The classic 'impossible crime', 'locked room', mystery is basically a puzzle. You don't care too much about fine writing or subtle characterisation. All you really want is a striking character investigating an intriguing mystery that has an ingenious solution.
They are very difficult to do well. Even the acknowledged greats of the Golden Age, Like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, got it wrong as often as they got it right. David Renwick is the latest author to try his hand at the form.
Jonathan Creek is a wonderful creation. Renwick has realised that the process of writing a 'classic' detective story is very similar to the process of creating a good stage illusion, so it was a stroke of genius to have a detective whose day job is designing magic tricks. He is the best new super-sleuth we have seen in a long time and this pilot episode is a good introduction to the whole series.
It is also a very shrewd essay on the problems of writing this highly specialised type of fiction.
For me, there are two very revealing scenes in this episode that I suspect were deliberately inserted by Renwich to illustrate two problems that mystery writers have to solve.
Shortly after Maddie has learnt what Jonathan does for a living, he takes her to lunch. She asks him to do a trick and he reluctantly complies. She is astounded and asks him how he did it. He says: "Trust me, you don't want to know, it's mind-bogglingly banal." She begs him to tell her and he finally agrees. Maddie looks crest-fallen and says: "That was mind-bogglingly banal."
This illustrates the first problem. It is not enough to have a possible solution to an intriguing mystery. The solution has to be as satisfying as the mystery is baffling. I once read a large anthology of famous 'locked room' mysteries. Most of them failed this test.
The second scene occurs half-way through the episode and illustrates the other problem.
A burglar is arrested for murdering a famous painter and Maddie takes up his case. She comes to suspect the painter's wife was the real murderer. She was in her office when the crime occurred, but left strict instructions not to be interrupted all morning, so nobody actually saw her for hours. Maddie smells a rat, but is faced with a problem: the office windows don't open and the only door leads to an outer office which her secretary didn't leave, even for a minute. There seems no way the wife could have left her office to commit the murder.
Maddie and Jonathan go to the office posing as a TV crew making a documentary. Jonathan films the two offices and constructs a detailed scale model of them. Using a couple of dummies, he then shows Maddie how the wife could have slipped past the secretary without her knowledge. It is a satisfyingly elaborate and ingenious solution that overcomes the first problem Renwick identified.
Maddie says: "So, that's how it was done." Jonathan replies: "No. That was how it could have been done, but of course it wasn't." Maddie looks puzzled and he explains that although the plan would work in principle, nobody would ever try it in practise. It is just too risky. He asks: "what if an important client turned up and absolutely insisted on seeing her? What if the fire alarm rang and they had to evacuate the building?"
That is the second problem in a nutshell. The more elaborate the solution to the crime, the less likely it becomes that anybody would ever try it. Even some of the best Agatha Christie stories stumble over this issue (A Murder is Announced, Evil under the Sun and Death on the Nile, for example). In truth, so does David Renwick. The final solution to this mystery is as improbable as the one that Jonathan rejects.
Of course, if you want to enjoy this sort of fiction you just have to accept that the solution to the mystery is going to be a bit far-fetched. For the writer, the trick is not to cross the line between far-fetched and utterly ridiculous. But that line will be in a different place for every reader or viewer.
So, do I think David Renwick crosses the line?
Certainly, some of his stories take 'ingenious' to almost surreal heights. But Renwick is so knowing in this pilot episode that I believe Jonathan Creek is actually intended to be a parody of the genre. After all, before Jonathan Creek, Renwick was best known as a comedy writer.
A successful parody has to be at least as good as thing that is being parodied and that is often the case with this series. But, because it is a parody he can push the line of plausibility further out than straight exponents of the form. As a result, I think Renwick stays on the right side of it often enough to make Jonathan Creek amongst my favourite viewing.
Nonetheless, if you think he goes too far, then I cannot reasonably argue against you.
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