Just Dead | Robert Irvine, Baptism for the Dead

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Let’s roll back the clock a hundred years to a time when Catholics or Jews were more exotic to the American reading public than they are now. If I were an aspiring novelist, I could gain an immediate audience by bringing my readers a behind the-scenes look at life in these cultures. Of course, to keep the prejudices of my nineteenth-century WASP audience in mind, I would have to make my Jews into scheming Shylocks, with rabbis muttering into their beards about how “We are the Chosen People, and if we have to make ends meet by teasing some extra gelt from the goyim, then so be it. Blessed art thou, Creator of the Universe, who has made the gentile so stupid.” My Catholics would be involved in an international Papist conspiracy, with slick, sinister Jesu its laying plans to assassinate Lincoln. My simple-minded nuns would fall to their knees in prayer whenever a Protestant walked by, making the sign of the cross and saying three Hail Mary’s that the mis guided sinner would accept baptism into the true church, or else die a sudden and painful death. 

Actually, there is a sizable body of nineteenth-century literature like this about various minority cultural groups, Mormons among them. In his novel Baptism for the Dead, Robert Irvine attempts to follow where many have tread before. But prejudice is easier to tolerate when it belongs to people who are a century dead. Living prejudice is much less forgivable. 

Baptism’s plot offers murders, polygamous cults in the desert and the city, and long-hidden documents with scandalous implications for Church history. There are the elements of what could have been a good story here, although it is thinly drawn. But the book fails in its characterization of the Mormons, quasi Mormons, and apostates who are the center of the story. 

Irvine has kept his newsclippings in order, and he does provide “a wealth of local color,” as one of the book’s blurbs proclaims. He generally gets his Book of Mormon quotes correct. Readers meet fictionalized counterparts of Rulon Allred and Mark Hoffman. However, a good novel requires something more than a few “colorful” details. Good fiction requires that the characters be real, even if they are very different from a reader’s every day experience; on those grounds, the author has failed miserably. 

In Irvine’s Mormondom, not only are faithful Saints narrow-minded proselyting machines, they will beat you up to prove it. Early in the book, the protagonist, a non-Mormon private detective, oddly named Moroni Traveler, meets an old high-school friend who is now a high-level Church Public Relations functionary, Willis Tanner: 

Willis Tanner never seemed to change. . . . His face still screwed itself into a lopsided squint whenever he was under pressure. At the moment, it was completely askew. 

“Jesus,” Traveler said, “I know that look of yours.”

Tanner condemned the blasphemy with a grimace.

“You know me, Willis. A sinner in the land of Zion.”

Tanner shook his head sadly and made an obvious effort to relax his face. Then he brushed snow from the shoulders of his overcoat and turned his back as though expecting Traveler to help him out of the garment.

“I’m not one of your wives, Willis.”

That brought Tanner whirling around, fists clenched. He was a high official of the church, sworn to defend it against the slander of polygamy. 

Traveler raised his hands in mock surrender. “You wouldn’t hit a defenseless gentile, would you?” . . .

Tanner was shifting his weight to attack when he slipped on the snow-slick tile underfoot. . . . He had to grab hold of the detective to keep from falling. The office was so small they ended up lurching into a wall.

“I took you once before,” Tanner said to cover his embarrassment. “I could do it again.” (pp. 22-23) 

Get real! People like this are not remotely typical of Latter-day Saints (or “LDSers,” as the author calls them). Yet Willis is no isolated crackpot; every Mormon in this book either acts like Dudley Doright in tight underwear or secretly rejects the Church.

Some would defend this portrayal of Mormons on the grounds of artistic license. If I wrote a novel portraying the typical Afro-American as an oversexed, dim-witted yet cunning drug dealer, I suppose I could try to hide behind the label of “author.” But I would earn another label as well: “bigot.” Simply put, Baptism for the Dead is little more than bigotry masquerading as entertainment. Admittedly, it is the fashionable bigotry of our times, the unconscious bigotry of those who simply cannot believe that anyone who believes in modern prophets can really have it all together upstairs—but it is bigotry all the same. Irvine has kept the prejudices of his audience firmly in mind. His contempt for his subject matter seems to be reflected in a comment by Moroni Traveler’s father: “Who can figure Mormons? Or real people either for that matter” (p. 196).

I find it irritating that people will take this book as an accurate, if fictionalized, account of Mormons and Mormonism. The blurbs proclaim that “Irvine . . . knows his subject matter”; the author note indicates that “like the hero of Baptism for the Dead, Robert Irvine was born in Salt Lake City, Utah.” I suppose that this is an argument for “authority by proximity.” As it happens, for several years I have lived in a city which is well over half black, but I would not presume to write a novel involving black characters without trying to penetrate the stereotypes.

Usually, I make it a point to review books I can recommend. Life is too short to spend on bad books. (My favorite button, from the Gotham Book Mart in New York City: “So many books, so little time.”) Unfortunately, being published by Pocket Books, there are probably more copies of this novel around than there are LDS missionaries in the world. There comes a point, when bad literature is so widespread, that one feels obliged to take up the cudgels and try to beat it back a little.

Irvine is certainly capable of good work. His descriptions of the inner tensions of Moroni Traveler are much more sophisticated than his cardboard descriptions of his Mormon characters (although that wouldn’t be difficult). The author note indicates that he is working on his next Traveler mystery. But unless he is going to do a better job than the straw Saints he depicts here, I suggest that he give Moroni Traveler his walking papers.

Baptism for the Dead by Robert Irvine (New York: Pocket Books, 1990), 239 pp., $3.95. [The first of a projected series of detective novels featuring Moroni Traveler.]