Justice?

I think it may be the only ending of its kind that I have seen in the last six or seven years. I am thinking of the ending of the movie the Gran Torino. The old man with cancer gets himself killed by the gang of hoods, and the movie shows the hoods being taken away by the Police. One of the policemen tell the neighbor youths that the case is a "lock" because there were lots of witnesses.

The movie turns the bad guys over to the our criminal justice system with implied confidence. That is not how the bad guy usually gets it. In other movies that I have seen and in the mystery novels that I have read, that is usually not the case. There are two much more typical endings. The most typical is the "good guy" in some major action-filled climax in which they battle to the death. The Revelation of St. John style of resolution. The good guy usually pulling out a victory in the last second. The second ending is much more common in the books I read. I just finished T is for Trespass by Grafton. As the police arrive, the evil woman jumps out of the hotel window and commits suicide. P.D. James, Dorothy Sayers, Martha Grimes, Ian Rankin and many others tend to have the bad guy die in some other way, but the "bad guy" is seldom surrendered to the criminal justice system. Ian Rankin even has taken to having the "bad person" slip away and avoid any legal or public punishment.

Is it a lack of faith in the criminal justice system, that the makers of these movies and writers of these stories do not believe that the reader will be happy to have the evil one end up in our criminal justice system? No one thinks that Madoff will be appropriately punished by the criminal justice system for his fraud. Is it more of a statement that in this world there are no clear cut, good guys - bad guys, and the struggle between good and evil continues on. Mystic River, the movie, seemed to suggest that that is the river of life, a mix between good and evil. They struggle on different sides of the street and the flow of the struggle is never ended.

Certainly one of the great engines of the desire and hope for Heaven is that there will finally be a fair and just resolution to this conflict between good and evil. That there will finally be a place where all of the little and great evils will be sifted and there will be a complete and appropriate balancing of the justice that each of us claims we want. One of the things that makes mystery novels so much fun is to see each writers vision of justice.