“When they said ‘Repent’ I wonder what they meant.” – Leonard Cohen (The Future)

One of the classic themes of literature is repentance or Atonement for one’s sins. The convict going straight, the addict getting clean, the refomed killer, the detective driven by hidden guilt to set wrongs right—they’re staples of fiction from the lofty-lit peaks to the pulpy gutters I traverse with equal enthusiasm, and the results are as varied as the sources. Sometimes it’s powerful and believable and other times it’s a throw-away device on which to hang a quick riff of a plot, but it’s enduring because of its inherent relevance. Who doesn’t have something they’d rather not in their past?

In the opening of Gabriel Cohen’s new one, The Ninth Step, Jack Leightner, his Brooklyn homicide detective, is confronted with just such a character, an aging con working his way through a twelve-step program and the titular task of making amends to those he’s wronged. He shows up on Jack’s front porch early one morning and ruins Jack’s day off by confessing to him that he is the man who killed Jack’s brother when they were just children.

And it gets worse.

Like most of my favorite detective fiction, The Ninth Step is less about the solution of a case, (though there are a couple good ones in there), than it is about what the case does to the investigator. What it puts them through. The reasons the heroes, (or anti heroes), take on personal interests, (or obsessions) in that particular case often have to do with the echoes of wrongs in their own life, (either suffered by them or perpetrated by them) and they attack the case like a second (or third or fourth) chance to re-write history or make up for their own shortcomings.

The answer to the question of whether atonement is even possible always changes, too. Some wrongs can’t be outweighed by a lifetime of efforts and other times the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. But sometimes… Sometimes Redemption Street seems within reach.

What are some of your favorite literary attempts at redemption?

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.