Episode 47: Jeremy Black on Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, and more

Recently retired history professor Jeremy Black was very gracious in allowing me to interview a while back about something I was curious about: war. Black has written many, many books, and a darn big pile of them specifically about military conflicts. His historic perspective—looking at how many common narratives about why wars start and how they’re won are often wrong—was amazingly refreshing, but … we’re not here to talk war. 

We’re here to talk morality. Religion. And detective fiction. 

Black has just published two new books on Sherlock Holmes (The Game Is Afoot: The Enduring World of Sherlock Holmes; Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and Agatha Christie (The Importance of Being Poirot; St. Augustine's Press, 2022). Any fan of either, or detective fiction in general, surely will delight in the perspective of a history-trained literary appreciator (is that a word?) of the books. I’ve read a little Arthur Conan Doyle and none at all of Christie, but talking to him for a little while inspired me to do more of both and to take seriously the visions of society, morality and theology inside the works and, for sure, inside the writers’ own intentions and lives.