Detectives I

It started as a distraction and there was much from which I wanted to be distracted. I resist now making a list. But the diversion began with a steady viewing of British detective shows: Lewis, Inspector Morse, Grantchester, Vera, Pie in the Sky. More have followed as the events evolved. These shows kept me free of the immediate presence of the dangerous politics that has overwhelmed the country for the past four years and that accelerated throughout the election campaign and the subsequent mad attempt to overturn the result by an insanely narcissistic Trump and his sycophantic enables in Congress and in the media. My immersion at one time in marxist thought had ensured me that there is a political level to any production: I learned from Kenneth Burke that “Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose.” There have been studies of the detective novel that attempt to answer their appearance and ideologies, and I appreciate the notion that all artifacts of the culture are socially symbolic acts that require study. But in these British detective shows though their context and ideological situation might be political, the avoidance for the most part of political intrigue kept the horror of the present at bay for ninety minutes at a time. that level of the political remained minimum when it was mentioned at all. Sometimes a show might broach issues of politics, but the show was never about politics; the show was about the murder and its solution by the well-dressed and relatively polite detectives. And if you want to know the truth (a line I learned from Holden Caulfield), most of the murderers in Lewis and Inspector Morse were academics and intellectuals all of whom lived in very large, expensive and expansive homes.
     The shows were as interested with the personalities of the detectives as they were with their discovery of the culprit. In traditional literary language these detectives were round characters: they had depth and psychological presence, and their personal lives were an important aspect of the shows. They were more than detectives: they were humans who operated by their own strengths and with their own demons. Inspector Morse was an educated and intelligent man who loved opera to which he listens in his flat and in his car: Morse reads and quotes from classic literature in the practice of his work. But he often erred in his work and didn’t seem able to quite establish steady relationships with women.  As for Lewis, which was a sequel to Inspector Morse, Sergeant Hathaway is a Cambridge graduate who almost became a priest before he lost his faith and joined the force. But he could recognize the allusions of the mostly Oxford intellectual crowd, and sometimes even solved the murder based in his academic knowledge. In Pie in the Sky, epicure and police detective Henry Crabbe opened a well-reviewed and successful restaurant as he prepared for retirement: often the restaurant figures as an important scene of action and almost half of each episode takes place in the restaurant and involves the staff who become like family to Henry and his wife, Margaret, the latter, a professional accountant, who for financial reasons actually owns the restaurant and works in it as host. Vera’s crankiness and solitariness is an obvious factor in each episode, and her acknowledgment of a troubled early family life played prominently in the show. Often an episode of Vera would end with the image of her drinking scotch alone in her office or a darkened room in her rather isolated home; sometimes a final image in an episode is of Vera walking alone from the scene of discovery. Sidney Chambers, the vicar in Grantchester who becomes a partner to detective Geordie Keating, drinks and smokes heavily to bury his frustrations and impossible relationship with Amanda Kendall. Sidney also is troubled by his experience in combat in World War II. Sidney’s presence does ground the show in a standard Christian morality, but in the character of Leonard, Sidney’s gay curate the show on social issues. These characters interested me well beyond their detective roles.
     I am aware that programs that Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue also rounded their characters, but in in a single hour’s show there was always a significant amount of violence and gunfire, screaming and fighting that took place.

I do not have to cringe or close my eyes during any episode of the British detective shows. In the shows I was watching the detectives do not carry guns, handcuffs or batons. For the most part they do not engage in fist fights with the suspects, or anyone else for that matter, and they put the unbound suspect into the rear seat of the car without constraint or accompaniement. The violence in the shows exists solely in the murder (usually up to three events!), but the viewer never sees the actual attack. The final result is seen but not the act itself. I watch the shows about murder and its detection but I am never appalled by them. The body might be viewed and especially during the post mortem. but never the act of putting it there. There exists a certain civility in the shows that actually seems to calm me despite the occasion of the murder about which the plot is concerned.
     In these shows the male detectives all wear shirts and ties and the females wear dresses and pant suits. The latter also sometimes wear high heels, and they even sometimes run after suspects in them and whom they actually catch. Dungarees (jeans) are never part of the uniform even when they meet in a pub after work. The detectives all drive well-polished and expensive automobiles. Morse owns a classic Jaguar.
     These shows all are situated in smaller venues and not in noisy and dirty city streets: in Oxford, Cambridge, and Northumberland in Northeast England, I have marveled at how many murders occur in these rather small and sometimes rural settings, and I guess this might suggest how corrupt even these seemingly bucolic and quiet places are despite their beauty and seeming quiet. Finally there is no paradise that exists without serpents. And though at show’s end order is restored,  the next episode reveals another corruption in the environment.
     I have enlarged my menu of detective shows, but I am referring here to only those I began to watch at the beginning of the pandemic, back in. March 2020.