I recently watched a
half-century-old movie comedy and a much-more-recent TV police procedural drama
in both of which the police race their cars onto an airstrip in an attempt to
cut off the escape of the criminals by plane. In both cases the police fail, and
the criminals fly off unapprehended.
Lucky escapes? Hardly. The
creators* willed it so. In the case of the comedy, the escape allowed for a
gloriously goofy conclusion on a tropical island. And in the case of the police
drama, it produced for the lead detective, in the following episode, career
complications and suspicions about his staff’s loyalty.
Fictional
policemen and detectives do not catch criminals--even when they do catch criminals. Their creators structure the
works to have the crimes solved and criminals brought to justice (not always
the same thing)--or not. As Molly McArdle** points out, sometimes their
creators do not allow the greatest of fictional detectives to solve a case: “Like [Sherlock] Holmes, [Hercule] Poirot has one
emblematic failure to keep him honest and relatively humble.”*** Each detective
may have an “emblematic failure,” but it is not really his doing. Conan Doyle and Christie fashioned
it so. But if the failures are not the detectives’, can the successes be
theirs? Obviously not. Again, it is the creators who, in the first place,
created the crime and criminal and then plotted how the detective by dogged
legwork or cool ratiocination (or both) will unravel the mystery.
Like me, Sophie
Scott, who reviewed Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova for the Observer****, is a “tiresome person” who “might point out that, as Holmes was not a real person, at
least some of his expertise might arise from his creator knowing the answers to
the puzzles.” She goes on:
Konnikova, however, says that as amazing feats of insight were achieved by Conan Doyle and some of his contemporaries, we can safely suspend our disbelief. I found this difficult to do.
Neither can I.
Fictional characters have no agency.
Like the pieces on a chessboard, their latent powers are only realized when
advanced by an outside force. Holmes’ intellectual powers are as impotent as a
chess queen’s in an empty room until Conan Doyle sets them into play.
John Dickson Carr was recognized as
the master devisor of the locked-room mystery, in which the crime occurs in
impossible circumstances and, thus, there is seemingly no way to explain it and
solve it. But, of course, there is a solution, which the author has conceived
together with the puzzle. The mastermind is the author, who dazzles the reader
with his trickery, pulling a logical explanation out of a locked room, like a
magician pulling a rabbit out of an empty hat. The detective is his magic wand.
Essentially a prop.
But sometimes the creators falter in
their legerdemain, though the audience, having bought the idea of the
detective’s super reasoning powers, will most likely not pick up on the flawed
performance. One example: In a 1974 episode of Columbo, entitled “An
Exercise in Fatality,” the rumpled police lieutenant “solves” the murder by
determining that the laces of the victim’s sneakers were tied post mortem by
another person (because of the way the loops go). And his reasoning is
correct—for a right-handed murderer and a right-handed victim (which is what he
demonstrates). However, it all breaks down (if anybody is carefully looking),
because the victim was played by Philip Bruns—a left-handed actor.
(This picture of Bruns is from an episode of Sanford and Son, but even so . . .)
Even a half-sober defense attorney
could get an acquittal when that case came to trial.
I don’t know if I can be a
mastermind, as Sherlock Holmes is alleged to have been, even if I practiced hard, but
I can definitely out-think Columbo!
***
*Since movies and
television are collaborative arts, several different people (writers,
directors, producers) may have contributed to the outcomes; therefore, I
decided to play it safe and just say “creators” when dealing with those media.
***P. D. James
created a case which Adam Dalgleish “solves” but doesn’t have enough hard
evidence to bring about an arrest. And (at least in a French TV series) Georges
Simenon‘s Maigret literally walks away from a murderer, allowing him to fish in
freedom.
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