In the 1920s, during the so-called Golden Age of crime writing, a Catholic theologian and literary critic, Ronald Knox, published a list dubbed the “Ten rules of detective fiction”. This was an attempt at trope-busting in a genre that, all too frequently, slipped into hamminess and absurdity. Under Knox’s instruction, writers were restricted to “not more than one secret room” and banned from the use of “twin brothers” altogether. But perhaps the most obvious of Knox’s prohibitions was a simple one: “The detective must not himself commit the crime.”
Yet within the first three minutes of the BBC’s new adaptation of Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels – titled simply, like the ITV/Ken Stott version of the Noughties, Rebus – the protagonist, a detective inspector, is beating the bejesus out of a suspect in custody. The line between the men (and it is usually men) who solve crimes and those that perpetrate them is a thin one. For all of Knox’s proscriptions, he failed to eradicate cliche from the genre. One cliche simply gives way to another, and none has been more pervasive or resilient than the copper dealing with a mountain of personal issues. Is it time, then, to add an 11th commandment to Knox’s list: the detective’s life must not be totally falling apart.
