that would allow him to keep his nickname’ (Nevins, 2013, p. 6) and became Manfred Lee. Daniel Nathan became Frederic Dannay, taking his new first name from the composer Chopin. Their biographer, Francis Nevins, refers to them simply as ‘two agnostic Jews’ (2013, p. 171).
Dannay and Lee’s detective, Ellery Queen, was loosely inspired by S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance and, in Dannay’s words, his approach was ‘complex, logical, deductive, almost entirely intellectual’ (qtd in Nevins, 2013, p. 13). In the early novella ‘The Lamp of God’ (1935)2, Queen is described as ‘that lean and indefatigable agnostic’ (p. 429) and his attitude presented as entirely rational: ‘Rationality, that was it. No esoteric mumbo-jumbo could fool that fellow. Lord, no!’ (p. 428). Apart from ‘The Lamp of God’, which may be considered to have ‘a strong religious dimension’ (Nevins, 2013, p. 59), very few of the early Queen stories have any overt religious or metaphysical elements at all. No early critics analysed Queen from a metaphysical viewpoint and although a recent commentator, Robert Latona, sees in him: ‘a Jewish archetype: that of the righteous, intellectually gifted man (Talmudic scholar), who uses hermeneutic methods (intuition, reflection, deduction) to determine the significance of attributes (clues) that, when correctly interpreted, reveal that which is hidden (the murderer’s identity)’, this presentation of a Queen as a ‘Kabbala-certified cryptographer’ is unconvincing as Latona fails to mention anything about the detective that would not be equally relevant to several other religious or philosophical traditions of thought.
After The Finishing Stroke (1958), which was probably intended to be the final Queen novel, Dannay and Lee took a rest from writing books. However, after a few years, Dannay was ready to start again. Up until that point, for all the novels except those intended for children, Dannay had written a lengthy synopsis, providing his cousin with a detailed plot and character outlines, and Lee had done the actual writing. Unfortunately, during the gap years, Lee had developed a form of writer’s block and felt incapable of writing any more fiction. To continue the series, Dannay’s only solution was to employ ghost writers and the Scott Meredith literary agency found two suitable volunteers, Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985), who successfully wrote The Player on the Other Side (1963) from Dannay’s synopsis but then decided not to continue, and Avram Davidson (1923–1993).
Unlike Dannay and Lee, Avram Davidson was a practising Jew. He had lived in Israel from 1948 to 1953, knew the terrain of the Middle East, and had studied the Torah and the Talmud in depth. According to his widow, Grania, everything Davidson ‘wrote at different times in his life, had a Jewish flavour and subtext, a Jewish essence’ (Dann & Davidson Davis, 2000, p. 17). At this time, Davidson had just finished a three-year stint as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction where his work was ‘not always well liked’ (Ricard, 2018, n. p.). He was looking for a new challenge and, as one reviewer points out, ‘as a religious scholar getting into fiction writing, was probably the perfect choice’ (Ellery Queen Reader, 2016, n. p.) for the project Frederic Dannay had in mind.
Francis Nevins writes: ‘Fred told me that On the Eighth Day (1964) was inspired by his reading about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Having known him, I suspect that his source was Edmund Wilson’s series of articles in The New Yorker’ (2013, p. 217). In particular, Wilson’s lengthy 6 May 1955 article ‘The Scrolls from the Dead Sea’ – it fills 40 sides of A4 paper when printed from the internet – contains details of the Qumran community which Dannay obviously borrowed. Dannay gave Davidson a 66-page long outline of the proposed novel to work from (Sercu & Andrews, 2021, n. p.) and the resulting text was extensively edited by both Dannay and Lee before publication. This unusual novel left the critics divided, even sometimes in their own minds, with the devout Catholic Anthony Boucher writing: ‘I still have not decided whether this is a small masterpiece of an unconventional genre (limited so far as I know to this one book) or whether it is an unfortunate error in the Queen career’ (1964, p. 18).
Although several works, including Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), have been suggested as sources for Andon the Eighth Day (Fuller, 2021b, n. p.), it is clear that the principal inspiration is the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although the first manuscripts were discovered in 1946–1947, the unstable political situation in Palestine at the time delayed a full excavation of the area until the mid-1950s. Other delays, caused by arguments about ownership and who had the right to study the scrolls and fragments, meant that it was only when most of the material was moved to the Palestine Archaeological Museum in 1953 that information about the contents began to be made public. Transcripts of all the texts found in the first cave to be discovered appeared in print between 1950 and 1956. After the biblical texts, those that generated the most interest were the documents obviously produced by a religious community near Qumran in the period just prior to the birth of Christianity, thought by many archaeologists to be a branch of the Essenes written about by Josephus and Philo of Alexandria around the time of Jesus Christ. For much of the general public in America, including Frederic Dannay, it was Wilson’s 1955 New Yorker article, although some aspects of it were controversial (Cronin, 1956), which first enabled them to gain a detailed knowledge of the Scrolls.
Francis Nevins describes the community in Andon the Eighth Day as ‘a kind of Eden in the wilderness’ (2013, p. 217), an innocent society of the type described by Auden, and a perfect example of the ‘homogenous and peaceful world’ (1999, p. 34) considered by P. D. James to be the ideal setting for detective fiction. Its exact location is unclear, although it is probably ‘not far from the southern edge of Death Valley’ (Queen, 1964, p. 7). The Valley of Quenan, a name which the protagonist decides ‘might be a corruption of “Canaan”’ (p. 39), is fertile and visually idyllic despite the surrounding desert, having been carefully cultivated by its inhabitants using methods similar to those used to reclaim the desert by the kibbutzim in Israel. The connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls is made explicit when Ellery remembers ‘a pre-Christian group he had read about years before in Josephus’ (p. 26), which he later identifies as ‘a religious order originating in the second century BC called the Essenes’ (p. 40), and which has many similarities to the community he is visiting.
Both the Qumran community, as described by Wilson, and the Quenan community live together without money, ‘there is no buying and selling among them’ (Wilson, 1955, n. p.), and lead a simple life, coming together for communal meals, which take place in silence. In both places, ‘a steward, or manager does all the buying and handles all the money’ (Wilson, 1955, n. p.) and everything is considered to be owned in common. Like the Qumran community who used to ‘cultivate the earth or devote themselves to peaceful arts’ (Wilson, 1955, n. p.), including farming, beekeeping, milling, leatherworking, and weaving, the Quenan community cares for its lands and animals and refuses to make weapons of war or use force. In both places, the sick are supported, the old cared for and the children educated. In the same way, the worst punishment in Qumran was imposed on an offender who ‘was sent far away from them and may not return’ (Dupont-Sommer & Philonenko, 1987, p. 31), while the only crime remembered in Quenan, which had been committed fifty years before the novel starts, had been punished by the expulsion of the culprit (p. 31). The Qumran community bases its common life on its Manual of Discipline, while Quenan uses a similar Manual of Understanding. In Qumran, men usually married at the age of twenty (Dupont-Sommer & Philonenko, 1987, p. 48), while in the novel ‘every male Quenanite was expected to marry by the age of twenty’ (Queen, 1964, p. 27).
Equally, while the Qumran community was governed by ‘a Council of the Community made up of twelve laymen and three priests’ (Dupont-Sommer & Philonenko, 1987, p. 31), responsibility in Quenan is assumed by ‘the Crownsil of Twelve’ (Queen, 1964, p. 23), each with their own particular task, plus three officers, the Teacher, the Successor (or heir apparent) and the Superintendent, known as ‘the fifteen elect’ (p. 26). In both communities, the Teacher is the key figure. He is ‘the leader and guide and healer of his flock’ in Quenan (p. 26), considered by all to be ‘not as other men’ and possessed of great wisdom (p. 28). In Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls mention a ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, thought to be ‘the Elect of God’ and to have ‘been favoured with divine revelation’ (Wilson, 1955, n. p.). Wilson suggests that the title of ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ may have been a general title that was given to a succession of messianic figures. Ellery Queen adopts this idea and gives the Quenan community a succession of Teachers, chosen for their vocation and not in any hereditary line. The only small difference is that, in Quenan, ‘women were eligible for all offices’ (Queen, 1964, p. 25), a necessary element for any 1960s utopian society.
It may be noted that the atmosphere of the two communities is also similar. Wilson quotes Josephus in writing of the Essenes that ‘the silence of those within gives the impression of some awful mystery’ and relays Philo of Alexandria’s conviction that everyone was ‘subdued by the virtue of these men’ (1955, n. p.). Similarly, Ellery Queen is conscious of some kind of mystery. He appreciates the silence of his meal shared with the Teacher and feels the ‘curiously powerful serenity’ of the old man (1964, p. 12) but describes his time in Quenan as ‘exactly like a dream, in which the powerless dreamer never quite grasped […] the phantom realities of the experience’ (p. 29). Nick Fuller describes Ellery’s experience as ‘certainly numinous’ (2021b, n. p.) and Nevins even considers this ‘sense of the numinous’ to be ‘the novel’s central thrust’ (2013, p. 218). Both critics are referring to Rudolf Otto’s famous concept of the numinous, ‘the non-rational aspects of the holy and sacred that are foundational to religious experience in particular and the lived religious life in general’ (Sarbacker, 2016, n. p.). For Otto, the numinous represents ‘the experience of a mysterious terror and awe and majesty in the presence of the “entirely other”’ or supernatural, usually divine (Sarbacker, 2016, n. p.). Ellery certainly experiences this as he steps into ‘another world’ in the Valley of Quenan (Queen, 1964, p. 15). However, his feelings of being ‘queerly lightheaded’ (p. 14) come not only from the holiness and serenity of the place and the ‘fascination not far removed from awe’ (p. 13) generated by the Teacher, but also from the ‘state of ambulatory exhaustion’ (p. 6) or burnout he had experienced in Hollywood before ending up in the desert place after his car broke down. The ‘strange utter fatigue’ (p. 89), caused by his overwork, affects Ellery throughout his time in Quenan, and is sometimes so strong that it ‘makes a roaring in his ears’ (p. 89), slows down his mental processes and makes him doubt the evidence of his senses. This ambiguity remains to the very end of the novel when a humble Ellery, confronted with what may be a fulfilment of prophecy, decides to ‘acknowledge and depart’ as a mystery beyond his understanding is revealed (p. 101).
There are several Christian elements in Andon the Eighth Day, not least of which the fact that the action takes place during Holy Week in 1944, starting on Palm Sunday and ending on Easter Day, with the Teacher being put to death on Good Friday, which was also that year the 14th of Nisan, the first day of the Jewish Passover when the sacrificial lamb is ritually slaughtered. The book was also published on Good Friday 1964 (Boucher, 1964, p. 18). The innocent Teacher is tried and put to death, with his ‘arms outstretched in holy symmetry’ (Queen, 1964, p. 94), for a crime he did not commit, after sharing a meal of bread and wine with Ellery. He deliberately takes the sin of the community upon himself (p. 88), after they have been betrayed by the storekeeper, Storicai, whose name is an anagram of Iscariot, for thirty pieces of silver (p. 97). Ellery, whose name is pronounced Elroy or Elroï, meaning ‘God sees? Or God sees me?’ (p. 14) in Hebrew, is a John the Baptist figure, perceived by the community as one prophesied about long before, a man ‘who comes to us in the time of our great trouble, and prepares the way for the second’ (p. 15) and greater visitor. However, as Francis Nevins points out, he may also be seen as Moses ‘based on the encounter with the flaming bush and the trek through the desert’ (2013, p. 218), or even as Pontius Pilate as he presides the Teacher’s trial and leads the Crownsil to declare him guilty. He is even placed in parallel to Christ himself, as the whole of chapter 7, describing the Saturday after the Teacher’s death, is made up of just one short sentence: ‘Ellery wept’ (p. 95), evoking the shortest verse in the English Bible, ‘Jesus wept’ (John 11:35).
And yet, although the novel ‘can easily be misconstrued as a one-for-one allegory of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus as related in the Gospels’ (Nevins,2013, p. 218), it is, in fact, much more complex than that. The text abounds with references to the great and good of many traditions and to utopian literature. Quenan owes as much to Shangri-La3 as to the children of Israel. The Chronicler looks like a ‘bust of Socrates’ (Queen, 1964, p. 46) and the Teacher, like Mohammad, is allowed to have more wives than the other men in his community. In the end, the Teacher’s peaceful death resembles that of Socrates more than Christ’s crucifixion. Ellery even realises that he ‘had been following the wrong prompt book’ (p. 94), as he did not realise that the drink given to the Teacher was the poison that would kill him and not a sedative, like the ‘wine mixed with myrrh’ (Mark 15:23) offered to Jesus on the cross. Equally, the Teacher is not resurrected, like Christ, but is rather ‘reincarnated like the Dalai Lama’ (Fuller, 2021b, n. p.) in the form of a young aviator, appropriately named Manuel Aquina, who comes ‘down like a streak of flame from the sky’ when his plane explodes (Queen, 1964, p. 100), reminding Ellery of the biblical Elijah and his chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11). There is also something not quite real about the whole scenario. Ellery’s first thought is that the Quenanites are there ‘from Hollywood, on location from some biblical production’ (p. 8), a feeling which returns when he first sees the children of the community ‘emerge from their houses like figures in a biblical painting’ (p. 18), leading the detective to wonder whether he can truly believe what he sees.
Although, in many ways, On the Eighth Day is unique, as Francis Nevins points out, it is ‘still packed with themes and devices we’ve seen in the canon before’ (2013, p. 218). None of the early novels treat spiritual themes in any depth. The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) contains an unconvincing religious fanatic and a few superficial comments from Ellery about religion, but most of the other pre-Second World War novels just do not mention the subject at all. The detective fiction blogger Cavershamragu has suggested that ‘in 1940 Dannay nearly died in a car crash and this may have had an impact on the more serious and religious aspects of the later Queen novels’ (2011, n. p.). In any case, the first novel, chronologically speaking, with religious themes is Calamity Town (1942), where the author, like in Andon the Eighth Day, chooses his dates carefully. Nora is ill at Thanksgiving and Christmas, finally dying on Easter Sunday. Her husband Jim is arrested on Valentine’s Day. The plot covers precisely nine months, the human gestation cycle (Nevins, 2013, p. 109). Both Andon the Eighth Day and Ten Days’ Wonder (1948)have numberedchapters following the days of creation, but Ten Days’ Wonder is also structured around the breaking of the Ten Commandments. Like Andon the Eighth Day, it is, as Nathanael Booth explains, a ‘novel thick with biblical allusions’ (2019, p. 120) that the reader cannot fail to notice and, like the later novel, includes ‘Ellery Queen’s confrontation with God’ (Fuller, 2021a, n. p.), although in a much less attractive form, as the culprit is ‘a deistic megalomaniac’ (n. p.), who has confused himself with the Almighty and needs the rationalistic Ellery to remind him of his humanity.
The next novel chronologically after Ten Days’ Wonder, Cat of Many Tails (1949), shares with Andon the Eighth Day the presence of a wise paternal figure who is able to teach Ellery true wisdom. Dr Bela Seligmann is a Viennese psychiatrist, described by Ellery as ‘the grandfather of your tribe’ (Queen, 1949, p. 541), who has ‘seen all the terrors in the world and the human heart’ (Nevins, 2013, p. 170). His name, like those in Andon the Eighth Day, is significant, as selig is the German word for ‘blessed’ and bela, although its primary meaning in Hebrew is ‘swallowed’ or ‘devoured’, may also have the meaning of ‘devoted to God’. The novel ends with Jewish Seligman quoting to Ellery a line from the Christian Gospel of Mark, which could be described as ‘Judaism’s fundamental article of faith’ (Nevins, 2013, p. 171): ‘There is one God; and there is none other but he’ (Queen, 1949, p. 560; Mark 12:32). As in Andon the Eighth Day, Ellery has to learn humility, that he is fallible and that he should not try to play the role of God.
All these novels show the reality of original sin, the need for humility and ‘distrust of human nature, even in Eden’ (Nevins, 2013, p. 218). This is the main theme of the appropriately named novel The Origin of Evil (1951). The fallibility of human nature, which leads the whole of the Crownsil in Andon the Eighth Day to fall into temptation, is clearly shown here in all aspects of life. The author’s spokesman is the elderly Mr Collier, who explains to Ellery at the end of chapter 7 what he needs to know:
It’s about corruption and wickedness. It’s about greed and selfishness and guilt and violence and hatred and lack of self-control. It’s about black secrets and black hearts, cruelty, confusion, fear. It’s about not making the best of things, not being satisfied with what you have and always wanting what you haven’t. It’s about envy and suspicion and nosiness and drunkenness and unholy excitement and a thirst for hot running blood. It’s about man, Mr Queen. [Queen, 1951, n. p.]
As the previous section has shown, the originality of Andon the Eighth Day is to be found not in its themes or its message, but in its atmosphere and language. In fact, the ‘curiously powerful serenity’ (Queen, 1964, p. 12) noticed by Ellery and the reader from the beginning of the novel is created, at least in part, by the language. Ellery Queen was not the first American author of crime fiction to use biblical language from the familiar King James or Authorised Version of the Bible to provide a particular atmosphere. To cite one example, Melville Davisson Post, whose Uncle Abner stories the Queen authors knew well, created a biblical, and in his case Old Testament, atmosphere through his use of style and language. As Grant Overton remarks, ‘the prose style, by its brevity and by a somewhat biblical diction, does its part to induce in the reader a sense of impending justice, of divine retribution on the evildoer’ (1924, p. 44). The result is a detective who is ‘thunderously prophetic’ (Nevins, 1994, p. 195) in the style of the biblical Elijah.
Using biblical language, in particular the language of the Authorised Version, in modern fiction always creates a certain atmosphere. As C. S. Lewis points out, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, nearly all English-speaking people, whether they believed in the Christian message or not, were familiar with the biblical text. As a result, ‘nearly all that was biblical was recognizably biblical, and all that was recognized was sacer, numinous’ (Lewis, 1963, p. 142). The result of this was that the use of biblical language in fiction was ‘nearly always solemn or facetious’ (Lewis, 1963, p. 135). To use biblical language in a realistic, credible setting in order to create a sacred, numinous atmosphere as Queen did in Andon the Eighth Day is extremely rare and may account for some of the mixed reactions to the novel.
From Ellery’s very first meeting with the Teacher in the novel, right until the final climax, biblical phrases, usually in italics in the text, come into the detective’s mind. Ellery even reminds the reader that ‘the noble language of the King James Version was familiar to all 19th century Americans’ (Queen, 1964, p. 39). As he sees the elderly Teacher, he recalls ‘words from the Song of Songs: thine eyes are dove’s eyes’ (p. 8), and he would later think ‘He has the eyes of a prophet’ (p. 8). The Quenan community greet people with the phrase ‘The Word be with you’ (p. 13), reminiscent of the liturgical response: ‘The Lord be with you’ from the beginning of the Roman Catholic and Anglican services of the Eucharist, and which itself echoes the biblical greeting used by Boaz to the reapers (Ruth 2:4), Saul to David (1 Samuel 17:37) or the Apostle Paul to the Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians 3:16). Replacing the Lord, the creator God, with the Word, or divine logos, is theologically appropriate and continues to sound biblical.
This biblical, slightly archaic, atmosphere is also helped by the fact that the Quenan community members still use the old-fashioned second person singular thou and thee in everyday speech, reminding Ellery of ‘the fashion of British Quakers’ (1964, p. 14). Although only Quakers would use this form when speaking to each other, in 1964 most English-speaking Christians would still address God as Thou. In Britain, although a few protestant denominations allowed You in the 1960s, it was not until the Series 3 experimental, and for some revolutionary, liturgies, authorised at various times between 1973 and 1980, that British Anglicans were allowed to say You to God in official church services (Kershaw, 2007, n. p.). In America, the Episcopal Church introduced You in Rite II of the 1979 prayer book, so all Episcopalians at least, and the majority of Christians from other traditions, were still using Thou in 1964.
However, not only do the Quenanites use the Thou form, they also spontaneously use biblical or traditional gestures. As the Teacher, for the second time, kisses the cuff of Ellery’s trouser leg, the detective immediately thinks ‘the hem of my garment’ (1964, p. 14), remembering both the idiom, to kiss the hem of my garment, meaning ‘to express one’s respect, fealty, awe, subjection, or reverence to someone else’ (The Free Dictionary) and also the woman in the Gospels who touches the hem of Christ’s garment and is healed (Matthew 9:20-21). These allusions continue until the very end of the novel, combined with old-fashioned sentence structure: instead of being unlike everyone else, the admirable Teacher is ‘not as other men’ (Queen, 1964, p. 28), a phrase used in the Bible in a completely different, and much more negative, context (Luke 18:11). In the same way, the Teacher at his trial echoes Christ’s words to Pilate (Luke 20:70), stating ‘it is you who say it’ (p. 77), but here the ambiguous reply is only a way to avoid telling lies. In fact, all the actual biblical quotations or specific allusions come in Ellery’s thoughts as the Quenan community reminds him of the words he has read or heard as a child. The Quenanites themselves merely evoke the Bible by accident, using archaic vocabulary and syntax, speaking the ordinary language of a bygone age. The result of this strategy is to immerse the reader in another culture, with a language and society reminiscent of the Bible stories remembered from the reader’s youth, creating an almost nostalgic feel.
In this unique novel, the Dead Sea Scrolls together with biblical language and culture provide the starting point for a mystery. There is indeed a murder, but it does not dominate the action. While most detective fiction insists on rationality and wants most of all to know who is guilty, Andon the Eighth Day, as Francis Nevins points out, ‘uses the detective story form, which is based on the power of reason to order chaos and comprehend truth, in a manner calculated to undermine our faith in reason’ (2013, p. 219). And even truth is, in some ways, insufficient, as the Teacher finally persuades Ellery to trust him and not to reveal the identity of the true culprit to the community, but to let him give his life and ‘take their sin’ upon himself (Queen, 1964, p. 88). Ellery leaves still wondering if this sacrifice will be sufficient to save them all – a far greater mystery than the crime. The result is one of the rare classic detective novels with a strong religious content which continues to sell well today, with 27 editions having been published since 1964, the latest paperback edition in 2021. As S. T. Karnick explains, ‘Queen’s religious themes remind us that popular escapist fiction can be meaningful while it entertains’ (2000, n. p.). In the novel, Frederic Dannay’s expert plotting and interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls combines with Avram Davidson’s religious sensitivity and knowledge of Jewish desert communities to create something out of the ordinary. Although, Davidson went on to write another Queen novel and unsuccessfully attempted a third, the numinous atmosphere of And on the Eighth Day was never repeated.
Ellery Queen Reader, 2016, ‘And on the Eighth Day (1964)’ [online]. Available at: https://readingelleryqueen.com/2016/04/18/and-on-the-eighth-day-1964/ [accessed 18 Dec. 2021].
Although many critics have written about the religious aspects of detective fiction, these essays have usually discussed Christian authors. Studies about the American-Jewish composite author Ellery Queen mainly concentrate on the logical nature of his novels, his famous ‘Challenge to the Reader’ or the intricacies of literary collaboration. The two main Queen authors were known to be not very religious Jews and their detective protagonist is described as an agnostic. However, Manfred Lee’s writer’s block in the early 1960s led to And on the Eighth Day (1964) being written by the devout, former Talmudic scholar Avram Davidson from a lengthy outline by Frederic Dannay, who had been intrigued by Edmund Wilson’s articles in The New Yorker on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The result is a numinous narrative with biblical and metaphysical overtones, set in a community with many similarities to the one in Qumran in the century before the Christian era. The novel is what Anthony Boucher calls ‘not a mystery but a Mystery’, a tale which is religious without being explicitly connected to any one religion, but which contains echoes of many belief systems and philosophies and asks some profound ethical questions. Few of the plot elements in And on the Eighth Day are new. Most of the devices and many of the themes may be found in the Queen corpus from previous decades. However, the writing with its biblical language and cosmic uncertainty, rooted in the protagonist’s mental state due to burnout, strikes a new note. Dannay and Davidson combined to create a crime novel where the identity of the criminal is far from the most important issue facing the detective and which, while some critics remain sceptical, may be described as a work of great power and imagination with tragic and uplifting elements.
Bien que de nombreux critiques aient écrit à propos des aspects religieux du roman policier, ces études se sont généralement employées à examiner les œuvres d’auteurs chrétiens. Les articles consacrés à l’auteur collectif judéo-américain publiant sous le nom d’Ellery Queen se concentrent principalement sur l’aspect logique de ses romans, sur son célèbre « défi au lecteur », ou sur les subtilités de la collaboration littéraire. Les deux auteurs principaux du tandem Queen étaient connus pour être des Juifs peu pratiquants, et leur détective est décrit comme étant agnostique. Cependant, la panne d’inspiration de l’écrivain Manfred Lee au début des années 1960 a conduit à l’écriture de And on the Eighth Day (1964) par l’ancien spécialiste du Talmud Avram Davidson, un juif pieux, à partir d’une longue ébauche de Frederic Dannay, lui-même intrigué par les articles d’Edmund Wilson parus dans le New Yorker sur les manuscrits de la mer Morte. En résulte un récit numineux aux connotations bibliques et métaphysiques, qui se déroule dans une communauté très similaire à celle de Qumrân lors du siècle précédant l’ère chrétienne. Le roman est ce qu’Anthony Boucher appelle « non pas un mystère mais un Mystère », un récit qui est religieux sans être explicitement lié à aucune religion, mais qui fait écho à de nombreux systèmes de croyances et à de nombreuses philosophies en posant des questions éthiques profondes. Peu d’éléments de l’intrigue de And on the Eighth Day sont nouveaux. La plupart des techniques littéraires et de nombreux thèmes se retrouvent également dans le corpus d’Ellery Queen datant des décennies précédentes. Cependant, l’écriture, mais aussi son langage biblique et son incertitude cosmique, liée à l’état d’épuisement mental du protagoniste, sont inédits. Dannay et Davidson ont co-écrit un roman policier où l’identité du coupable est loin d’être le problème le plus important auquel est confronté le détective et qui, en dépit du scepticisme de certains critiques, peut être décrit comme une œuvre d’une puissance et d’une imagination considérables, comportant des éléments à la fois tragiques et édifiants.