Thursday, June 24th, 2010
DETECTIVES: There’s no such thing as too quirky!
The copper who uses their special break-dancing prowess to catch criminals. The Private Eye who can piece clues together using hallucinations caused by auto-esphixiation. The detective who is also a duck. I love them all. But how quirky is too quirky?
In my own writing, whether it stars a procedural copper or an accidental investigator, mysteries have always been my ‘thing’. Trouble is, if your protagonist is just doing their job week after week, it can be hard to generate an emotional connection - no matter how many endearing tics they have.
This is easily remedied in a film/one-off. A case starts as professional but quickly becomes personal (Silence of the Lambs, Chinatown, Se7en). But if you’re creating an ongoing TV, web or comic series - surely everything can’t be ‘hey, this case resonates with that traumatic broccoli experience I had as a child!’ But you’ll probably need something if you don’t want your show to simply be a cerebral exercise.
I’ve heard the appeal of the Mystery described as ‘the audience’s desire to see Order triumph over the Chaos of the outside world‘ (like the drunken football fans who chucked our bins all over the street last night. Where were you, Batman?) But where Bob Peck in a one-off story like Edge of Darkness needed to know why his daughter died, the returning series detective needs a more abstract motivation for taking on the Chaos of the world that we can understand and emotionally connect with.
The reason we connect with any of the above more than, for example, Miss Marple is because of this vocational calling that made them a detective. Details aside, this can usually be summed up as one word. Redemption. Ambition. Validation. Even Retaliation. (they don’t all have to end in ‘-tion’ btw 
)
So it’s okay to pile on as many quirks as you like to make your detective unique. But before you do, make sure you can easily answer the core reason why this guy or gal is a detective in the first place.
June 24th, 2010 at 10:12 am
Liz said:
Really interesting blogpost and not something I’ve thought about.
I love cop-shows and procedurals. But I’ve not watched Monk…I tried to and his antics makes me feel ill, i.e. dizzy and disconcerted and it’s not something I appreciate in general!
I do really enjoy the long-running Crminal Minds and Law and Order series - two shows that have great fun incorporating characters and various crimes. Similarly, not a cop show as such, but Burn Notice is an excellent show with quirky characters that tell really good stories.
Cool - thanks for a thinking-blogipost
June 24th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
john said:
Hi Liz - glad it got you thinking. I was just inspired after watching various bits of CSI and thinking about how they’ve turned the gimmick into three very different shows using the characters.
Who your detective is also dictates the sort of stories they should be solving too. I think a good rule of thumb is that if your idea for a CSI mystery could be solved by Gene Hunt or Miss Marple then it’s probably not going to be an amazing episode.
June 24th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
john said:
Also - I don’t think this idea *just* applies to detectives either!
June 24th, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Chuck Spear said:
As ever, great discussion topic here, John.
I had been thinking about this very idea a while back and came to the conclusion that in the serialized mystery genre, be it detective story, crime fiction or police procedural, whether it appears as novels or a TV series, the case at hand doesn’t matter nearly so much as the detective trying to solve it.
Sherlock Holmes isn’t going to get the same case(s) as Monk, and Monk isn’t going to get the same cases as DCI John Luther. That is a given. But even if by some weird stroke they WERE, well, the constant is the case at hand which may interest us as readers/viewers in that we’d see how we’d solve it, yet the real appeal comes in seeing how our detective solves it. Holmes’s methods will vary from Monk’s will vary from Luther’s. They may even come to varying or–gasp!–incorrect conclusions.
The Wire’s Lester Freamon, one of the greatest TV detectives of the last decade or more, is introduced as a quirky, urbane (out of place in the Baltimore PD) older man who builds and paints dollhouse furniture–on the job! The viewer, like his colleagues, dismisses him based on these traits, yet all are amazed when he displays his detective prowess. In some ways, I think he owes a lot in one form or another to Andre Braugher’s Det. Frank Pembleton from the series Homicide: Life on the Streets. Pembleton was as brilliant as Freamon, but was also something of an anomaly in his police department. He was an Ivy League graduate, yet took a blue collar job as a police officer. When they went out for drinks, he ordered milk. And he was also gloriously arrogant and more than a bit of an arsehole, which made him tough to be around, but made him a huge asset when going up against a suspect in “the box” (or the interrogation room). And both Pembleton and Freamon were based on real detective Harry Edgerton, who was one of the cast of David Simon’s true crime/journalistic masterpiece, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which not only gave The Wire a ton of its characters, names, incidents and quotes, but also served as a blueprint for much of the first season of the TV series Homicide.
Most of my serialized detective storytelling is consumed via novels as opposed to TV, and I’m a big fan of characters who are intimately tied to a place (and a time, if possible). My current favorite is Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series, which is set in Galway and features Taylor as a former police officer–a guard–kicked off the force for drinking too much. Jack is a deeply flawed man, which is what makes it so interesting to read his exploits. He’s what I like to call an accidental detective. He didn’t set out to become one, he doesn’t have a private investigator’s license… Having lived in Galway his whole life, everyone knows him, which is more or less how he gets jobs. But more often than not he acts on impulse or emotion, which leads to horrible consequences. The quirk, if there is one, is that with the early novels of the series, Jack is battling addiction of one form or another. In the first book, The Guards, it’ss alcohol. In the second, The Killing of the Tinkers, it’s coke. Later, it’s pills. But, as I said, he’s intimately tied to Galway in a way that, I think, is Ken Bruen’s own thoughts coming through. As the series progresses, Galway changes around Taylor–he begins the series in his late 40s/early 50s–tourism and gentrification have seen the destruction of old Galway, yet immigration has brought in many interesting and vibrant people.
Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mysteries, of which Devil in a Blue Dress is the first, is another series tied to time and place. Though I admit I’ve only read that first novel, it’s about a black private eye (and veteran) operating in ’40s and ’50s Los Angeles, in a time before the Civil Rights Movement, and what that meant for race relations in the U.S.
In the comics world, one of my favorite new series is Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth’s Stumptown, about a tough-as-nails female private investigator in Portland, Oregon. If there’s any quirk here I’d say that it’s less of a quirk and more of the trope of having awful, horrible luck. Or, Warren Ellis’s apparently-on-hiatus series, Fell, which reverses things a bit in that it’s a brilliant, yet normal, detective reassigned to a city that’s at least quirky and at most insane.
June 24th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
john said:
Yowser, Chuck - some great extensive examples! We have a lot of favourites in common (although I’m the opposite of you in that I’ve only read the first Ken Bruen novel but have read most of the Walter Mosleys
) Must check out Stumptown.
I definitely agree that time and place can be a great ‘quirk’ (I think that word has a bad rep these days!) If anything, it helps create that one or two word definition that makes the detective stand out. Are they a product of their surroundings? Or are they consciously pushing against them?
Cheers for taking the time to write that epic post!
June 27th, 2010 at 5:45 am
Chuck Spear said:
Sorry for the lengthy post there, John. Sometimes I get a bit carried away, but then you’re a constant source for great discussion topics. I need to delve a little further into the Walter Mosley stuff. (Were you aware that he’s a HUGE comic book fan? He recently organized a new coffee table hardcover edition of Fantastic Four #1–Fantastic Four Maximum–which blows up each panel to the size of a page, the better to examine and dissect Kirby’s influential art.)