Sacrament, sacrifice. If these stories that probe religious depths are violent, it's because Christianity is violent at its core, even if at its core it preaches peace. It's based on the barbaric torture and execution of an innocent man, and it considers itself the continuation and renewal of another faith that has as its story the execution of an innocent, prevented when God stays the hand of Abraham about to slay his son. Both were sacrifices, the snuffing of life with a religious purpose. What is the purpose, then, of the violence around us? Lister’s detective chaplain struggles to learn the truths of whodunits and of the relationship of man, that violent creature, to God.

The first struggle requires powers of detection, as well as personal bravery. The second gets no help from detection, for it's an undetectable mystery that can only be approached through sacrament and sacrifice, through the power in the blood. And though there is no answer, there is, there can be, redemption. A prison is, after all, a house of sinners. Who could possibly be in more need of salvation?

But Jordan is no ascetic saint. He has struggled with alcoholism. He is wildly attracted to women. And he certainly doesn't see the world through rose-tinted lenses. As Lister has pointed out, he breaks from the genteel tradition of religious detective fiction (Father Brown) and moves instead into the hard-boiled genre. Yet, all the characters in the novels, even the worst, are human. No cardboard villains.

Lister takes me by the hand and introduces them to me. As of this writing I have yet to read all the John Jordan stories, never mind the others, for he is a prolific writer. And, as I discover the more I read, he's a craftsman of his trade and a deep one. Crime fiction can be unabashed entertainment—in fact, to be good, it should always be that—but it can go to the same places literary fiction does: a meditation through writing on the human, the divine, the social, the sacred, the role of humans in history and vice versa, the attraction of the concrete, and the unavoidable pull, due to the confluence of mortality and consciousness, of the metaphysical.

I navigate the blood—always shed by crime and always participating in sacrament—that flows through the John Jordan books like the river that flows by Wewahitchka. Drive through here and you wouldn't know this is a river town, a magnet for fishing enthusiasts. Like so much about Wewa, the river is hidden. You have to follow the little road signs that point to a boat dock, and after a short drive through backcountry, there's the river. The mystery. “The river is within us,” TS Eliot wrote. Unlike Lister, I am not from this town, from this river. But reading him, I begin to feel it flowing within me.

How to read the John Jordan Blood Series