Sophie Sanders reflects on our love of cosy crime and its reassuring promise that truth will prevail and justice will be swiftly served. But, as someone who has experienced the painful reality of a lengthy criminal justice process, she asks what it means to trust God when earthly justice is painfully slow – or seems absent altogether.
I have a love-hate relationship with cosy crime. And so, the return of the eccentric protagonist John ‘Ludwig’ Taylor – this time as a crime scene consultant – to our television screens filled me with both joy and despair in equal measure.
Ludwig always cracks the puzzle; when you tune in, you can expect a satisfying conclusion within the hour, swiftly followed by the criminal being handcuffed and incarcerated. And I think that’s what makes cosy crime so addictive – it fulfils our innate desire to see good triumph over evil, crimes to be exposed, and verdicts to be simple and uncontested.
The icing on the cake is that there is no gore or grit, meaning that you can sleep easy after said post-watershed shows
The icing on the cake is that there is no gore or grit, meaning that you can sleep easy after said post-watershed shows – the worst you’ll get is ketchup slathered over a dead body, which is quickly out of sight and out of mind.
That, my friends, is the joy of Ludwig returning to our screens, not to mention the gothic courts, pealing bells and towering turrets of the beautiful city of Cambridge. I’ve found myself yearning for these quick solutions to injustices within my own life. And, if I’m honest, watching cosy crime can make me despair that things aren’t quite that simple in our broken world.
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It’s pure fiction that cases can be cracked at breakneck speed and that justice comes in the blink of an eye. Our justice system is stretched and strained; court backlogs are the norm, with roughly 80,000 open cases – roughly double pre-pandemic levels, and a number that is projected to exceed 200,000 by 2030. And, as someone who has been the victim of a violent crime, I know the pain and compounded trauma that comes from such waits.
To be honest, sometimes it feels like, as the victim, you’re the one serving the sentence.
To be honest, sometimes it feels like, as the victim, you’re the one serving the sentence. By the time my case gets to the Crown Court, it will have been three years, almost to the day, since the dreaded incident. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. To get the case to trial, I had to fight for the case to be taken seriously, contest the findings of the original investigation, and endure the horrors of dredging the memories back up in an ABE – which, in layman’s terms, is a video-recorded interview to ‘achieve best evidence’.
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In our broken world, it’s rare that truth triumphs and, when it does, why does God often make us wait years for justice? And when injustice seems to prevail and there are no clear answers, how do we keep looking to the God who is justice? These are questions I wrestle with on a daily basis and which, if I’m honest, bring me to tears as I write this article.
I have found Charles Spurgeon’s exposition of Psalm 103 particularly helpful, in which he says, ‘justice may at times leave the courts of man but it abides upon the tribunal of God’. In other words, our earthly legal system is not perfect, but God’s judgement is not subject to these limitations. He sees all things and knows the truth behind every action, even when our relativist culture suggests that your narrative is simply ‘your truth’, not ‘the truth’ (Proverbs 5:21). Ultimately, every human will stand before his throne and have to give account for their lives (2 Corinthians 5:10).
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But, if I’m honest, the truth that eternal justice will triumph doesn’t always feel like a present comfort, rather, it’s the big-picture truth that I return to when I lose perspective. On a daily basis, I return to the beautiful truth that Jesus, the all-compassionate and all-powerful God, is walking with me in my suffering and will give me the grace I need to get through each day. Jesus himself was the victim of injustice and so can empathise oh-so deeply with my grief and pain. What’s more, because he triumphed over sin and death on the cross, his justice is my refuge – my certain and steadfast hope.
Dear reader, if you, too, are waiting for justice to come, keep looking to Jesus through your tear-stricken eyes, for it’s in him that love and justice mingle, truth and mercy meet.
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