Saturday, January 8, 2011

A Novel Detective Series

No, I am not about to name one. I want to specify a new series where the relationships are not too, too, too predictable before I’ve even seen Episode 1.
  • If a coroner is included at all, the coroner would not be female; if female, she would not be nubile and there would be present neither sexual nor mother-son tension between her or the detective she works with. The detective would never ask the coroner how soon he/she would know the time of death.
  • The detective’s higher up would be a political innocent; the detective, instead, would spend all of his time trying to get good press coverage, keep an album of clippings about his own successful cases, and be utterly failing to attract journalistic attentions.
  • The aggressive journalist would be neither an obnoxious male nor a sexy female; there wouldn’t be one. Why? Because papers can’t afford to take an interest in crime today. All real reporting comes by way of the AP and the UPS wire.
  • The detective would absolutely hate all victims because they cause him all the hassles; he would have a grudging liking for criminals—because there are too many useless victims in the first place, and the criminals get rid of them. He would avoid victim’s families as if they were lepers, and failing to avoid them, pretend that he is the aggressive journalist. If the detective has a family, his children would have plenty of his quality time because he would be a mighty shirker of hard work and always home helping them with teenage problems. He would be happily married and plotting with his wife to start a flower shop.
  • No case would ever be solved—only shelved. Each exciting episode would end by giving up the case as attention is diverted to the new case—to be handled in the next episode.
  • There would be no female detective who is genuinely superior to all the males but under-appreciated; if there is a female, she would be unattractively corpulent, sit behind a desk, and solve every case without doing a thing—but nobody would recognize that she had done so, and the case would be shelved anyway.
  • The second in rank would lack all ambition and spend his time trying to interest the local paper in hiring him as the aggressive journalist.
  • The junior detective would be an old man passed over innumerable times, would definitely not be black or Asian or provide any humorous light moments at all.
  • The setting would not be a grimy big city—nor would it be in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, in a small town, a ritzy suburb with offensive rich people, the English country side with an offensive lord of the manor, truck stop, an airport, or a holiday resort. It might be in an alternative universe, however—where all detective series are actually placed.

3 comments:

  1. DNA Results would take six weeks to come back from the lab.

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  2. Right on, John. More additions, improvements to this "detective series proposal" are welcome. Come to think of it, it would make a pretty funny series, even as here sketched...

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  3. I thought this was our police department.

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