Watching Hinterland on Netflix, I’m tempted to vote for Welsh detective Tom Mathias, but there’s a long tradition of fictional detectives with absolutely pathetic personal lives. So who else is up there with Tom in terms of misery? Cormoran Strike might be up there too, though he’s seemed to me to be reasonably content with his personal lot, pathetic as it might be in many ways.
Jessica Jones on Netflix seems pretty messed up and miserable to me. Utterly joyless, always drunk. Don’t read the comics so don’t know how she compares between the two.
Jones is another good example!
Sherlock Holmes needed to mainline cocaine to cope when he wasn’t working.
Wallander, Morse and Rebus?
I don’t think you are allowed to be a male fictional detective and be chirpy.
What about Poirot? I haven’t read any of the books but on the TV show he always seemed chipper enough. Eccentric as hell, but happy.
Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lew Fonesca is as depressed as they come. He is a virtually penniless process server who lives behind his office, uses the bathroom in the building, showers at the gym and only has a bike to get around. He is seeing an 80 year old therapist trying to resolve his issues after the hit and run death of his wife. The novels are set in Sarasota which makes a nice change.
Jim Rockford lived in a trailer, got beat up a lot, and the calls on his answering machine were never good news. He was cynical as hell, but seemed to be holding up okay.
Adrian Monk
Gregory House. He’s a doctor by profession, but really his job as “diagnostician” is detective work.
Dick Francis has a protagonist in one of his books, Blood Sport, who is clinically depressed and suicidal. He was the first one who leapt to mind, though I don’t usually think of Francis’s characters as “detectives.”
My guess would be something from Scandinavia. Or maybe they just make me personally miserable.
I was gonna say Adrian Monk. Everything is an anxiety disorder for him. Going out, staying in, touching things, not touching things, being with other people, being alone…
I noticed Wallander and Morse’s melancholy (never saw Rebus) and wondered about it. A couple of times in Morse episodes, DS Lewis even told him to cheer up. (And then when Lewis became the focus of his own show, he was melancholy.)
Columbo never looked all that happy.
Ash Henderson. He is the protagonist in a two book (so far) series by Scottish author Stuart MacBride (best known for the popular Logan McRae books.) Now, Henderson has plenty to be depressed about. Here is a brief synopsis of the plot:
But that’s not the worst of it, because…
He’s too late to save his daughter and after endless scenes of beatings, torture and other assorted mayhem, he finds her mutilated corpse.
But it couldn’t get wore…could it?
It sure could! Because after that, his other daughter is kidnapped by a copycat psycho. And guess what? He’s too late to save her either. Yes, both daughters die horribly
One of the few times I was actually angry upon finishing a work of fiction. I love the McRae novels, but I’m not touching another Henderson book.
Not quite a detective, but a criminal psychologist… How about Fitz from the Brit series Cracker? Wikipedia describes him as “alcoholic, a chain smoker, obese, sedentary, addicted to gambling, manic, foul-mouthed and sarcastic” which is a roundabout way of saying “Scottish”*
*kidding 
I think Kinsey Millhone, in her fictional life, is miserable at the frustrating knowledge that she came so close to Z, but will never cross that finish line.
I’M miserable, too, over this! I was hoping Z would wrap up with Kinsey writing from the present day in the 21st century, looking back on her last big case and updating us on what she is doing now, what happened to Henry and her exes, that kind of thing. As it is, I suppose she will forever be working away in the 1980’s with the same old cast of characters, living in her tiny house, never moving on AFAIK.
Yeah, I’m suprised it took to the 9th post to get the obvious answer.
I happen to know that she’s right in the middle of her last case as we speak! See, she got a call from an old high school crush, Matt, who’s “working” in Switzerland, in a tiny mountain village (hence the “Z is for Zither” appellation). I won’t spoil it, but the rumor is that at the end of the alpine adventure, she’ll find out that Matt is actually Matteo von Graffengriff, next in line to restore the village’s ancient-yet-quaint castle.
The reason we’ll never read Z is for Zither is that Kinsey will be too busy making wedding plans and renovating the castle… and she’ll never have time to type “Respectfully submitted, Kinsey Milhone.”
ETA: She’ll also have her hands full with the newest businesses in the village: Henry’s Bakery and Rosa’s Hungarian Café.