I have allowed Snoopy Susie to write for this magazine. After all, detectives are mango people too. To be honest I wasn’t very keen. In her introductory letter she wrote “Everyone is guilty till proven innocent”. She was looking at me with suspicious eyes, as if I have committed some major crime myself.
Thank god I didn’t become a detective. I would have failed miserably. I have none of the eccentricities of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, the annoying persistence of Lieutenant Columbo or the resourcefulness of Crime Patrol / CID guys. One would think that today’s detectives have it easier – exaggerate a troubled past (or invent one), hit the bottle and be rude to everyone around. Your deputies will take care of everything else.
It all started when someone said “Your characters aren’t fleshed out enough”. I mean what do you really know about the pasts of Poirot, Holmes or closer home Byomkesh da. They just appear one day and start solving cases. They have no known sources of income, their clients are never seen as paying them anything i.e. in the rare case that they stay alive till the end of the story.
So some smart people started giving ‘flesh’ to detectives. No one told them when to stop. Now you have a reluctant sleuth with a mysterious past, who has a spouse with a mysterious past having an affair with another person with a mysterious past. In between all this someone is killed but that’s never really the point. For the actual grunt work there is the token female sidekick and a brown skinned curly haired computer hacker. The detective is mainly preoccupied with managing his/her nightmares, struggling with custody battles of their children and generally gazing at unknown objects for a long time.
The Scandinavians excel at this genre and the grim settings made me cancel my 3 month holiday to the region. My wealth manager will tell you that I am lying and I couldn’t afford it in the first place. It is lie. I have no wealth and no manager. What I do have is a lot of ‘flesh’ but I am told it is the useless kind.