Annoying Detectives - a list

 

Annoying detectives - do we have 

room for them all?

 

 

 

In my last post, 

The Layton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley

I mentioned that series sleuth Roger Sheringham was annoying, and said in passing that maybe we needed a list  of annoying detectives. I'd actually planned a different post for today, but the subject brought a lot of suggestions (always my hope) and my dashed-off list of my own ideas is getting bigger by the minute ('how could I have forgotten X?') so I'm putting it out there now - and you can get a good start on those pesky investigators in the comments on the first post. 

Of course please post your own comments, suggestions and arguments. Bring them on!

 

This is my off-the-top-of-my-head list of 

Annoying Detectives

- not in any particular order:

 

1)  Roger Sheringham, Anthony Berkeley’s series sleuth. There is an important distinction here in that he is clearly meant to be annoying – where so many others are obviously loved by their creators.

2)  As in: Lord Peter Wimsey, the creation of Dorothy L Sayers who was deeply in love with her idealized man. I love the books, love Sayers, they have been with me for most of my life and I will continue to reread my favourites of her oeuvre forever. But still – someone should have stopped her from portraying LPW in such a cringe-making manner, and making Harriet D Vane such a Mary Sue character

3)  Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, everybody’s least favourite of Agatha Christie’s detectives. They are arch and annoying, and Christie never really got a handle (apparently) on how old they are at various points – the timeline goes crazy throughout the books. Postern of Fate is a candidate for being her worst book of all, so only right that T&T are there being irritating. The Beresford books also make for the worst TV adaptations – I don’t know that anyone’s every bothered with an actual film.

4)  Adam Dalgliesh  This was PD James’ usual policeman and he is grim, horrible, judgemental – and also one of the leading poets of his day. We know we are meant to like a character when Sir sees a copy of one of his books on their shelf. I recently wrote about authors who invent characters solely to give them awful traits and then despise them: PD James is the mistress of this, and – guess what? - Dalgliesh shares her views. I also quoted recently Curt Evans’ spot-on judgement that PD James was prone to ‘the idealization of the learned professional class’.

In all my years blogging on crime books, this is one of the best pictures for demonstrating the crime - it's Shroud for a Nightingale

5)  Inspector Alleyn. From the Ngaio Marsh novels. The main objection is that he has the nickname ‘Handsome’ Alleyn, which is a most unconvincing idea. Also, I said in one of my posts:

Marsh goes even further than usual in showing us clearly who is nice and who isn’t. At one point, while interviewing suspects, Alleyn has this thought:

As he lit his pipe he was visited by a strange thought. It came into his mind that he stood on the threshold of a new relationship, that he would return to this old room and again sit before the fire.

Not to spoiler, but do we seriously then think that anyone living in the house concerned is any longer implicated in the crime?

6) Inspector Wexford and his sidekick Mike Burden from Ruth Rendell’s long series of police novels set in the town of Kingsmarkham. They were both pompous, priggish, full of themselves and very judgemental.

7)  Patricia Moyes’ detective was Henry Tibbett, and while I often enjoyed the books, I found him an awful man, and particularly disliked the way he treated his wife Emmy – a couple of times actually putting her in the way of danger.

8)  I know many people love these books, but I can’t bear Donna Leon and the awful Commissario Guido Brunetti and his wife and his lovely meals of Italian food. They set my teeth on edge with the opinions served up as fact, the weird hatred for the Catholic church (what did they ever do to Leon?) and the self-satisfied air. They nearly ruin Venice for me. (not quite).

9) John Banville – writing sometimes as Benjamin Black – has a series of crime novels based in the past  featuring DI St John Strafford. They are awful, Strafford is awful. When I read one called Snow, I complained afterwards that the detective was incompetent and did no detecting. The person I said this to replied that there were next to no murders in Ireland in the 1950s, so the poor fictional policeman would have had no experience. Fair comment. However, I considered the book to be horrible, predictable, lazy and shoddy and apparently not edited at all. He  may be able to write a Booker-Prize-winning novel, but he can’t write crime and he doesn’t know enough about the Chalet School (see specialist complaint here).

10) A comment on the first post reminded me how much I dislike Inspector Lynley and his sidekick Barbara. Lord Snooty and Minnie the Minx, as someone close to me always called them (the same person who knew about Irish crime as it happens). I dislike the posho, object to some of the least convincing dialogue in any book ever, and also feel that Elizabeth George has set her books in the UK but gives the impression that she has never spent any time here at all – when I try her books I am constantly distracted by the basic items she gets wrong about everyday life in the UK.

 

 

That’s 10, and then I’m going to add in a couple more who are not ready for the full list. I suspect if I read more of Caroline Graham’s books I would hate Barnaby, but I haven’t got there yet. Blogfriend Marty had this helpful gloss:

I read the Midsomer books after having seen them on TV, and was very surprised (and yes, repelled) by Troy. It was a good thing they changed him for TV, although the first episode had Barnaby being unnecessarily snarky to him. That's a good thought that he was written to make Barnaby look better!

Michael Innes’ Appleby is the hallmark of a boring book for me, but I’m not sure how annoying he is. The Norths in the Lockridge books are always teetering on the edge of being infuriating, but not quite falling over, and the same applies to dreary Lady Lupin, whom I know many people like.

Blogfriend Dame Eleanor Hull said this:

I've been surprised by how unlikeable I find various detectives in televsion adaptations (Dalgleish, Lynley) and I can't decide if I'm misled into liking someone whose point of view I'm taking while reading, if other people read characteristics and ways of speaking very differently from the way I do, or if this is an artifact of adapting to the screen, either deliberately or because of that loss of interiority.

Which I think will resonate with many people.

And my friend Chrissie said:

 Honestly, when it comes to GA detectives, it might be easier to say which ones aren't annoying in some way.

So right – have at it. You can argue with mine and add your own…

 

(Use tags or the search function to find posts featuring these detectives. Pictures are mostly from previous posts, people who might be annoying detectives, victims etc)