Whodunit? No Coincidences, Please.

 

I don’t watch a lot of TV, and when I do it’s usually whodunits. Midsomer Murders, Whitechapel, Jonathan Creek et al, are all high on the list of compulsory viewing in our house. With Death in Distribution, the eleventh STAC Mystery due out in just over two weeks, it would be strange if they were not.

 

The one thing I try to avoid in my work is coincidence. It doesn’t sit well with a discerning audience. There’s a good deal of suspension of disbelief in accepting that the police would not only allow Joe to investigate, but actively co-operate with him, but it’s no stranger than a little old lady from St Mary Mead or a member of the landed gentry poking their oar into the odd murder or two.

And yet, once the reader buys into that, everything that follows must make sense, and we don’t want any coincidences, do we? Instead, we need a chain of logical deduction based on the available clues, many of which are tiny and discreet, but all of which are there for the reader to second guess whodunit.

Bearing all this in mind, the missus and I have been watching the excellent Belgian drama Salamander on BBC Four for the last five weeks. She’s even put up with the subtitles.

Caution: potential spoilers.

As a political thriller, it is superb, and quite believable. If you follow the real life news, it’s easy to imagine a sinister clique of like-minded business people manipulating government to influence policy.

As a whodunit, whoever, I’m afraid it falls short. We already know whodunit, but then, we already knew whodunit in every episode of Columbo. The fun came from watching our intrepid sleuth dog his man and arrive at the logical conclusion.

Gerardi’s efforts in Salamander, while courageous and determined, are not up to spec. The sole reason he is finally on the track of the bad guys is because he bumped into the widowed daughter of one of them at a club, and he met her again when taking his daughter to the same school as her daughter attended. To further rack up coincidences, the two girls become friends, which lands Gerardi an invitation to the mother’s home where he spots a photograph he recognises.

Fair enough, one of his bosses sent him to the club, but it was stretching credulity a little when that same boss sent his daughter to that school for her safety. Or did the boss suspect something of the mother? If so, he could have told us.

I’m sure these things happen in real life, but this kind of deux ex machina in fiction warrants a smack on the botty.

Now, having said all this, I fully appreciate that Salamander is not billed as whodunit, or even a cops vs the bad guys show. It is a political thriller. And there are many possible reasons why it may have been constructed in this manner. They could have been short of time. There are already twelve episodes running to about nine hours. How many more scenes would we have needed to establish a chain of investigative logic? Perhaps the writer(s) couldn’t fathom a means of getting him to the solution, but I don’t think so. Watching it with the writer’s critical eye, I could think of several avenues of investigation which would have put Gerardi on the right track. Or perhaps they simply wanted to suppress the detective work to concentrate on the political machinations and subversion.

Whatever, I shall be tuning in next Saturday for the denouement, and the curious thing is, so will my missus, even though she hates subtitled movies.