 |
Some reading about TV detectives.
Welcome to my world... |
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…
