Sunday Night Sleuths

Today true crime podcasts are very popular and TV crime dramas have even begun to use the idea of podcasters as their protagonists. ‘Bodkin’ was released on Netflix in May this year and follows true crime podcasters trying to uncover  a mystery in a small Irish town. 

Or last Year’s ‘Murder at the End of the World’ which follows Gen Z online sleuth to the underground bunker of a tech billionaire and of course ‘Only Murders in This Building’ which began as far back as 2021.  

In 1946 George Orwell published the essay ‘Decline of the Great English Murder’. He suggested the great period of murder was 1850 to 1925 ‘If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Doctor Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson.’ (Orwell 1946)  

He also describes the perfect murderer for the now passed away ‘News of the World’ or fictional murder story.   ‘The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience’ (Orwell 1946). 

It is these murders from fact and fiction that allows the U.K.  to have far more engaging murder and detective plots than the U.S.  Someone being shot is rarely going to inspire as much interest as a good poisoning, (Unless it’s being investigated by the team at CSI).

With a lack of firearms, the British must think of far more inventive ways to do away with their victims and due to this, the British detective has far more work to do than to point out that a person has been shot and the person with the gun is likely to be the perpetrator.Good TV detective plots are like crosswords, riddles, puzzles to solve with a range of clues. However, not all are ingenious puzzles. Some just meander and waffle for one and a half hours and then introduce information about the killer, that was nowhere to be found earlier in the narrative, e.g.  We find out that character ‘A’ was the real child of character ‘B’, therefore they killed character ‘C’. If there are no clues sprinkled throughout, then all is just guess-work, experience or just potluck and that is no challenge and provides little enjoyment. As a viewer, you want to be the detective and beat the protagonist to the solution. With experience (especially if you are an enthusiast) you can guess fairly easily who the killer is because the formula in some shows is very limited. We know the traditional British detective is likely to have a wayward teenager and/or a parent who needs care due to dementia, we know if you escape from a killer or kidnapper, the first car you flag down will be likely be the killer or one of their friends. We also know that the detective might get thrown off the case or suspended, due to rule breaking of some sort.   

The following are my top fourteen typical, overused plots which appear on most British Sunday night detective shows. This this is perhaps not due to lazy writing, but more to do with pressure to produce the large amount of Sunday night sleuth programming, e.g., there are 132 episodes of ‘Midsomer Murders’. That’s 132 different murder plots. In fact, in a 2016 episode called ‘Habeas Corpus’ there is no murder at all. Cultural theorist Theodor Adorno referred to this mass production of culture as ‘pseudo individuality’. What he meant by this was that we are being fed the illusion of cultural difference and choice due to methods employed in all mass production, e.g., most family cars are the same but once you give it a brand name and stick a badge on it then you can tell consumers that they are different and perhaps better than their neighbours.  

The same is true of our Sunday night detectives, each with their own unique selling point. Morse is an academic, Wycliffe is Cornish, Vera wears a mac and wellies and drives a Land Rover, Strike has one leg, Dalziel scratches his undercarriage in public and (in his very Yorkshire way), calls a spade a spade, and so on, but Adorno would suggest they are pretty much all the same. So here are my top fourteen overused Sunday night sleuth plots.        

Plot one; The frame-up. 
I’ve given this the number one slot because it is rare to not have it included in a detective series at some point and secondly because it is the most yawn inducing. The detective is framed for or suspected of murder themselves. We know they are not guilty but for some reason their close friends and colleagues, who have known them for years, suddenly seem to doubt them? There are very few long running detectives that do not have to go through the experience of being a suspect themselves. I always think it must be worrying joining the British CID because it must only be a matter of time before you are blamed for a murder you didn’t commit. 

Plot two; You’ve got the wrong killer.
The detective may have imprisoned the wrong person, but, again, you know it’s a copycat, an old accomplice or someone the killer has set on a path to murder, because our detective never gets things completely wrong.

Plot three; Undercover.
The detective goes undercover, so we sit on the edge of our seats wondering if they might be caught or not. Except we’re actually not in any suspense, whatsoever, because we know they must keep our detective alive to return next week.  

Plot Four; Getting the band back together:
This plot has come up in ‘Lewis’ and ‘Midsomer Murders’ and in the 2022 series ‘Queens of Mystery’.  An old rock band who were semi-famous get back together and one of them is killed. Usually for the copyright money. This is similar to plot Ten (the Sports Team).

Plot Five; Children’s Home Revenge.
This one turns up with great regularity and is the long story arc of Welsh detective series ‘Hinterland’ and a long running story arc of ‘Endeavour’ (young Morse). Seemingly unconnected victims are bumped off (often doctors, priests, free masons and council workers) and it is discovered they all were complicit in the cover up of abuse or murder in a now closed children’s home. The killer is an ex-child from the home.  I can’t be sure, but I imagine this story line was created after the many children’s home scandals began to hit the headlines in the 1980s.  

Plot Six; It was in my past.
Similar to plot five but this time a group of people either bullied a child to death when they themselves were children or killed a child in an accident of some sort (usually a hit and run whilst drunk when they were younger). The killer is a relation of the original victim and seeks revenge.  ITV’s rather good ‘Unforgotten’ (2015-) bases its whole premise on ‘It was in my past’ but use very inventive links to connect the groups of people together.   

Plot Seven; The twins.
This is one of the worst detective plots but still turns up now and again. You can guess this one. One twin is a killer, and the other twin is good but is suspected of the murders or the suspect has a perfect alibi which cannot be explained, turns out it was their twin. Turned up in Midsomer Murders (1997), Endeavour (2012) and an even worse incarnation of this plot was used in Grace (2021-) played by John Simm, the Triplets!   

Plot Eight; The long-lost child.
Person suspects their partner of having an affair, but it turns out that they were meeting a long-lost child they had far back in their past. Partner kills child out of misplaced jealousy or long-lost child kills someone close to their newly discovered parent. 

Plot Nine; The Hospital.
This plot is approached from varying starting points. Often one of the detective’s team (sometimes our central protagonist) ends up in hospital for something and finds out that more of the patients are dying than should be. Is it a doctor trying to ease suffering of dying patients or is it a cleaner that always wanted to be a doctor? Or just a simple revenge plot? It is rarely something more intricate, but the hospital plot definitely deserves its place in the set of Sunday night sleuth narratives.  

Plot Ten; The Sport team.
In the sport team plot, a champion of the team is found dead. The motivations for this are often that they are planning to leave and join a bigger team, jealousy of an up-and-coming player, an affair between the champion’s partner and another member of the team. The first episode of Dalziel and Pascoe (1996) comes straight in with this plot, as it also acts to introduce the northern credentials of lead cop Andy Dalziel. This is due to the champion player being a member of the Rugby league team that Dalziel is also a member of.  A Touch of Frost (1992) uses this plot in an episode called ‘Dead Male One’ is season 3 which stars a young Danny Dyer. 

Plot Eleven; Death of a Soldier.
A death on the army camp (usually) and there is always a problem with jurisdiction, who is in charge, our detective or the base commanding officer?  This plot often relates to something that might have happened whilst the victim was on active service during some global conflict. Sometimes it is to do with crime on the base, e.g., drug or gun sales. Inspector Frost deals with this in season four episode two, ‘Unknown Soldiers’. Vera deals with hers in a season two episode called ‘Sundancer’. There are often similarities to the sport team plot (swap sports team for army squad), where a high-flying soldier is killed for a similar reason as the sports ace. 

Plot Twelve; The Immigrant.
The immigrant in question is usually Eastern European, but sometimes Asian. This plot often takes place around exploited agricultural or cleaning workers. The motif differs from something that happened in the Balkan wars to something closer to home but gives the writer a chance to discuss modern immigration and racial attitudes. The immigrant plot occurs more is the darker detective shows and less so in the likes of Midsomer Murders.      

Plot Thirteen; The Neuro Diverse Witness. This plot revolves around communication problems between a character with autism and the detective. Sometimes the autistic character is suspected of the murder, (especially by the less understanding members of the police force) but it is usually something they have seen leads to the killer’s comeuppance. In the Lewis 2008 episode ‘And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea’, the character Phillip Horton writes down the number of the killer’s car because he paints the same picture of the river every day and never forgets anything he draws. In A Touch of Frost episode called ‘Close Encounters’, the autistic character thinks the killers he has seen are aliens.

Plot Fourteen:  The Hostage.
Our detective is taken hostage in a bank or factory robbery along with other hostages. It is the detective’s job to keep their job secret and keep the hostages and hostage takers calm, whilst the police outside decide what to do. I think this is a common plot because it must be cheaper than location filming.

You might think because I bemoan this lack of inventive plot structure, that I don’t like to watch these detective shows that end our weekend viewing, but far from it. I’m an optimist (my wife would disagree strongly with this). I watch every episode and every new incarnation of the Sunday night sleuth in the hope that it is going to be an original plot.  Sunday night is the right time for detective scheduling. I like to make them part of my evening relaxation ritual. I know that sounds like I’m about 80 but they are wonderful medicine for a busy stressful hectic week and a useful palate cleanser before hectic Mondays. So, don’t moan every time you see a Sunday night detective plot you’ve seen a 100-times before, think of those poor writers having to think of something new on a weekly basis.