Blood on the Snow—Crime and Crumpets at Christmastime (by Pat Black)

Posted on December 12, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

If you read EQMM and follow our blog, chances are you’re familiar with Pat Black, the Yorkshire-based journalist who regularly contributes to our magazine. In this special post, Black draws on examples of classic mysteries, from Christie to Allingham, and discusses why Christmas and crime go so well together. Also, be sure to stay tuned for a holiday story by Pat in next year’s winter issue.

When it comes to fiction at Christmas time, ghost stories seem to have it all wrapped up. With A Christmas Carol as a starting point, all the way through to MR James’ chilling adaptations for the BBC from the 1970s all the way to the present day—it is the time for spectres and visitations. When the light is at its thinnest, and the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is most easily breached.

But there’s another genre that lends itself well to festive reading—crime. Much like the preponderance of ghosties and ghoulies, this is counter-intuitive. Christmas should be a time for feasting and merriment, of warmth and comfort in the company of our fellow humans… So it shouldn’t really make sense for us to cosy in with some grim, sometimes gruesome reading. Maybe it’s to do with the shifting seasons, rather than their associated festivals. Perhaps with the dark in ascendance, there are things to fear in there, reasons for foreboding, our blood chilling as the temperature falls outside.

Winter is no joke in our uncertain times and changing climate—but earlier in human history, proximity to a fire was the difference between life and death. Maybe there’s a yearning for stories that reflect this desperate state, even as we seek communal warmth and closeness in our own way. And maybe that storytelling instinct, the need to entertain each other with tales of darkness and danger, is another link to our need for festive crime.

But there’s another reason—Christmas is a time for gifts, and if you’re anything like me, that means good books. Handsome ones, too. Like the collected Sherlock Holmes. In it, you’ll find a classic Christmas story: The Adventure of The Blue Carbuncle.

If you’re imagining 221B Baker Street with a well-fed fire shooting sparks, maybe some crisp muffins while we’re at it, a good pipe, today’s Times and strong coffee, while snow falls outside on London’s streets, then congratulations—you’re already toasty. The tale concerns the stolen gemstone in the title, as well as a Christmas goose which turns out to be the key to the theft. Not for the last time in these stories, Holmes takes pity on a hapless criminal after exonerating someone framed for theft, betraying a sentimentality which we do not readily ascribe to the great detective. It ends, perfectly, with Holmes and Watson preparing to feast in the warm sanctuary of Baker Street, with all wrongs righted outside.

Dorothy L Sayers wrote a cosy mystery featuring Lord Peter Wimsey—A Necklace Of Pearls. Set in an English country house, dressing for dinner, assembled guests… let’s face it, it really needs a murder. But there’s no body in the snow here; Sayers’ golden age peer looks into the missing pearls in the title, a gift from Sir Septimus Shale for his daughter, with a brand new stone added to the necklace every year. Wimsey sniffs out the thief, and the location of the lost pearls, just in time for Christmas.

Agatha Christie has entire collections filled with seasonal tales, but we’ll allow her dapper little Belgian to represent her this Christmas. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is the obvious place to go for the classic Christmas golden age murder mystery, but we’ll swerve to one side for The Adventure Of The Christmas Pudding. This one is a riot, which sees Poirot initially engaged to find a ruby stolen from an eastern prince. As part of his investigations, the sleuth is invited to spend Christmas at a fancy house, wherein he is inveigled in a number of plots. One of these involves a “faked” murder which then appears to turn into a real one. A typically clever and twisty plot is unpicked by the Belgian, who ends up with a kiss under the mistletoe as recompense by the end. Along the way the part played by the pudding in the title is revealed and—yes!—there is indeed some blood on the snow.

Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion takes on a mercy mission of sorts in The Man With The Sack. Answering a call from his friend, Mae Turrett, the “universal uncle” heads to the Turretts’ country retreat for Christmas. Long train journeys; home for the holidays; and, as ever, England between the wars is placed under the microscope by Allingham, as the certainties of the aristocracy in the early 20th century are exposed in a tale of theft.

In Rumpole’s Christmas, John Mortimer’s portly, slightly grumpy barrister begins to take on some ancient, pre-Christian characteristics. Apparently no lover of the festive season, Horace is tasked with trying to keep a younger member of the Timson crime clan out of prison, after one of the O’Dowd family is filleted during a dispute. Rumpole has a raging hangover during this story, but it has a nefarious purpose. The “spirit of Christmas” in the title doesn’t refer to anything in Rumpole’s gift, but to a carve-up between his opponents. Win a few, lose a lot, as Rumpole reflects, ruefully.

But there’s something ancient, possibly pre-Christian, about Rumpole and his forays into Pommeroy’s wine bar (to be fair, it doesn’t need to be Christmas for Rumpole to end up there for a snifter or two). Our boozy hero is a bewigged Bacchus—perhaps not the most enthusiastic spectator at the pantomime, but certainly a celebrant at the feast. For lovers of classic crime, maybe the ghost of Christmases past, in his cloak and wreath, wears the face of Leo McKern?

And this cosy sense of celebration takes us to a strange Christmas crime tradition—the classic board game, Cluedo (or Clue, for American readers). The classic whodunnit board game is linked to Christmas, for me, and there’s a tactile memory associated with it, as well as the fun of playing the game with family as a boy. There’s the weapons, for one thing—the frayed ends of the rope, the solid lead piping, the treacherous sheen on the candlestick, the testable point of the dagger and, of course, the wee gun. The cards, sheathed in their holders, concealing the identity of Professor Black’s killer. The pencils, even, whispering across the suspect list sheets. Who can it be? Mustard? Peacock? Scarlet? Plum?

I put Cluedo before Monopoly, any day of the week… it seems less murderous somehow. One day, perhaps very soon, Santa might bring a new edition of Cluedo for my own children to enjoy. I hope so. It’s top of my list this year.

May all your Christmas crimes be confined to the pages of a good book. All the best to you and yours.

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Fail Better (Dennis J. Palumbo)

Posted on December 6, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

“Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”
-Louise Nevelson

I have always been struck by this line from Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett’s 1983 novella: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

As a therapist and writer, I believe the wording sums up accurately both the clinician’s and the artist’s experience. It captures the struggles, uncertainty, and much-needed indefatigability of both professions.

Perhaps, more prosaically, this same sentiment was expressed by Albert Einstein. Once, when asked how he worked, he replied, “I grope.”

As I acknowledged in my book, Writing From the Inside Out, “Not an attractive word, grope. Sounds too much like lope, or dope, or mope. As an image, groping has associations with unpleasant activities like stumbling around in the dark, feeling blindly with your fingers, or enduring a series of false starts and wrong turns. It sounds unprofessional, almost haphazard, and too susceptible to the whims of luck and circumstance.”

I have taken the liberty of quoting from a book of mine, as well as from Einstein and Beckett, to preface my discussion of an issue that sometimes confronts clinicians treating a creative patient. Ensnared by anxiety while working on a difficult project, the patient often asks their clinician—sometimes only implicitly—for guidelines or a technique for addressing the new work’s problems, and so quelling the doubts and fears it has birthed. In my experience, such patients are not only looking for pragmatic suggestions for alleviating their concerns but need help coping with the shame they associate with having such difficulties.

In other words, and in the minds of many creative patients, real artists do not grope. They plan, reflect, ponder, conceptualize, synthesize, outline, embellish… create. Their work is the result of craft, inspiration, thought, and insight. To be blunt, a real artist knows what the hell they are doing.

This gnawing belief holds true for many creatives, whether writers, painters, musicians, or designers. It also holds true for many clinicians, whether therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, or social workers.

In a previous column, I suggested that 1 of the root causes of procrastination is a fear of shameful self-exposure. In my view, a creative patient’s difficulties with a project, and their belief that there is some technique that offers a solution, evokes a similar shame. There must be a way to solve these problems, they think, and if I were a true artist, a real professional, I would know what that way is.

So much for, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

I recall a session some years back with a writer patient struggling with the plot details of his first novel. He had published a few essays and a number of short stories, but working out the narrative issues of this complicated novel was seemingly beyond him.

“There must be some technique that every novelist knows,” he said plaintively. “Some rule. I guess I just don’t know what it is.”

Based on what we had explored previously about his childhood experience with a demanding and pedantic father, knowing (and the rules, facts, andexperience this knowledge was built on)was acore value in defining one’s worth—and thus one’s worthiness to be loved. (Reminding me of something I had heard during my years as a Hollywood screenwriter, concerning the actor Steve McQueen’s description of the only type of character he would play: “I’m not the guy that learns; I’m the guy that knows.”)

Given the similar ethos fueling my patient’s shame, my mentioning Einstein’s quote about groping did not do much to allay his concerns. So I tried to elaborate.

“I think what the quote suggests is that a professional person’s view of their work include in it the reality that all artistic effort, in a sense, is a groping toward something.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Let me put it this way: A writer like yourself, a real craftsperson, should know that the tools of creative preparation—plot construction, reflection on theme and content, an understanding of how to devise realistic characters—these tools have been developed for one reason only: to enable them to grope.”

I spread my hands, in an attempt to come off as less pedantic myself. “It’s only logical, right? The higher your skill level and experience, the more likely you are to break away from the known way of doing things. That kind of exploration has uncertainty built into it.”

My patient nodded. “That reminds me of something I read. What the cellist Pablo Casals said. ‘Learn the notes and forget about them.’ Are you talking about something like that?”

“Pretty much. It’s only when you reach a high level of competence that you’re finally able to grope. Like where you are with your novel. Given your past experience and talent, a new project like that only gets harder, not easier. You find that you’re demanding even more of yourself.”

“Lucky me.” He gave me a wry grin. “Well, shit, if it was good enough for Einstein…”

Sessions like these reveal how often creative patients fear Beckett’s notion of “failing better,” and yearn for models or guidelines, not merely to quell their anxiety but to counter the shame underlying it. Even veteran artists need the validation that confirms they “know what they are doing,” though the wisest among them know that is not the sole prerequisite for doing good work. That happy outcome requires risk, accident. As an actor patient once explained it to me, “Rehearse like crazy, then wait for the mistakes.”

In my 30+ years of practice, I have come to believe that what is true for my creative patients is true for clinicians. Too often we adhere to conventional dogma when it comes to treating patients, relying too readily on the dictums of diagnostic categories or the claims of personality theory. Knowledge of these things is crucial, of course, but since I feel that therapeutic work is both a science and an art, we have to be careful not to rely so much on the profession’s orthodoxy that we are blinded to the wisdom of our own instincts, the potential for our own unique approach to a patient’s issues. Which inevitably entails risk.

A book that had a profound influence on my thinking in this regard, written many years ago by philosopher William Barrett, was The Illusion of Technique. As the title infers, it is a ringing defense of creativity as a spontaneous reaction against the false sense of security promised by reliance on rigid structures, belief systems, and techniques.

In other words, a closed system of thought is a dead system. Equally true, I believe, for both creative patients and their therapists.

Again, an anecdote from Einstein’s life: when a student complained about his difficulties with math, Einstein replied, “Don’t worry about your troubles with mathematics. I can assure you mine are far worse.”

Another allusion, no doubt, to the reality of struggle, uncertainty—groping, if you will—as the price of any worthy creative endeavor. After all, as my author patient said, if it was good enough for Einstein…

Mr. Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist and author in Los Angeles. His email address for correspondence is dpalumbo181@aol.com.

(This essay previously appeared on PsychiatricTimes.com)

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM EQMM!

Posted on November 27, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Warm wishes and and thanks to all of our readers, contributors, and friends.

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SEASON’S GREETINGS FROM EQMM

Posted on November 14, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

We’re looking forward to cozying up with a hot beverage and some exciting new mysteries in the months ahead. What will you be reading this winter?

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Finding Three Pines (by David Wallace)

Posted on November 7, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

David L. Wallace is a professor of English at Long Beach State University, and he has published a number of articles about the effects of closeting on queer people. He lives in West Hollywood, CA, where he spends as much time as possible swimming laps, hiking, running, cooking good food, reading mystery novels, and joining friends for happy hour. Here he shares his experience with a series that has captured the hearts of many: the Three Pines mysteries by Louise Penny.

I found best-selling author Louise Penny’s village of Three Pines about fourteen hours after I gave up looking for it. To be honest, the conceit of a village tucked away in a hard-to-find valley between Montreal and Vermont that is not on any map and has no cell service always struck me as a bit fanciful.  But I have been willing to suspend disbelief because I like the village Penny created and the quirky characters with which she populates it. 

As I drove unpaved back roads in the Eastern Townships to see the sites that inspired the Old Hadley House, Sarah’s Boulangerie, and the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-Les-Loups I kept losing cell service and hoping the directions stored in my GPS program would get me to the next village on my Three Pines itinerary.  The third time my cell status declared itself SOS deep in the Quebec woods, the notion of a quaint village cut off from most of civilization just over the next ridge seemed completely plausible, and I couldn’t help but wish that it would find me worthy of revealing itself to me.

I began to understand how Penny constructed Three Pines at my third stop in the village of Sutton where I sat in a gazebo in the little town square eating a marvelous cheese and raspberry pastry from the local boulangerie.  To be frank, each of my stops had been a little disappointing: The Old Hadley house is a pink Airbnb now; the long hallway of the abbey was interesting but lacked the trick of light Penny describes in The Beautiful Mystery, and the store that inspired Sarah’s Boulangerie was more a specialty grocery store with no flakey croissants at three in the afternoon. 

As my teeth sunk into the pastry and I fished the Gamache mystery I was currently reading out of my backpack, I began to understand that one of Penny’s many skills as a writer is to glow things up—to take inspiration from a physical place and then add elements either imagined or from other places, making Three Pines the best of everything she has culled from the villages of the Eastern Townships.

I saved Lac Brome/Knowlton for the last stop on my tour as the fan sites identified it as the village in which Penny lives.  My GPS found enough bandwidth to direct me to my hotel, and just after 5 pm I started exploring the village, crossing a stream that might be the Riviére Bella Bella, noting that I would have to come back in the morning because the cool bookstore that inspired Myrna’s new and used bookshop had just closed, and spotting a coffee shop for my next-morning writing session.

I hadn’t expected to find three tall pine trees in the square or to see a grizzled old poet walking around with her pet duck, but I had hoped that one of the two bistros in town would be something like the Olivier’s bistro with its two fireplaces and would serve a reasonable facsimile of the amazing food Penny describes in the books.

Both bistros were disappointing; I had mediocre fish and chips at the pub version (although the sangria and the view from the patio were nice).  I went for a glass of wine and dessert at the other, and was one of eight customers lost in the large space. As I sipped my wine and ate very disappointing carrot cake, I realized that the aspect of Three Pines I had been hoping for was village life—the sense of familiarity and community that is a constant presence in Penny’s fictional village no matter how many times a murder threatens to tear the community apart.

After my wine, I walked along the little river, noting an abandoned building with a big exhaust fan that I decided could have once been Olivier’s bistro and house nearly overgrown by trees and shrubs that I tried hard to make into Clara Morrow’s cottage.  I concluded my walking tour by climbing up a small rise to a bench overlooking the village green and imaging the retired Chief Inspector Gamache sitting there reading his father’s copy of The Balm of Gilead. I turned back toward the green and thought that just maybe I saw Myrna peeking out of a window from her apartment above the bookstore.

I gave up finding Three Pines and went back to my hotel and settled in with The Nature of the Beast, entering the Three Pines in which a nine-year old, tall-tale-telling boy is murdered because no one believes that he saw a gun bigger than a house in the woods with a monster.

I found Three Pines the next morning when I entered the coffee-breakfast-lunch-wine shop and thought immediately, “Oh, Olivier closed his bistro and opened this place.” My café au lait was served (sadly) not in a bowl but a mug, but my raspberry/cheese pastry was every bit as good as the one from the day before. 

As I settled at a little table against the wall and set up my laptop to work on a scene from my own fledging murder mystery, I stopped to watch the dozen or so people who had pushed four tables together in the middle of the room.  Their conversation was in French so I couldn’t figure out why they were meeting, although they each had a binder from which the flipped pages.  Whatever the meeting or activity was, it broke up about twenty minutes later, and I watched as members of the group chatting in twos and threes.  And there it was—Three Pines—the kind of neighborly familiarity that Penny uses as the backbone of her fictional village’s society.

An hour later I had finished sketching the scene in which all my suspects are present at a happy hour in a fictional gay bar in Los Angeles and decided it was time to visit the bookstore.  As I entered the bookstore, I saw a tall woman with glasses standing to the side of the front counter and wondered, “Could it be?”  I wandered through the large inviting space pretending to browse as I stole looks at the tall woman, comparing it to a picture of Penny on a poster, and decided that, indeed, it was her.  When the people she had been talking to left, I plucked up my courage and thanked her for the books, and then I found Three Pines for a second time. 

Penny was absolutely gracious, introducing herself even though I clearly knew who she was and laughing when I described looking for the big gun in the woods as I walked down the hill to the bookstore. When I mentioned that I was writing a piece in which I used a line of poetry attributed to her character Ruth Zardo, she walked over to a corner of the bookstore and pulled a book by Margaret Atwood off the shelf and flipped to a page so I could read the whole poem.  When I mentioned that I had been working on a scene from my own murder mystery at the coffee shop, her eyes lit up and suddenly we were two writers talking about the pleasures of plotting a murder mystery. I was a bit star-struck as I floated out of the bookstore and realized that I had not thought to buy one of her books and ask her to sign it.  I turned to go back but changed my mind and continued on to my car because Three Pines had found me for a couple of hours, and I didn’t want to do anything that would spoil its magic.

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HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM EQMM!

Posted on October 31, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

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“The Patient” and My Patients (by Dennis Palumbo, M.A., MFT)

Posted on October 24, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Dennis Palumbo, M.A., MFT is a writer and licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues, primarily in the entertainment industry. His award-winning series of mystery thrillers—Mirror Image, Fever Dream, Night Terrors, Phantom Limb, Head Wounds and the latest, Panic Attack—feature psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi. He’s also the author of Writing From the Inside Out, as well as a collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime. Recently he served as Consulting Producer on the Hulu limited series The Patient, and here (in an article first published in the journal Capital Psychiatry) he tells us about how the play out of the television crime drama affected his real-life patients.

After seventeen years as a Hollywood screenwriter (the film My Favorite Year; the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), I retired from show business and have been a licensed psychotherapist in private practice for over thirty years. During this time, my writing has been confined to articles and reviews, as well as a series of mystery novels whose protagonist is a psychologist. My point is, it’s been so long since I was a dues-paying member of the Hollywood industry that I was quite surprised to hear from the team of Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg. Writers of the award-winning TV series The Americans, they’d reached out to me to act as advisor on a new show they were developing. Called The Patient, it was about a serial killer who kidnaps and holds hostage a well-known therapist, in hopes that he can “cure” the killer of his homicidal urges.

Apparently, my former career as a script writer and my current one as a therapist prompted them to see me as a reasonable person to act as consultant on the new series. Essentially, what they wanted was for me to vet each episode’s scripts for clinical accuracy and to “make sure the therapist sounded like a therapist”—or as much like one as possible given the bizarre circumstances of the show’s premise.

Over the coming months, I did my best to keep the narrative within the range of plausibility, including suggesting the occasional line of dialogue or therapeutic interpretation.  Just as we were finishing the script for the last episode, it was announced that Steve Carell had been cast as the therapist. A wonderful actor, he’d been given a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses. Whether or not it was conscious on the writers’ part, he looked somewhat like me. Which, at the time, I just found amusing.

My working relationship with Fields and Weisberg was one of the most pleasant professional experiences of my life. Moreover, the two writers were very gracious about my contribution when doing PR interviews leading up to the series premiere.  During one such interview, when writing up the story for Newsweek, the reporter off-handedly mentioned that Carell’s character looked like me.

It wasn’t until the series began airing on Hulu that the ramifications of this became apparent in my therapy practice. A number of patients who’d begun watching the show pointed out that Carell’s therapist character looked a lot like me, and on occasion even sounded like me. (No surprise, since I’d suggested some of the therapeutic comments the therapist made.) Naturally, I had to process this with these patients, some of whom were quite upset at seeing the therapist chained to a bed, helpless. More than one half-jokingly worried that the series’ premise would give “some crazy person” the idea of kidnapping me. Did I feel I was in danger? they asked. I answered honestly that I didn’t, while privately wondering why I’d never even entertained that idea when working on the show.

Moreover, had I been unforgivably clueless in not anticipating this reaction from my patients? I reminded myself that Steve Carell hadn’t been cast until the series’ scripts were almost finished, that I had no idea he’d be playing the therapist, and certainly no idea how they were going to make him look. Yet I still felt pangs of remorse for the distress the show’s depiction of the therapist was causing for some of my patients.

As the weeks went on, and episode after episode aired, it became obvious that seeing an avatar of their therapist was upsetting to a number of my patients. Of equal interest during sessions was the reaction of those patients who found the whole thing amusing, or at least presented it as such. They even joked with me about the series’ story-telling: why didn’t the therapist try harder to escape? Why didn’t he just refuse to talk to the serial killer? Is this how you would react in this situation, Dennis?

Of course, the narrative choices displayed on-screen were made by the show’s writers, not me. I was merely the consultant. But this didn’t matter. What did matter, and what ended up being of real clinical interest (and value) was what some patients’ transferential connection to the therapist character and the story revealed about both their own core issues and their relationship with me. As Robert Stolorow has reiterated, there is only subjectivity and context; in this unusual situation, there was a patient’s subjective experience of me in the context of our therapeutic relationship, and then a kind of meta-subjectivity/context experience through the narrative of a TV series.

(SPOILER ALERT: I’m going to discuss the series’ final episode)

For a select few of my patients, as I’d expected, it was the series’ final episode that elicited the strongest reaction. Not only does the therapist fail to escape, he’s strangled to death on-screen by the serial-killer patient. This horrible murder is hardly ameliorated by the killer’s decision to send an anonymous letter to the therapist’s family, telling them where they can find the body so it can have a proper funeral. The last time we see the serial killer, he’s the one chained to the bed, his mother holding the key to the chain’s lock. Since she’s known all along about her son’s activities, we’re left to wonder if/when she’ll release him to potentially kill again.   

A couple patients revealed that they’d cried at the end, one of them pointing an accusing finger at me and saying, “You better not fucking die!” Again, said half-jokingly. And yet, not. The few others who’d stayed with the show all the way to the end were angry at both the series’ writers and at me. Their reactions ranged from disbelief (“How could they end a show like that? How come the killer gets away with it?”)  to frustration (“That’s not fair to the viewers. We deserved a better ending.”) to simple creative criticism (“I hate ambiguous endings.”).

As difficult as the sessions were with these patients over the course of the series’ run (including my own guilt at having put them through it), some of the clinical work that arose from our discussions was quite beneficial. A greater understanding of the contextual nature of our therapist/patient relationship undoubtably occurred. Moreover, we often reached a deeper understanding of the dependency/resentment dynamic at work in the therapeutic dyad. And, in one or two cases, the discussion regarding the show was a springboard to a more energized, proactive engagement on the patient’s part.

Still, I have somewhat mixed feelings about my participation in the series. It was often an exhilarating experience, due primarily to the talent, receptivity and warmth of both Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg. And while I regret the distress that the lead character’s words and looks evoked in a few of my patients, I also felt this similarity led to real forward progress in our work together.  A potential disjunction becoming a fruitful conjunction.

That said, if I’m ever asked to consult on another series, my only hope is that the lead character looks like someone else.

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SPOOKY SEASON ARRIVES

Posted on October 17, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

What are your favorite horror-mysteries?

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AUTUMN TIDINGS FROM EQMM

Posted on October 10, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Fall is arriving in our northeast United States HQ, and we’re thinking about our favorite fall reads. Let us know yours!

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A Perfect Couple but a Very Imperfect Miniseries (by Kevin Mims)

Posted on October 3, 2024 by somethingisgoingtohappen

In today’s post, essayist, short-story writer, prolific reader, and often a blogger on this site Kevin Mims talks about the frustrations of watching contemporary TV police dramas. We all know the feeling of asking, “Why would they do that!?” to our screens while knee-deep in a televised procedural . . . here, the author gets specific. Share what you think about this phenomenon in the comments section!— Jackie Sherbow

Don’t read this essay if you haven’t watched A Perfect Couple on Netflix. It is full of spoilers.

I have harped on this before, but it bears repeating because the situation just keeps getting worse. The contemporary TV crime drama relies way too heavily on some extremely illogical behavior by both the cops and the suspects involved in various mystery investigations. This current rant is inspired by the Netflix series A Perfect Couple, starring Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, and a handful of other talented and attractive people. The basic storyline is this: Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, a successful author of popular crime novels. Her books sell so well, in fact, that she and her husband, Tag (Schreiber), live in a $40 million mansion in Nantucket. What’s more, she seems to be keeping most of her deadbeat relatives afloat as well. As the story begins, one of the Winburys’ three sons is about to marry a young woman named Amelia Sacks. Amelia is from a normal—i.e. working-class—background (she herself works at the Brooklyn Zoo) and thus seems almost like a fish out of water amongst the wretched excess of the Winbury family. On the night before the wedding is scheduled to take place, Amelia’s maid of honor, Merritt Monaco, is murdered on the beachfront property where the Winbury family resides. The whole family and various guests were present on the property and celebrating the upcoming nuptials, so just about everyone at the party is a potential suspect. So far, so good.

The problem is that the police who investigate the murder do very little in the way of actual sleuthing. Most of what they learn about the crime they discover while interviewing subjects in that hoariest of all TV clichés the police interrogation room. These interrogations are handled by Police Chief Dan Carter and Detective Nikki Henry. Again and again they pull members of the immensely wealthy Winbury family down to the station and subject them to thoroughly hostile interrogations. Again and again, these cops seem to believe that they have arrested the murderer, only to have to release them at the end of the interrogation. This, of course, is absolutely insane. The Winburys are fabulously wealthy and well connected. They undoubtedly have an entire team of attorneys on retainer for any sort of emergency (considering how loathsome many of the family’s members are, the Winbury’s attorneys are probably kept fairly busy). The local police would not arrest a Winbury unless they had proof positive of that person’s guilt. Otherwise, they would open themselves up to a wrongful arrest lawsuit.

What’s more, the Winbury clan would certainly be aware of their right to remain silent. And they would certainly insist on exercising that right, as well as the right to be represented by an attorney during questioning. The Winburys are not nice people They are mostly arrogant jerks. Even the innocent ones, who had nothing to hide from the cops, would never in a million years voluntarily step into a police interrogation room and allow themselves to be verbally abused by a couple of prole police officers. What’s more, the family’s attorneys would be all over the place trying to thwart any sort of investigation into the Winburys. The local yokel cops would be informed that they are not to question any member of the Winbury family without an attorney present. The attorneys would be denying the police access to the Winbury home, the Winbury cell phone records, the Winbury vehicles, the Winbury computers, and the Winburys themselves. It is idiotic to think that every one of the hostile jerks who make up the Winbury family would allow themselves to be hauled in and interrogated like a common criminal. It simply wouldn’t happen.

I’m singling out A Perfect Couple here, but this problem is widespread in contemporary crime dramas. I realize that cops do often interrogate criminal suspects in dark and scary interrogation rooms with two-way windows in them. But on TV, we see all manner of wealthy people—doctors, movie stars, politicians, investment bankers—allowing themselves to be hauled into interrogation rooms and treated like common criminals. Occasionally the writers of these TV shows provide the suspect with a lawyer, but this lawyer generally does absolutely nothing. If the lawyer does make an effort to advise his client not to answer a question, he’ll almost always be rebuffed by a client who will angrily declare, “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m not afraid to answer the question.” A self-respecting lawyer who has been neutered like that by his own client would probably just walk away. Why sit by and watch as your client ignores your very sound legal advice and creates immense difficulties for himself by blabbing angrily to the police?

I realize that some suspects do actually spill their guts to the cops in interrogation rooms. I once served as a juror on a murder case in which a seventeen-year-old suspect was questioned in an interrogation room for eight hours. Watching even selected segments of that interrogation session was painful as hell. The child was clearly frightened and the detective was able to manipulate him into saying anything he wanted him to. The suspect changed his story over and over again at the insistence of the police officer. The suspect claimed to be in the second of three vehicles that were involved in the incident. The officer insisted that he was in a different vehicle. The officer offered no evidence to back up his claim. He just seemed to need to place the suspect in the other vehicle so that he could get him to testify as to what was said in that vehicle. The entire interrogation session was horrifying and, in the end, none of it was used in court and the child wasn’t charged with a crime. The jury was given access to a video recording of the interrogation simply because it had been entered into the evidence collected by the police. Neither the prosecution nor the defense ever used the video. It was easy to understand why the prosecutor never used it. The child was bullied into changing his statements so many times that it was impossible to know what the facts were.

But that was an impoverished minor who had no attorney and who didn’t understand his right to remain silent. Suspects like that may well sing like a canary when hauled into an interrogation room. But almost no college-educated professional is ever likely to utter a word in a police interrogation room. And if he has an attorney—which he almost certainly would—said attorney wouldn’t ever let his client be interrogated by the police. And, if the college-educated professional were a member of a fabulously wealthy and well-connected family, no cop would ever try to drag him unwillingly into an interrogation room. It’s a lazy trope of contemporary crime TV. What’s more, it usually makes for pretty dull TV.

Nearly as nonsencial is the way that cops in contemporary TV shows are able to get search warrants with such ease and speed. For about five years, the house next to mine was used as a sort of unofficial halfway house for convicts who were out on parole. The landlord apparently was making good money by allowing nearly a dozen people at a time to flop in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house. In fact, she even parked an inoperable van in the driveway and rented it out as well. Needless to say, this was not an ideal situation. I chatted with and liked some of these ex-cons, but there appeared to be a great deal of drug dealing going on next door. The SPD spent several months observing the house from undercover vehicles parked up the street. At the end of that period, the SPD sent all of the neighbors a report indicating that they had seen plenty of behavior that appeared to be consistent with drug dealing. But the police report also noted that their investigation didn’t yield anywhere near the kind of evidence that would be necessary for them to obtain a warrant to enter the house and search for drugs. It is not easy to obtain a search warrant in America, nor should it be. None of us would want the police to be able to barge into our home simply because a neighbor suspected we might be doing something illegal.

But even before criminality moved in next door to me, I knew enough people involved in law enforcement—including a few assistant district attorney’s—to know that getting a search warrant is rarely a quick or easy process. But on today’s TV crime shows, you regularly see cops telling suspects—including well-heeled ones like the Winburys—“If you don’t willingly let me come inside and search your house, I’ll be back here in a few hours with a search warrant.”

If the cops want to search your house, you should insist that they get a search warrant first. The cops themselves would probably want to get a warrant. Anything they find in a search would be inadmissible in court if it weren’t collected lawfully. And any thinking person knows that a cop isn’t likely to be able to obtain a search warrant in a matter of hours. They probably wouldn’t be able to get it in a matter of days. Cops don’t usually appeal directly to judges for search warrants. They take their evidence to the district attorney’s office and request that the D.A. present it to a judge and then request a search warrant. This is a long and complicated process. If a cop tells you, “Let me search your house now or I’ll be back with a search warrant in an hour,” he’s probably lying to you. (I suspect that no real cop ever actually makes this statement.)

But even for a TV cop this is a stupid line of dialog. Even stupider is the fact that it often works. Why would a suspect in a murder case let a cop into his house? If he knows that he has incriminating evidence in the house, the obvious response to the cop would be, “Go get the damn warrant.” Even if the suspect has nothing to do with the murder, why would he let the cops go wandering about his house?

Usually, when the police are given a search warrant, its parameters are fairly narrow. The police aren’t allowed to search for any damning piece of evidence they can possibly find. They have to inform the D.A. and the judge of what exactly it is they are looking for in the house. And that is usually all they are allowed to look for. But if you were somehow convinced to give the police carte blanche to search your entire house without a warrant, well, God help you. Normally, people like that are only found on TV crime dramas.

If any of this sounds as if I am anti-cop, let me dispel that notion right now. I have always been an admirer of police officers in general, just as I admire doctors and teachers and firemen. These are tough jobs and I am grateful for the people who do it well. You may think that I am making this up, but at 6:30 p.m., on September 5, while my wife and I were watching A Perfect Couple in our living room, we were the victims of an attempted home invasion. The perpetrator kicked in the glass panels of our front door, sending shattered glass and splintered wood everywhere and terrifying my wife and I. We shot up out of our seats and made a beeline towards the back of the house, hoping to escape into a neighbor’s property through our backyard. I was dialing 911 while we did this. But by the time we reached our backdoor, the home invader had already gone down the side of our property and was climbing over the fence into our backyard. Terrified, we made a u-turn and bolted back through the house and out through our shattered front door. My wife was barefoot and cut up the soles of her feet. We ran across the street to a neighbor’s home and explained the situation. Unbeknownst to us, the police were already on their way, because several neighbors had already reported their own interactions.

Multiple police cars showed up within minutes of my wife and I exiting the property. Before two entered, they asked for my permission to enter the property. They also asked me if anyone else other than the intruder might be there. These cops had no idea what they would find inside. My house is small—1,235 square feet—but they spent forty minutes looking through every square inch of it. When they finally allowed us back into the house, every closet door was open and the door to the basement we never use was also opened. They had checked under the bed and behind every piece of furniture. What’s more, while they had been searching the house, their colleagues had actually caught the would-be intruder on a neighboring street, where he had gone to continue looking for a house he could rob.

Needless to say, this was an extremely unnerving experience. But it was made infinitely less traumatic than it could have been by the bravery and professionalism of the SPD. They took statements from numerous witnesses. The SPD sent a CSI photographer to our house to photograph the damage to the house. They provided me with a police report number that I could use when dealing with my homeowners insurance company. The police drove me to where the suspect had been apprehended, so that I could identify him as my intruder. And they followed up the next day with several text messages identifying the suspect and providing me with additional information.

All of the SPD officers I have ever interacted with have been consummate professionals. It burns my biscuits when I see cops portrayed on TV shows such as A Perfect Couple as buffoons, authoritarians, or both. It is highly ironic that I happened to be watching A Perfect Couple just as I found myself in the midst of a frightening police emergency. But that is exactly what happened.

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