(1964) Robert Duncan [James Hall Roberts], The Q Document (Morrow & Co./Ballantine Books)
Writing under the pseudonym "James Hall Roberts," Hollywood screenwriter and journalist Robert Duncan may be said to have inaugurated the "gospel thriller" genre in earnest in the early 1960s in this Cold War-infused novel set in Japan (where Duncan had served in the army after World War II). Still close enough to the 1940s to invoke the specter of those U.S. archnemeses, the Nazis, a new crop of foils for the tortured male hero (here, a disaffected post-academic living in self-imposed exile) arises: an effeminate international smuggler, Vatican envoys, the "Red Chinese." This novel is the first to introduce the idea of Q, a mainstay of academic desires surrounding the New Testament, into the gospel thriller lexicon. The Japanese setting, also unique to The Q Document, creates a stark sense of post-War displacement while still linking the quest for Biblical knowledge tightly with U.S. military and economic imperialism.
Hero: George Cooper, an embittered historian who has fled his U.S. faculty life after a domestic tragedy; he now works freelance translating smuggled ancient documents in Japan. Over the course novel he discovers a moral code that conflicts with his academic (and personal) detachment; a parallel figure in the past is the late German scholar Martin Baum-Brenner, a convert from Judaism who worked for the Nazi regime
Villains: Victor Hawkins, an effeminate "faux English" American capitalizing on the economic freedom of post-occupation Japan to smuggle antiquities and humans; the Nazis who originally commissioned the falsified documents from Baum-Brenner; and various parties interested in acquiring the documents (particularly the Vatican and the "Red Chinese")
Gospel: multiple documents from the time of Jesus (which discount the resurrection), most spectacularly a first-hand account by Jesus (the "Q Document") which reveals him to be a revolutionary megalomaniac; all of them were forged by Baum-Brenner at Nazi behest in order to save his (Jewish) family
Reviews:
Initial reviews, such as those below, from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, praised the "brilliant" concept of the novel while being less charitable toward the execution. More recent readers, perhaps conditioned by the success of novels like The Da Vinci Code, are more generous in their view (see the Goodreads reviews and Amazon reviews).