Murder He Wrote

 

“Dad,” Elliot asked me the other evening.  “If someone was shot through the neck, could you tell what gun had shot them just from the size of the bullet hole if you didn’t have the bullet?”

“Probably not,” I said.  “Although depending on how close to their neck the gun was held, there would certainly be blood and DNA on the gun.”

“Sure,” Elliot agreed, “but they didn’t know about DNA in the 1920s in England.”

“This is a weird conversation,” I said.  “Why are you wanting to know all this stuff?  Are you time traveling back to try to murder someone because murder is murder, even if a time machine is involved.”

“I’m writing a detective story,” Elliot said.  “It is set in the 1920s in England and it involves the detective’s cousin being shot in the neck and the detective coming to solve the crime.”

“That’s interesting,” I said.  “I thought you were supposed to write about things that you know about.  You don’t know anything about England, particularly not during the 1920s – nor much about murders, for that matter.  Why not set your story in a small Mennonite school in the 2020s?”

(Even as I said this, I realized it wasn’t totally true.  An awful lot of authors write stories about dragons and magic and not a single one of them that I have found owns a pet dragon or can do magic beyond using an iPhone.)

“That would be boring,” my younger son replied.  “Beyond which, I’ve read enough Agatha Christie stories that I think I know how to write this sort of thing.  My only problem is that my chapters are too short – most of them are only a page and a half long, but I figure after I do my research, I can expand them.”

“Well, I’ll enjoy telling people that I knew Elliot Waldron, back before he was a famous crime novelist,” I said.

“It’s amazing to me that I thought of this perfect crime.  I think it will surprise most people,” Elliot told me seriously.  “I figure I’ll have the book done by the end of the summer.”

“And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” (Ecclesiastes 12:12)

If Solomon thought that there were a lot of books written in his day, I wonder what he would have thought about the 21^st century.  In doing a tiny bit of research, it seems as though (if you include self-published books) there are some 2 million new books written every year, just in the United States.

That means that there are more people writing books than are actually reading them!

I have read enough of these books to know that many of them have no particular reason for their existence.  I suppose it takes some level of self-importance to believe that you have an important story tell or light to shed on some subject that has been shrouded in mystery until the present.

I suppose more important than the writing of numerous books is the reading of THE book – God’s message to humans.  More than that, the goal in reading Scripture is not simply to read or even memorize the words, but to apply them to our lives.

An awful lot of people who claim to follow Christ stalk through their lives, hurting their friends and family with their words and actions. 

Too many of us believe that we have much to say and some of us even sit down and cobble together books or blogs as a result.  But only one book truly sheds light on the path we are to take.  All other books fall short – even a crime novel written by a 15-year-old about someone shot through the neck in England in the 1920s.