The ones in the first season of True Detective.
Having just finished season 2 of Mindhunter, I’m going to nominate Bill Tench for this list, provided “FBI agent in the BSU” counts as “detective.”
Naw. As mentioned above, both the Barnaby’s in the Midsomer Murder series have been happy with their lives, and other than the initial detective in the Death in Paradise series, the next two leads have been fairly happy (even if each had a tragedy early on, they’ve mostly moved past and are enjoying life and their job in the Caribbean). The detectives in the New Tricks series are also fairly happy in their lives. There are ups and downs, but it’s not a constant gloom-fest.
I just noticed that all the series I mention are English. Interesting.
Well, Alan Cumming’s character in Instinct was pretty happy with his life. Of course, CBS canceled that, the miserable bastards!
Max Payne - He was basically a mixture of inconsolable grief and a burning hatred that drove his unquenchable desire for revenge.
His inspiration, Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, the first classic “detective” in literature, already was a very gloomy character.
That’s true, the Barnabys are happy. I can’t watch Death in Paradise or New Tricks - they’re just too cheesy. Maybe that’s why they can afford to have relatively happy characters.
Lewis in Lewis and Morse is reasonably happy too, come to think of it. His wife died young (before Lewis started, so it’s not a spoiler) but they’d had a happy marriage and other good things happened to him that I won’t spoil.
I thought Lewis was relatively happy during Morse (I even remember him telling Morse to cheer up) but was more melancholy on Lewis. I assumed Lewis’ wife was killed off because you can’t have a happy detective. Had they gone forward with the programme featuring Hathaway, I assume they would have found a reason to make him sad.
I vote for Dresden as well. I had to stop reading the series for a while things got so bleak.
He had to kill his ex-girlfriend/mother of his child
I though it couldn’t go lower but then he was killed, and became a slave in the fae court.
Yeah, they might well have done. But on Lewis he
got together with a new, loving GF, and still mostly got on with his kids.
After getting to his fifties with a marriage that had been happy since they were very young, lots of holidays and hobbies and support, ending it still in love, and probably getting further in his career than he might have thought. Not idyllic or anything but that’s a fair amount of happiness. Lewis has a sort of melancholy face but he didn’t actually seem sad very often.
Lewis did live in a very, very small and battered house, but that seemed a little odd for a man who had had a good job in Oxford and had owned a home since the 80s, and his wife had died suddenly without nursing home costs, and without any medical costs or any other costs that were ever mentioned. His wife died young, as the wife of a senior detective, and she worked and would have got death in service benefits and paid into a pension and probably a life insurance policy; he wouldn’t have been poor after she died youngish. He might even have made out, financially.
But in the show Lewis lived in a home that was much poorer than the one he lived in when he was young and raising children and there was never any suggestion that he or his wife lost all their money somehow.
But they made him look like a divorced man living in a dive rather than a widower rattling around in a house too big for him now his wife was dead and his adult kids had flown the nest.
This might sound weird but that makes me want to read the Dresden Files more and they’ve always just been something I’ve heard of. Are they worth reading?
Columbo ran around in a beat up old raincoat, drove a beat up old car, had a beat up old dog, and kept referring to his wife, who was never seen, heard, or even given a name. Then, when someone conjured up a “wife” for him as an obviously cruel prank, it turned out to be Katherine Janeway.
Nitpick: Kathryn.
Travis McGee had spells of self-loathing and depression.
This was fortunate, since otherwise he would have been easy to dislike for having a carefree beach lifestyle with an abundant supply of good-looking women.
That was my impression when watching the show. I started out liking it a lot, but then it devolved into the perfect murderer concocting all these elaborate schemes that had to work perfectly for anything at all to go to plan. It just annoyed me by the end.
And New Tricks is revoltingly cheesy. I only liked the “Richard” episodes on Death in Paradise, of course, he was the only gloomy one.
Several candidates to be found in the works of James Ellroy:
Lee Blanchard, one of the protagonists of **The Black Dahlia **whose obsession with the titular murder enigma (along with the horrific death of his little sister many years ago) ruins his whole life and gets him killed. Not that his partner Dwight Bleichert is a ray of sunshine, mind you.
Dan Upshaw, from **The Big Nowhere ** is a brilliant detective for the LASD, and also a tortured closet case and borderline alcoholic who gets played by both sides of the law and ends up cutting his throat.
Ed Exley in LA Confidential, basically loses everything due to breaking his biggest case ever.
Dave Klein and Junior Stemmons, the narrator/protagonist of **White Jazz **and his partner respectively–the former’s an incestuous, corrupt, Mob-employed and remorse-stricken copand the latter is a tortured closet case (that again!) who ends up going crazy and then getting murdered..