The Metropolitan police are offering graduates resident in London the chance to train as a detective without first having to go on the beat in uniform. The good news for the Met is that, with crime fiction being so popular, they will surely be inundated with applicants. The bad news is that, with crime fiction being so popular, some of those applicants might be thinking in somewhat unrealistic terms.
The call might seem to come from Southampton Row police station, where DCI Jane Tennison works in Prime Suspect, or even 221b Baker Street, HQ of the leading gentleman detective. The fact that the Police Federation, which represents the rank-and-file officers, has criticised this fast-tracking will not surprise the crime fiction reader: naturally, the plods would object. Who would want to play Lestrade alongside a latterday Holmes, constantly subject to patronising remarks such as (from The Six Napoleons), “If any little problem comes your way I shall be happy, if I can, to give you a hint or two as to its solution.”
The crime fiction reader is taught that a detective is always culturally superior. PD James’s man, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, is a published poet. Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey has a first in history from Oxford, and is a pianist of concert standard. He is incessantly referred to by everyone around him as “milord”, and when a yokel comes along who refuses to kowtow, we can be pretty sure he’s the killer. Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, by contrast, is a Cambridge graduate, and possibly a member of the royal family.
The lesson of the genre is that the detective is a flair player. Here, from Murder on the Links, is Poirot, responding to the dim Captain Hastings, who deferentially suggests that one might occasionally have to pay attention to tiresome matters such as “fingerprints and footprints, cigarette ash, different kinds of mud”. Poirot counters that he will not make himself ridiculous “by lying down (possibly on damp grass) to study hypothetical footprints.” His work, he declares, “is done from within – here”, and he points to his head.
Poirot professes to look for the “psychological clue”. Otherwise, the key to his relentless success is obscure, unless one were to put it down to innate superiority. In My Friend Maigret, by Georges Simenon, the dogged Inspector Pyke of Scotland Yard is assigned to shadow Inspector Maigret to “observe his methods”. Trouble is, Maigret has no methods. He tends to come to the right solution after drinking large quantities of white wine. The dangerous message of crime fiction, from Philip Marlowe to John Rebus, is that the detective should be an alcoholic, if at all possible.
The Met applicants of literary bent will have minds cluttered with irrelevant strictures. They will be reluctant to consider a case closed, because they will always be looking for “the twist”. And they will be all at sea if confronted with a case that involves secret passages in the plural. Why? Because among the 10 rules of detective fiction set out by the priest and detective story writer Ronald Knox, we find: “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.” One of the rules might prove morally instructive to the trainee, though: “The detective himself must not commit the crime.” But this goes against the lesson of Line of Duty, which is that crimes are committed by detectives. (Applicants should not mention this series, given that the real police refused to cooperate with the makers.)
Then again, I can see there might be something in Inspector Morse’s dictum that “there is a 50% chance that the person who finds the body is the murderer”. As a crime writer myself, I have found a book called The Crime Writer’s Guide to Police Practice and Procedure, by former senior Met officer called Michael O’Byrne, to be very useful. He writes: “If the victim is adult and the body has been moved, then either the killer will be a man, as most women simply do not have the upper body strength required, or two or more people will have helped move it.”
I would advise the Met to be wary of anyone who has done a course in creative writing, or who shows signs of unnecessarily wide reading. Watch out for applicants who, when required to “state briefly why you want to be a Metropolitan police detective”, open with: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is himself not mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” They might be signing up just in order to research a bestseller. Especially so since, apparently, one of the purposes of the initiative is to recruit people who can counter cybercrime. So they’ll be sitting at a computer all day. Install a Word document, and the fatal words Chapter One could be just a few clicks away.
