Opinion: It’s obvious something’s badly amiss in the world of crime and thriller fiction when Vera announces her retirement and the great new hope is a remake of Bergerac.
To further addle readers and viewers, James Bond, in the person of actor Daniel Craig, is now getting around in fluffy hand knits, daffy specs and Boris Johnson hair. Heaven knows what he’s driving, but it’s probably achingly carbon-neutral.
Now Sir Ian Rankin, the creator of Inspector Rebus, says the whole gritty thriller genre is in decline because of – and this is a hell of a twist – reality.
“The public doesn’t necessarily think of the police as the good guys any more,” he told a recent crime fiction festival, citing alienation caused by policing scandals in the United States and Britain.
When people are turning away from fictional police officers because they no longer trust real ones, that’s a dark and stormy night of the soul.
Instead, Rankin points out, “cosy crime” is on the rise. These are books in the classic Agatha Christie vein, in which the body count is barely even passingly troubling because it’s all just a bit of fun; a puzzle to be solved by appealingly eccentric characters. Evil is rendered restfully impersonal.
Typifying this is Richard Osman’s blockbuster series starring rest-home resident sleuths. The stories are witty, playful and utterly daft, and Dame Helen Mirren has been cast in the TV film – which would send her Prime Suspect inspector, Jane Tennison, straight back to the bottle.
Rankin has definitely got a point. Fictional crime fighters are now absurdly out of step with reality. You’d never catch Norway’s Harry Hole or even Brokenwood’s cuddly Mike Shepherd earnestly discussing “policing by consent”, as real police do now. Whatever their failings – and Rebus has just murdered his criminal nemesis – these fictional heroes never racially profile people or turn a blind eye to some categories of crime while pursuing others too severely because of “woke-ism”. This is simply no longer credible.
Clearly, people now assume that Vera would tacitly soft-pedal on a serious crime if – “there now, pet” – it was committed by an oppressed minority person. And that Gene Hunt from Life on Mars would stand peaceably by while pink-haired protesters brought his manor to a standstill by gluing themselves to bits of infrastructure. “S’for the planet, my son, innit?”
Readers and viewers would now no longer trust Taggart not to spend lockdown interrogating them about where they got their takeaway coffees and measuring their social distances. “Thurrrs bin a metrrrre!”
People now bitterly anticipate Jason Bourne seeking redress through The Hague against people who make jokes about the peculiarities of Welsh spelling, and the Mission Impossible operatives redirecting their efforts to infiltrating pubs on the hunt for blokes who call the barmaid “Luv”.
How long, readers mordantly wonder, before Jack Reacher demands miscreants’ pronouns before causing them to be admitted to A&E?
It’s specially painful to reflect that Inspector Rebus is in prison in Rankin’s latest book. The new British justice policy is to let hundreds of inmates out early – another reason the public has lost faith in the non-fictional long arm of the law.
It’s not a fair cop for the public to take their distrust out on gritty crime fiction. In real life, crime fighting can’t get cosier, because crime won’t.
Nor would it help if real police emulated fictional ones. Alcoholism and cases before the Independent Police Conduct Authority would soar, and governments won’t pay officers to practise that soulful middle-distance stare to show how much they care.
One thing, though. Patrol cars would thrum with opera, country music and dad rock, and that at least might deter a few crooks.
