When I was a kid,
watching the weekly mystery shows on TV in Germany with my parents was a
tradition. We’d all be guessing who did it, and as I grew older, I was right
more often, of course. So you could say I grew up with those shows, with that
kind of storytelling.
These days, however,
mystery shows like the ones I grew up with, where it was more about the case,
more about investigation, are much more rare than they used to be. The German
shows barely have that any longer - I think that, if you’re not having any
emotional trouble, you’re not even allowed to become a TV police inspector in
Germany any longer. Don’t misunderstand me - a bit of private life can be very
interesting and can fit well with the story as a such, but a lot of mystery
shows, even the better ones, either lean a lot towards cosy mystery, but with a
cop, or towards thriller territory with seriously disturbed individuals. Not
that I never like a thriller, but that’s a genre all of its own, I don’t need
that in my regular mystery show.
If I want my dose of
that, I turn to British mystery series, strange as that might be. Sure,
Midsomer and Sainte Marie, the places where some of my favourite series are
set, don’t really look like there could be a murder there eight or ten times a
year (more like once all eight or ten years), but they are doing it the way I
like it - they investigate, they keep personal things to a minimum (so it just
spices things up), and they keep the whole ‘psychological profiling’ stuff out
of it.
Written mysteries are
a slightly different story, but a lot of novels I have found also come with too
much private stuff or with the whole psychological edge - I like a thriller as
much as the next person, but a lot of crime is committed simply for the money
or to remove a witness or because someone really loved or hated someone else.
That much psychology isn’t necessary. If I want that, I watch something like “Criminal
Minds” and get my fix that way.
I’ve
mentioned before that I find it hard to keep up interest in a long-running
cosy mystery series, because at some point, I fail to believe that an amateur
can stumble over that many crimes by themselves. A professional or
semi-professional is another question, of course.
That might be why,
sooner or later, I usually turn back to Sherlock Holmes, the old stuff by Doyle
himself as well as the new stories written by other authors (I just reviewed two
of them).
Holmes is a professional, so him stumbling over (or being consulted on) crimes
regularly is perfectly fine - it’s how he makes his money.
That might also be why
I personally like Christie’s Poirot stories a little more than the Miss Maple
ones (but Agatha Christie also has done quite some stories where there’s an amateur
detective who only turns up this once). Poirot, too, is a professional, so it
stands to reason he’ll come in to solve a lot of crimes.
Lord Darcy is another
detective whose stories I’ve read several times (and about whom I
wrote a post at some point). I like the way magic is used in the stories
and I like it that you are given all necessary clues to solve the mystery for
yourself.
Other older crime
stories, such as the Philo Vance ones, go in the same direction - they present
someone who either has made it their job to solve a crime, is regularly
consulted by the police (like Mr. Vance), or they have a detective only turn up
once or twice. As a matter of fact, S.S. van Dine, the author of the Philo
Vance mysteries, has written about the 20 Rules of the
Detective Story, where he claims that there should be no personal stuff
like love stories in a detective story. Needless to say that rule is broken
regularly these days (but with servants being much rarer, ‘the butler did it’
is in the running again, too).
I like thinking along
with the detective and seeing whether I’ll get to the solution first or whether
I’ll be surprised at the end (“Clue” really surprised me with its three endings
which all work and it’s also a classic mystery story, if one with a good dose
of humour). I like it when it’s just your regular, old crime, not something
complex and confusing where it plays a role that the perpetrator was once left
behind at the gas station as a kid. I want people who, like most perpetrators
in real life, commit crimes for the money and because they see a chance to get
away with it. Who kill a man because he has broken their hearts or who kill
that old geezer down the road because he saw them picking up the money from
their last blackmail of the local major. Something which doesn’t force me to go
down that psychology rabbit hole, but just to remember that humans have
different levels of morals and the tendency to think they’ll get away with
doing something wrong. That’s what I like about Hercule Poirot, Sherlock
Holmes, Lord Darcy, and others of their kind. They follow the good old ‘who
profits from it?’ through all iterations until they find that one person who
profits from it and has no alibi of any sorts and had the means and, you know,
surprise!, that person is the perpetrator. What’s wrong about that kind of
crime story? Nothing, that’s what.
Sometimes, I get horribly nostalgic for a time when you could expect the
murderer in a mystery story to be someone who had a simple, regular reason for
their deed. When you didn’t need to study psychology to be able to investigate
alongside the detective. That’s why, recently, I decided to branch out a little
into mystery territory and, perhaps, do a few stories of that kind myself.
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