It's Formulaic, Watson

By Nicole Angeleen   www.nicoleangeleen.com

Have you ever thought, You know, I think I’d like to be a detective, but I don’t have the requisite preposterously tragic back story?

Happens all the time.

Good, decent people who would serve their communities with dignity and diligence think about their normal childhoods and decide to manage banks or sell shoes rather than become cops.

You see, it is ingrained into us that people become detectives because something horrifying happened in their pasts, and now they are relentless in their pursuits to track and eradicate evil.

We’re all writers here, so let’s start with books. I am not, I repeat, NOT insulting Jeffery Deaver. His books are brilliant, they always have no fewer than two twists I don’t see coming but are perfectly obvious when I review the evidence, thus passing the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle test of mystery standards. If you want to get schooled in the art of the short story, read any of Deaver’s anthologies. He is also one of the most egregious exploiters of this disturbing trend.

For your consideration, I present to you Lincoln Rhyme. You know the guy, Denzel Washington played him in “The Bone Collector.” Lincoln Rhyme is one of the most brilliant crime scene investigators ever to grace the Big Apple. Tragically, he is rendered a quadriplegic when he is crushed by a beam at a crime scene.

Maybe he can't walk the crime scene anymore, but all the ladies still come running.

Still heads above the rest even lying flat on his back, he works through his proxy (and lover) Amelia Sachs. Now, if Rhyme’s back story wasn’t enough for you, Sachs as a character is guilty of the other sin plaguing fictional detectives. See, it’s not enough for detectives simply to be good at their jobs and have mundane outside interests. There always has to be a gimmick. Sachs is a red-haired goddess, a former model, and if that weren’t enough for you, she lives with painful early-onset arthritis so she can (ironically?) be Rhyme’s arms and legs in the field.

Oh, brother.

None of this is new. Nero Wolf has his orchids. Sherlock Holmes has his violin and cocaine. Stephanie Plum has her donuts. The problem comes when writers think they can’t create compelling investigators unless they force upon them a weird eccentricity that “sets them apart” from their peers. Instead of taking the time to produce a real personality, they use this shtick to artificially cultivate one.

I’ve met cops. The ability to think critically alone would be enough to make most of them standouts. They need not be glassblowers who saw their entire families slaughtered at the hands of the Yakuza.

This accurately represents the competency level I concede to most cops.

Michael Connelly’s uber-famous Harry Bosch has a murdered mother who was a freaking prostitute, followed by a stint as a goddamn tunnel rat in Vietnam, then a wife who is an I shit you not professional poker player who is also murdered. Jesus Christ.

There's only one guy I know who has that kind of luck.

Susan Hill is an outstanding British mystery writer. Her novels are perfectly representative of the new noir. Her recurring protagonist, Simon Serrailler, is the lead detective in a moderately-sized, as-English-as-crumpets town. He looks nothing like the others in his family even though he’s a triplet (here we go); he has a disabled sister whose existence shames his wealthy father (really digging in); he’s a respected colleague but mysterious loner (fine, I guess); he often travels to mainland Europe where he is an internationally renowned artist (what?), a fact he keeps secret from almost everyone he knows (COME ON). The family stuff certainly does enough to paint the picture of Simon as a solitary, secretive man, do we need him to also be a gifted artist? No. We do not. In itself, it’s not terribly offensive, but it doesn’t propel the plot or do anything to inform about him as a character, except that he’s a high-falutin’ douche, so why go there?

Because writers feel like they have to.

This is not relegated to books. Per the aforementioned examples, it’s not even relegated to bad books. This pops up time and again on television to the point that there is almost no back story too bizarre for a TV detective. “The Mentalist” Patrick Jane does what he does, helping the CBI solve all the crimes, because his wife and daughter were murdered by a serial killer.

I ask you, is this the face of a man wracked by grief and guilt?  No.  It is not.  It is, however, the face of a man every woman reading this would bone.

I would argue Olivia Benson of “Law & Order: SVU,” the rape-iest of all the Laws & Orders, is the most famous female detective in modern television, or at least the most prolific. And why does she stick with the SVU year after year? Because her mother was a rape victim, and Olivia herself is a product of that rape.

“Southland” is by far one of my favorite crime dramas of the last ten years, but even a show that great falls back on this cliché. Ben Sherman becomes a cop because his mother is a victim of a home invasion, and now he’s all kinds of not on my watch.

Jethro Gibbs on “NCIS” is driven to find bad guys because his wife and daughter are killed by Mexican drug cartels or meth-crazed coyotes or something, I’m not sure, I have a hard time watching that stupid show. Kate Beckett from “Castle” is motivated by her mother’s unsolved murder. “Body of Proof” lead Dr. Megan Hunt saw her career in neurosurgery end with a car accident, so now all she has is her job as a medical examiner and her thirst for justice.

Some people might think an insatiable desire to find every killer regardless of the cost would lead to reckless police work.  Apparently, the United States Armed Forces believe otherwise.

In the interest of space, I’m not even going to start on movies. But if they cram these narratives into books and television shows where time is not an issue, you can only imagine how easy it is to use this trite nonsense to create “meaningful” histories in three minutes or less for the big screen.

I think part of the reason I love "The Closer" Brenda Leigh Johnson so much is because she doesn’t fall victim to this cliché. She’s just a smart, dedicated, hard-nosed detective whose only foibles are eating chocolate and carrying a big purse, which I suppose is because the boobs didn’t make it obvious enough that she’s a woman. In the absence of the heavy emotional baggage, the show itself shines because the weekly capers are allowed to be interesting in and of themselves, and the characters develop naturally through the course of the series.

The funny thing is, police work is the only profession that uniformly gets this kind of treatment from writers. You seldom see a lawyer whose mother was wrongly convicted of murdering nineteen infants, and now the attorney wants to make sure innocent until proven guilty means something in this cynical world. We just assume people become attorneys for the money, and that’s fine with everyone. It’s rare to get more of an explanation for a character becoming a doctor beyond wanting to help people, which is a perfectly serviceable motivation.

It seems inconceivable to writers that a person would become a cop because of the potential to help people, it pays well, there’s a pension, and if you put in good years, you can retire young. So once you have a character with a history Charles Dickens would qualify as “too harsh,” in order to excel at the job, he or she also has to have some kind of extraordinary talent, like she’s an author of erotic fiction (Temperance Brennan), one of the world’s greatest hackers (Lisbeth Salander), or a sexy cyborg (citation needed).

You know you want to read torture porn written by New Girl's sister.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using this as a story device. The issue is it lets writers off the hook for creating relatable character motivation. How many of you are driven on a daily basis by a single event in your past? I hope no one answered yes. If you did, seek therapy, because that’s kind of messed up.

Too often the actual story is sacrificed to kowtow to these crazy expectations of what a detective should be. If a mystery novel doesn’t have a good mystery, no amount of piano playing, beer brewing, marathon running, psychic visioning detectives can save it. What happened to the gin soaked, grizzled veteran who does his job because it’s his fucking job, just like all of us every day? If there’s an engaging mystery at the core of the story, I don’t need my gumshoe to be a dyslexic tap dancer. Furthermore, if writers think detectives must be motivated by their pasts, we should be required to apply that to other professions. ALL other professions.

Good luck figuring out the dark secrets leading your character to kick ass at running the McDonald’s drive-thru.

Join us next time when Wayne Spencer takes us to school on a topic I am not nearly geek-chic enough to understand.