Seldom promiscuous, some popular fiction detectives are sedately married, but more often single, when not in sacred vows: an unwitting homage paid by secular culture to the Christian religion.
Why did the most successful authors of detective stories opt for chaste sleuths? In the analogous literary genre of espionage, after all (to say nothing of political thrillers), spies rely on promiscuity to extract information, don’t they? Would one ever imagine James Bond altogether chaste, successful, and popular?1 And yet, such are precisely the recurrent features of the best-loved fiction…
