When you’re reading or watching mysteries, do you like when there’s asides for the detective’s personal lives? Say, info on their dating lives or families or other issues? For me, that’s a no for the most part. I tend to tolerate it, but I don’t really care. The one exception would be Ruth Rendell’s Wexford books. I could read about Wexford taking the subway all day, and it would be awesome. I like his family, his musings, info on his past…everything.
What about you?
Archie Goodwin IS his asides!
Can you tell me of some mysteries where you don’t know about the detective’s private life? I mean, Lee Child tries to make his Reacher unknown but the details slip in anyhow. I think part of the story is the person telling/solving it.
(I have the same birthday as Archie Goodwin - month and day that is, not year! Made me smile when I found that out. Nobody is as cool as Archie.)
A very strong yay for me. The mystery plot serves to give the detective something to do, but I’m almost always more interested in his/her personal life than in the whodunnit.
I found that P.D. James never went too much into details about Adam Dalgliesh. There are lots of references to his past, how his wife died giving birth to their son, which gives him a tragic air. Plus, he’s a poet. But it never really overwhelmed the story. He didn’t seem to have much of a private life to be honest.
NVM. I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Well he has a romance lasting over several books and then proposes to her so…
Police procedurals generally minimize any background into the characters’ private lives.
I prefer not to hear about their private lives. The classic Law & Order seems to be the best about it, as far as TV police detectives go. You do get a smidge of everyone’s real lives but it’s few and far between.
Poirot and Columbo don’t seem to have much going on outside of whodunnit.
I watched Inspector Linley begrudgingly. Seemed like that fucker always had some mopey personal shit going on. I feel like Endeavor is like that too.
Nay! Well maybe just a little bit sometimes.
A bit of background is fine with me, for example to the extent of Connelly’s Mickey Haller - just enough about his character to make him human without it becoming a melodrama. I love Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander, but too much of his personal life and I’m losing interest. He gets a lot of colds though, and that’s kind of interesting
I read detective fiction for the detecting part, the other stuff gets in the way and will cause me to skip pages.
Oh yes. As for TV detectives, you need only look at the infamous decline of the X files once it got too personal, and all that hand-wringing in Law and Order SVU (“child of rape”). Just solve the crimes people!
Agree completely about the Linley books, just too heavy going with all the personal tragedy. 800+ pages for a mystery? Give me a break!
This is another reason I like reading the Maigret books. They are short and to the point; you know a lot about how Maigret deals with criminals and how he approaches a genuine mystery, but his private life intrudes very little into any of the stories. There is one where he goes back to his childhood home to investigate a mystery; one where a vicious attorney brings up in a trial his child who died; he retires to the country and then comes back; you see his wife from time to time, who is nothing more in the books than a comfortable soul who almost never complains when he is late to dinner and provides no drama whatever. Any and all of these are incidental to the actual story, and that’s the way I like it.
I liked the Commissario Brunetti TV series (set in Venice but done in German) for the same reason. You see his family, and they are all blessedly normal and undramatic, and only frame the main story, they don’t intrude into it.
Oops…man it’s been too long!
It depends.
First, it depends on whether the book is intended purely as a puzzle, a work of suspense, a thriller–or whether it is meant to function as a novel. If the latter, then personal life details belong and improve the book. Case in point: Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder books. Scudder’s personal life is an important addition to the books. The details about his relationship with his wife, connections with his kids, etc., help to round him out and provide extra understanding of what he’s doing and what’s motivating him to do it. It helps that Block is a very fine writer, and he can pull this off quite well.
Another example: the Anna Pigeon series by Nevada Barr. While I haven’t liked some of her latest books all that much, she’s another terrific writer who is able to make Anna a more interesting, if not always more sympathetic, character by virtue of sharing (some) aspects of her personal life. That in turn adds to the reader’s enjoyment of the book. (Well, mine, anyway.)
And even when the characters are a bit more cardboard and the puzzle is more at the forefront, mysteries can be improved by some (emphasis on some) personal stuff. I’m thinking of books like the Deborah Knott series by Margaret Maron, in which part of the point is keeping up with Deborah’s enormous family. Now, I think sometimes–okay, often–it goes too far, and I find myself skimming past long descriptions of who’s related to who and how and Deborah’s latest discussion about home furnishings with her husband, grousing “Let’s get back to the action”; still, it’s part of the charm.
But there are some examples of authors who can’t carry it off. In general, I think it’s because the authors think their characters are more interesting than they actually are, or don’t have the skills to bring them to life. Or both. Prime example would be Marcia Muller. I gave up reading her Sharon McCone books in large part because the good parts of the books–the puzzle parts–were increasingly being dwarfed by McCone’s personal life, which was neither interesting nor illuminating. William Tapply’s books about Brady Coyne had the same problem. I’d say Patricia Cornwell would be another example, but of course she seems to have become certifiably insane over the last 15 years, so there’s that…
Bottom line: Yes, when done well and in a book that can benefit from it; no, otherwise.
I think Tony Hillerman hit the right mix of personal life and detecting with his Joe Leaphorn character. When his wife was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor instead of Alzheimer’s all seemed well, and her death before the next book in the series was a shock.
Leaphorn’s skepticism about traditional Navajo ways played off nicely against the young Jim Chee’s embracing the ancient beliefs.
I feel that a reasonable balance, is nice to have. A fair amount of personal-life stuff humanises the characters, and makes the whole thing more interesting; too much, though, can just become distracting.
On the whole, I like Val McDermid’s novels. However, while I consider myself not at all homophobic – at times with McDermid: the sheer weight of intense-lesbian-issue content, in amongst the crime / mystery doings, is just more than I want to have to handle.
I, too, love the Leaphorn / Chee partnership / contrast in Hillerman’s books. Can’t help but feel amused (non-maliciously) by Jim’s finding – to his regret – that combining being a modern police detective, and a shaman, just isn’t feasible.
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Poirot and Columbo don’t seem to have much going on outside of whodunnit.
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We know that both had been married. Poirot was a widower when he fled Belgium during the German occupation in WWI, and Mrs. Columbo even got her own tv show.
I always thought it would be interesting to see a Poirot prequel about the young detective in Belgium showing his marriage and his early struggles to tame his 'stache.
Ironically, I loved CSI at first because they left the personal lives of the characters out of it. Then, hoo boy, that’s all there was, practically. I think Criminal Minds goes overboard too but I watch it in marathon bursts and I get sucked into the personal stuff.
I like a balance, but heavier on the mystery is my preference.
I’m more familiar with TV detectives. I think the media makes a difference. In a novel, especially one written in first person, the author can go into more personal detail and yet it still is part of the “whole”. The insights the detective has help solve the case.
But TV detective shows are generally better without it. As mentioned, the classic L&O never said anything about the detective’s personal lives, at least in the beginning. Later, probably starting with Curtis, we got a bit of off-screen drama. Still nothing like SVU!
But on the other hand, a show like Perception or Monk or Raines, then the personal life is 50% of the story. It’s a mystery as well as a character study.
I prefer less personal life on TV detectives, mostly because over the course of a show the different writers make mistakes or just change their minds about character continuity.
As an aside, despite Mrs.Columbo/Kate Columbo/Kate Loves a Mystery, I’m not convinced Columbo was married! I think the asides about “the missus” were just tools Columbo used to crack the case.
However, if there ever was a character that needed MORE personal details, it was Columbo. I have always wondered what the other detectives think of him. He never* had a partner. Could no one get along with him? And he never seemed to have and direct subordinates. He had a command rank, but didn’t seem to be anyone’s boss. I have this theory that in the office he’s “normal”, but everything we see of his personality on screen is an act.
*Well, HARDLY ever
I usually enjoy the private life part better than the mystery. This goes double for those detectives who are otherwise employed, such as Rabbi Small or Professor Shandy.