SUSSING THE DETECTIVES

Some reading about TV detectives.
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I watch and read a heck of a lot of detective fiction, in fact, I’m starting to imagine that it is just ever-so-slightly possible that I watch and read slightly too much of it. This is because, just recently, I’ve been able to work out far too early just “whodunnit” and I’ve come to recognise this is not due to any sudden increase in my own powers of deduction (Great Uncle Sherlock notwithstanding) but because I’m starting to recognise the structure that certain series and specific novelists use and it’s starting to kind of ruin the stories for me a little.

I hardly imagine that the Police Force are likely to come a-calling and asking me to assist with any of their cases about which they are utterly baffled any time soon.

Take, for example “The Mentalist”. This enjoyable US crime drama, rather in the “Columbo” mould, has been running for four years now and we’ve been watching it, more-or-less, from the start. It’s a well-made, character-based show about solving brutal murders committed in California and is basically a stylish bit of procedural nonsense that bears no real relationship to how such things would be solved in the real world, but it fills an hour or so on a Friday evening.

Recently, however, I have begun to notice something. There’s been a pattern developing that I’ve only noticed over the course of the last half dozen or so episodes but which may very well have been there from the very start. After all, despite the influence of Great Uncle Sherlock, I have always tended to be rather slow on the uptake.

You see, in recent weeks, there’s always been a small but significant scene where “the Mentalist” (a title, by the way, which still conjures up an image of Alan Partridge to me…) with a peripheral character which seems rather irrelevant but it always seems to turn out that the other character in that otherwise pointless scene turns out to have been the killer, despite the many false leads and other suspects that they might bring in across the course of an episode.

Now, I’ll grant you, with only 42 minutes to tell your entire story, fudging the issue by adding half a dozen other scenes of “little chats” with other suspects might significantly reduce the story-telling opportunities, but it has tended to rather spoil the denouement of late.

It’s like when I eagerly devoured the latest Mark Billingham “Tom Thorne” paperback recently. I’ve faithfully read all of his books annually since the first one came out about a decade ago, and I’ve always enjoyed them. This time, however, I began to realise that I’ve become rather too familiar with the style. It became very obvious within about twenty pages or so that, if the way the character was being written was anything to go by, there was only one person who could be the ultimately responsible party and, sadly, it turned out to be the case. I say “sadly” because I really wanted to be wrong and to get the kind of surprise the earlier books used to give me, but, this time, I wasn’t. I’m sure that next time, just to be perverse, I will get it completely wrong, but this time I wasn’t.

It’s not Mark Billingham’s fault, of course. He still writes a far better thriller than I ever could. It’s just that I’ve got far too familiar with his writing technique, and the structural form his books take, possibly because he is the only modern thriller writer who I do actually take the time and trouble to read. Maybe what I need to do is read some others and then I’ll return to him and be bamboozled all over again.

There is a theory that when you get to a certain age, you start to think that you’ve either seen it all before, or that you have got so very familiar with the subject that nothing much can surprise you any more. Well that may or may not be true. One of the things that I’ve found recently with cinema is that the same old cycles are coming around again but that my own level of tolerance for nastiness or extreme willful violence has reduced to a level where I’d rather not bother with them, but would prefer to watch the “better” films I remember from the first time around instead. Of course, I’m sure my parent’s generation thought much the same thing when “Alien” and “Jagged Edge” came along and they remembered “The Thing from Another World” and “Psycho”.

You see there’s a thing about detective fiction that’s basically unreal and that is that the crime actually gets solved. That’s not to say that crimes don’t get solved in the real world, but it’s seldom done so neatly, so precisely or with any sense of satisfaction.

There’s nothing real at all about the cosy world of murder that is found in Agatha Christie’s books, although they are immensely satisfying. A story like “And then there were none” is really an exercise in structure. “Is it”, the author seems to be saying, “possible to write a story in which all of the characters die and one of them had to be the culprit?” and, by and large it is. The novel itself is a very satisfying story, and doesn’t leave the reader feeling in any way “cheated” by it and yet, if you sit down and think about it afterwards, is so preposterous that it is, quite literally, untrue.

But then, that really is true of all detective fiction, and rightly so. I suspect that few readers would feel satisfied if they read an entire novel and, at the end, the police still didn’t have a clue who killed the victim. I suspect that, unless you’ve set up your novels as a series where the killer is slowly identified across a number of books and told everyone that that is your intention from the very start, you’d be losing your readers hand over fist.

It’s a bit like the original Danish version of “The Killing” in that respect. In the end it was always pretty obvious who had done it really, when you think about it. Just like when, in “Twin Peaks” the killer turned out to be exactly who it would be in the majority of real-life incidents of that tragic sort, somehow it felt slightly bland and disappointing when you found out that it was them after all. All of the to-ing and fro-ing in the first series of “the Killing” (I haven’t watched series two yet, “spoiler” writers) was really just a lot of, admittedly very effective and atmospheric, smoke and mirrors, sadly leading to a not-all-that original conclusion, even though there was some impeccable drama along the way.

But if the nation sat down to “Lewis” or “Midsomer Murders” and invested two hours of their precious free time into it, they’d be quite irritated if the main character turned to camera at the end and said “Buggered if I know who did it…”. Crime dramas, no matter how nonsensical or convoluted the killers plan turns out to be, have to fulfil certain requirements. There must be victims at the allotted commercial breaks; there must be plausible alternative suspects, preferably ones who need to be brought in for questioning; and above all, the whole thing must be neatly wrapped up within the running time of the length of the programme or series.

Otherwise we’ll all be screaming blue bloody murder…