The wonder of Sherlock Holmes
When one sees real detectives on television, they are rarely smiling. Usually they stand there in a reasonably smart suit and a tie the wife picked out for them because they were going on telly and read out a statement that means some family’s life has, or is about to be, shattered.
This is at odds with the other sorts of detectives we see on television. These ones have very good suits, drive fast cars and have complicated home lives, love lives and so on. They are often very good at their jobs (they must be to wrap up every case in an hour or so) but this professionalism comes at a cost, possibly they are divorced, possibly they drink too much.
Back in the seventies, complex character flaws were not as important as how quickly you could drive through a stack of cardboard boxes. Anyway, back then everyone was drinking, smoking and fooling around – if you had a character flaw back then it was that you were bald or fat. Never both.
Of course fictional detectives exist in other media, in films and books. They all share a common trait – they are all good at their job and solve crimes – this is because if you get to the end of the book and the detective is still doing door-to-doors and having conversations like ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue about this one’, then you might reasonably expect the reader to feel a little dischuffed.
The one place where books have the edge over film and teevee is fruity language. I toyed for a long time with the plot of a novel involving a detective with tourette’s, who was booted off the force after a particularly disastrous episode where he had to break some bad news to a grieving young widow and now lives on a barge (check) has a flirty relationship with his ex (check) and never has anything in his fridge when his spunky young daughter comes to stay (check). However, I abandoned it after a scene where he asked a bartender for some information ran to seventeen pages and involved 156 bloodys, 284 shits, 752 fucks and a monumental 7,000 cocksuckers. Predictably, it also ended in a bar brawl. Come to think of it, most scenes ended in a fight.
The greater the flaw, the greater the genius. This is why a cocaine using recreational sodomite who is lazy to the point of indolence is widely accepted as the greatest fictional detective of all time. Sherlock Homes is fantastic in print (where he doesn’t swear but by Christ, smokes and tokes like there’s no tomorrow), great on film (Rathbone and Bruce. Greatest Homes and Watson. Ever.) good on television (Brett is sublime) and marvellous on radio. Indeed, such are the strength of the stories that if they invented a new media experience which involved enjoying a story by shoving a chemically sodden sponge up your arse that released the story directly into your bloodstream, it’d probably be great on that too.
Homes is the most extreme example of the flawed detective. Detective who doesn’t have anything in his fridge? Fuck that, Homes doesn’t have a fridge, he has a landlady who makes him his meals…which he then doesn’t eat. He’s the perfect imperfect detective for the media age. Yet his imperfections mean that he can only be trusted to investigate the most unusual of cases. Had a run in with the red-headed league? Homes is your man. Relative savaged by an enormous spectral hound? Off to Baker Street. Suspect that people are conspiring to bump you off based on arrival of orange pips in the post? Send for the man in the deerstalker.
Which is why flawed detectives with genius in inverse proportion to their flaws are great in print but less so in the real world, if Homes were on Crimewatch being quizzed how he intended to tackle the Bromsgrove bullion job, then I’m not sure how well the response ‘I intend to take a seven percent solution of cocaine, smoke the very strongest Turkish tobacco, starve myself and scratch out a tune on my violin’ would go down with Scotland Yard.
This is at odds with the other sorts of detectives we see on television. These ones have very good suits, drive fast cars and have complicated home lives, love lives and so on. They are often very good at their jobs (they must be to wrap up every case in an hour or so) but this professionalism comes at a cost, possibly they are divorced, possibly they drink too much.
Back in the seventies, complex character flaws were not as important as how quickly you could drive through a stack of cardboard boxes. Anyway, back then everyone was drinking, smoking and fooling around – if you had a character flaw back then it was that you were bald or fat. Never both.
Of course fictional detectives exist in other media, in films and books. They all share a common trait – they are all good at their job and solve crimes – this is because if you get to the end of the book and the detective is still doing door-to-doors and having conversations like ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue about this one’, then you might reasonably expect the reader to feel a little dischuffed.
The one place where books have the edge over film and teevee is fruity language. I toyed for a long time with the plot of a novel involving a detective with tourette’s, who was booted off the force after a particularly disastrous episode where he had to break some bad news to a grieving young widow and now lives on a barge (check) has a flirty relationship with his ex (check) and never has anything in his fridge when his spunky young daughter comes to stay (check). However, I abandoned it after a scene where he asked a bartender for some information ran to seventeen pages and involved 156 bloodys, 284 shits, 752 fucks and a monumental 7,000 cocksuckers. Predictably, it also ended in a bar brawl. Come to think of it, most scenes ended in a fight.
The greater the flaw, the greater the genius. This is why a cocaine using recreational sodomite who is lazy to the point of indolence is widely accepted as the greatest fictional detective of all time. Sherlock Homes is fantastic in print (where he doesn’t swear but by Christ, smokes and tokes like there’s no tomorrow), great on film (Rathbone and Bruce. Greatest Homes and Watson. Ever.) good on television (Brett is sublime) and marvellous on radio. Indeed, such are the strength of the stories that if they invented a new media experience which involved enjoying a story by shoving a chemically sodden sponge up your arse that released the story directly into your bloodstream, it’d probably be great on that too.
Homes is the most extreme example of the flawed detective. Detective who doesn’t have anything in his fridge? Fuck that, Homes doesn’t have a fridge, he has a landlady who makes him his meals…which he then doesn’t eat. He’s the perfect imperfect detective for the media age. Yet his imperfections mean that he can only be trusted to investigate the most unusual of cases. Had a run in with the red-headed league? Homes is your man. Relative savaged by an enormous spectral hound? Off to Baker Street. Suspect that people are conspiring to bump you off based on arrival of orange pips in the post? Send for the man in the deerstalker.
Which is why flawed detectives with genius in inverse proportion to their flaws are great in print but less so in the real world, if Homes were on Crimewatch being quizzed how he intended to tackle the Bromsgrove bullion job, then I’m not sure how well the response ‘I intend to take a seven percent solution of cocaine, smoke the very strongest Turkish tobacco, starve myself and scratch out a tune on my violin’ would go down with Scotland Yard.
Labels: Detectives, Media, Police, Sherlock Holmes, Television
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