Overall an excellent post. To expand a bit on this quoted snippet …
A couple months ago the Discovery Channel here in the US aired a 4 hour double episode on the D.B. Cooper hijacking. D. B. Cooper - Wikipedia
In particular they re-traced the multi-year efforts of an investigative journalist team. Which team presented their findings to the actual FBI office which at that time still held an open investigation into the case.
The FBI’s response was in effect: “Nice job. You’ve built up a substantial pile of circumstantial data which strongly implicates your chosen perp (who’s still alive). Zero of which is evidentiary. You might be right he was the perp, but you’ve given us zero to take to court.”
Not long after the FBI closed the case for good.
It made very entertaining TV. And a convincing detective story. What it didn’t make was evidence.
My theory is that the town of Cabot Cove finances her out-of-town excursions in some way. After all, if she didn’t travel so much, the town would probably have a population of about eight.
Worse is being related to her. There were at least three episodes where her nephew, Grady, was falsely accused of a crime, and she had to step in and solve it to keep him from prison.
The main reason for the popularity of vigilante or private-sleuth novels is that the public longs for extrajudicial justice, or really, just, swift justice that doesn’t have to comply with the rules and laws that bog down justice in real life or prevent justice from happening.
Boulder Police reacted badly to a retired homicide detective brought in by the DA.
Lou Smit had a very long professional career solving cases. He was the first one to find evidence that an intruder entered JonBenet Ramsey’s home through a basement window. He eventually came to the conclusion the family wasn’t involved. Boulder cops were not happy. He got a lot of criticism.
It was over ten years later before recovered DNA from an unknown suspect proved Smit was correct. There was an intruder in that house.
In a City or decent sized town, with actual detectives, she’d be ignored or arrested.
In some small village with no detectives, and she is the “Chiefs” aunt or MiL or some other relative, she might get away with it.
Now, the further back you go, the better chance they have. So in Kembleford (pop 2000? Circa 1940??) Father Brown will get away with it, altho constantly harassed by the Inspector.
A Private Detective specializing in murder could work.
And yes, the high murder rate in these small fictional areas is alarming. Even in Portland, the numbers of bodies piling up would bring in the State Police and FBI.
I can’t vouch for the ACCURACY of the McBain quote; I’ve just always found it immensely entertaining.
I spent a good percentage of my life editing mystery and crime novelists, and always enjoyed the enmity between those who wrote about cops and those who wrote about amateur sleuths and private detectives in the Chandleresque “shining knight” mode…saving pretty girls from danger, shooting revolvers, and solving murder cases.
Well, remember the classic Chandler stories were set pre WWII, and then the police were often corrupt and/or incompetent. Many dicks were ex-cops (Marlowe was a ex- DA investigator) with buddies still on the force.
He is not “an extreme agoraphobic”; he’s just lazy and set in his ways. Smarter than Sherlock, perhaps; nuttier, not so, at least not as written by Conan Doyle:
*…“You wonder,” said my companion [Sherlock Holmes], “why it is that Mycroft does not use his powers for detective work. He is incapable of it.”
"But I thought you said --"
"I said that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an arm-chair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solution, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. And yet he was absolutely incapable of working out the practical points which must be gone into before a case could be laid before a judge or jury."
“It is not his profession, then?”
"By no means. What is to me a means of livelihood is to him the merest hobby of a dilettante. He has an extraordinary faculty for figures, and audits the books in some of the government departments. Mycroft lodges in Pall Mall, and he walks round the corner into Whitehall every morning and back every evening. From year's end to year's end he takes no other exercise, and is seen nowhere else, except only in the Diogenes Club, which is just opposite his rooms...." *
From “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter” (1893).
