A century ago, the golden age of British detective fiction had begun to flower. Agatha Christie had written and finally published her first novel, a Hercule Poirot affair. If the current age of detective fiction can be said to be flowering, it is the famously rank blossom of a titan arum plant. Let’s consider the two and see whether their differences might be resolved.
Poirot notwithstanding, the Christie crowd preferred amateur sleuths or private detectives, independent actors who could be counted on to best the bumbling local constabulary. One hundred years ago, in 1922, Christie introduced a stylish young couple, Tommy and Tuppence, who go into the detective business together. In 1927, Christie added to her stable of characters the little old lady who would do more than any of Christie’s other snoops to make the novelist’s bank account look like Scrooge McDuck’s bank vault: Miss Marple.
In a way, Christie’s first novel was not unlike today’s British mysteries. Poirot was a professional, a Belgian policeman, and his backstory was traumatic: He had escaped the brutal Boche and taken refuge in England. A few years ago, the BBC remade the Poirot story The ABC Murders featuring a bleak Poirot portrayal by John Malkovich, whose despairing Belgian suffers flashbacks of German atrocities in the Great War.
That, not gossipy old spinsters, is the dominant template of the modern mystery story. Yes, there is some gruesome business to get the story rolling, but what unfolds is rarely much about murder. Instead, it’s about the inspector, and it’s almost always a badge-wielding “DS” or “DC” or “DCI” of some sort (amateur sleuths now long out of style). The policeman’s intense drive to solve the crime is usually about working his or her way through some age-old personal trauma.
Consider the descriptions the streaming service BritBox gives of some of its standard mystery/detective fare. A show called Grace is blurbed: “Haunted by the disappearance of his wife, tenacious yet troubled detective … ” Or how about the series River, which features “gifted detective John River whose fractured mind traps him between the living and the dead”? Then there is The Long Call, about “the intriguing and flawed DI Matthew Venn, who is led back into the community he left behind — and the deadly secrets that lurk there.” The show with the straightforward title Crime depicts how “when a girl goes missing, troubled DI Ray Lennox investigates her disappearance while battling his own inner demons.” And then there is Vera, “the brilliant but irascible investigator obsessed with her work and driven by her own demons.”
I don’t know about you, but I think Britain has a problem. A society in which all the coppers are busy hunting their inner demons clearly has some issues. British crime entertainments seem to swing from one extreme to another. Either you’ve got an era in which Lord Peter Wimsey holds sway, elegantly solving mysteries by deciphering the code in pealing church bells, or you’ve got Sean Connery’s Johnson, the police detective sergeant (with demons of his own!) who beats a suspect to death in 1973’s The Offence.
Maybe the answer is to mix the old and the new, the silly with the dead serious, as in the Malkovich Poirot. Let’s go all the way and give old Hercule a badge. Miss Marple can be made the village detective chief inspector — she could be in constant conflict with the youngsters on her squad who are frustrated with her old-fashioned ways. All the worn-out, craggy-faced policemen would stop drinking themselves to death and busy themselves collecting clues at garden parties.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
