deird1: Andrew - with James Bond style intro (Andrew james bond)
[personal profile] deird1
When it comes to fictional detectives, you have:

Miss Marple ("it's just not what he'd do...")
to
Rick Castle ("this would be a bit more likely - and would make a much better story")
to
lots of detectives in the middle who are too non-quirky to discuss
to
Hercule Poirot ("logically, this alarm clock could only have been heard by someone inside the room - so she must have been lying")
to
Sherlock Holmes ("ahah! footprints! which proves that the crime was committed by a Bolivian man with red hair, money troubles, and a savage history")


Miss Marple is practically using intuition (as well thought-out as her deductions generally are) - and then the continuum goes on into more clue-based territory, putting more and more importance into finding the facts... until we're up to Holmes, who is almost using intuition again.

(Seriously - I read a Sherlock Holmes story once. He found some footprints, measured the distance between them, and spied a gold wedding ring that someone had dropped. From this he deduced forty pages of the villain's personal history. And he was right about every bit of it.)


I tend to prefer my detectives from the Marpleish end of the spectrum. (Although the occasional clue-heavy mystery can be fun.)



Of course, there are also Nancy Drew clones: where the detective runs around speculating wildly until the villain kidnaps them, tells them the whole plot, and then leaves them to get rescued.
They're... kind of strange.

Profile

deird1: Fred looking pretty and thoughful (Default)
deird1

April 2025

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930   

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 10th, 2025 11:31 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios