Good Murders

Unusually for us over the weekend we watched no fewer than two of the programmes for tv we've recorded in recent months - in this case two episodes of Midsomer Murder. This added up to a lot of murders as the count of corpses in any given episode is generally of a high order - four or five being the norm. Regardless of how gruesomely death is dealt out in Midsomer, and it tends to be gratifyingly nasty to say the least, there's an air of cosiness about the whole business hearkening back to the golden age of detective fiction that is most satisfactory. Inspector Barnaby and sidekick (we prefer Troy, actually, to the new one) somehow find the wherewithal to be engagingly amusing amidst the mayhem and can be relied upon to get their man (though, oddly enough, it more often turns out to be a woman) before the final credits roll. Frankly though, you don't really need great powers of deduction to figure it out - just go for the least likely character and you're on the right lines seven times out of ten. Noi tends to fall into the trap of deciding the killer is the character you're being set up to suspect and then is surprised when they turn out to be the next for the funeral parlour. I think she'll begin to cotton on soon, but there's nothing beats the pleasure of the two of us engaging in a duet of head-scratching wonderment when the truth is revealed.

Back in KL I had it in mind to read a few good murders just for relaxation, I suppose, but this fell by the wayside somehow. However, I did tackle Jeb Rubenfeld's The Interpretation of Murder, but I'm afraid I found it a bit disappointing, though enough of a page-turner to be acceptably readable. There seems to have been quite a vogue in recent years, particularly in America, for detective stories based on early twentieth or nineteenth century history featuring 'real' historical characters. In this case Rubenfeld draws on Freud, Jung and other luminaries of the psychoanalytical movement in their trip to the USA in the early twenties. Freud himself assumes the role of a sort of detective, though the main characters are strictly fictional. The writer is obviously a more than clever chap, he's done cartloads of research, especially on the New York of the period, and the premise is engaging enough - but it doesn't really come off, at least not for me. The problem, I think, lies in the characters (though the research tends to stick out a mile also.) Essentially we are dealing with the two-dimensional stereotypes of popular fiction and that isn't normally such a bad thing, but when you are immersing yourself in an ambience which was all about what was startlingly uncomfortable about human personalities then the thin characterisation starts to seem absurd. The best example is in the utterly unconvincing portrayal of Jung (to whom Rubenfeld is strikingly unsympathetic. He's better on Freud, but that seems to be because we need to see Freud playing the part of the great detective.) And why conflate the later split between the two great men with their trip to America? Even those with merely nodding acquaintance of the relationship between Freud and Jung would surely be aware of the actual time frame of events. I ended up feeling that the writer was merely using the history for his own purposes (to write a best-seller and get a big advance) and wasn't in any way genuinely gripped by it. And this is especially odd considering that one of Freud's own case studies is the basis of the central plot.

This is a bit of a cliché these days, but its truth struck me anew when reading The Interpretation of Murder: possibly one of the greatest of all detective story writers is Freud himself, and when his case studies are read in this light they make gripping narratives. We are all detectives, We just don't see the clues. Or recognise the crime.