True Crime Motel

It was very dark and rainy this morning meaning that the journey to work was a might scary. And now, back-to-school summer seems to have arrived whereby all the kids complain that it rained in their holidays and now they have to sit inside and work. Aha – another day of rubbish to fill up time and ensure an entry for every day.

No – not that after all! I have remembered something I have wanted to mention for some time. I used to like US detective shows when I was a teenager but I was never been a fan of British versions. Enough guff - the bottom line here is that while watching The Inspector Lynley Mysteries the other week and finding out that my wife could spot the solution well before the half-way mark, I started musing on why this was possible. The reason is of course that the script distils out the main points though leaving you with enough chaff to make the determination of the correct culprit satisfying. Real-life crime investigations are hampered by having so many irrelevancies that it becomes far more difficult to tease out the meaningful stuff. Maybe that is what determines how easy a crime is to solve. We have reconstructions but they are nothing more than fact-streams – This happened, that happened, he was here with her etc. The ideal mystery would be a sort of balance between giving away too much and not enough. Maybe you could have a two-person writing team, one person to decide on the salient facts and present them like a crime-watch reconstruction and then another to take those facts without knowing the solution and dramatise them, producing the final script. By extension you could then plug in a ‘real’, unsolved crime at the front end (which is obviously what reconstructions are) but the emotional content would filter the facts, possibly leaving some essential essence of the original to determine a solution. Show it to a number of people and let them discuss it. The answer is bound to turn up in those discussions.

I have run out of time. Back to SQL Server.