This week I have watched the US series True Detective (9 episodes, 2014) and have read book 19 in Ian Rankin’s series about Edinburgh cop John Rebus, Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012). Blame a nasty cold for my sluggish mind but at points the missing girls in Nic Pizzolato’s screenplay would get mixed with their peers in Rankin’s novel, the remote corners of the Louisiana bayou with the lonely tracks in the Scottish Highlands. Both set of girls were blurry, undistinguishable, mere appendages to the madness of the sick male that killed them (off screen) and of the obsessive males who hunted him. The cases were solved by flimsy, far-fetched coincidences. Nobody really cared nor mattered.

The first paper I ever presented in public, back in 1994, was a positive reading of FBI trainee agent Clarice Starling in Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs (much less conservative in this sense than Jonathan Demme’s film, despite the subsequent horrors to which Harris subjected Clarice). I remember a senior female academic asking me whether I did not feel disgusted with this obvious misogynistic trash, in which women were always victimised. Young that I was then, I was puzzled by her remark: not at all, I answered, Harris offers a strong female character who is a good role model to empower other young women in the fight against male violence. I still stand by that. Now, what makes Clarice so unique is that, unlike the men surrounding her, she learns who each individual female victim is and this way she eventually tracks their troubled male killer. I think this is what irked this woman and what irks me now: not so much the femaleness of the victims but their dehumanisation, intensified in current fiction.

I knew I would not like True Detective already by minute ten. Where are, I complained, the police women? Has none heard of Clarice and her many descendants? The series turned out to be, indeed, a bare-faced male ego trip. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were simply marvellous, giving total credibility to bickering partners Rust and Marty. Yet, somehow the pretentious Pizzolato convinced himself that the more Rust spoke, the deeper the series would be when actually all his pseudo-mystical, depressive chatter only deflected from what should have mattered: the victims. Me, me, me both true detectives proclaim to the world: I’m so unhappy, I’m so lonely, life is dark (but light’s winning??). Promising to unmask a confederacy of villains, they unmask in the end … a cliché, seen one hundred times (for the hillbilly’s point of view see the very funny comedy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil). Two things have been stuck in my dizzy brain for the last few days: Rust’s Texan drawl preaching to me endlessly and the beautiful opening credits (with the song ‘Far From Any Road’ by Handsome Family). Oh, well: 9,3 according to IMDB audiences. Really?

I read Standing in Another Man’s Grave a little edgy, as I wrote a while ago an article on the whole Rebus saga. Once Rankin published Exit Music (2007), supposedly to be the closing volume, I embarked on an article about the strange bond between his detective and the gangster Cafferty: “Aging in F(r)iendship: ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty and John Rebus,” published in Clues: A Journal of Detection in 2011 (see http://ddd.uab.cat/record/116052). I wrote with much caution, as I very much suspected Rankin would go on and follow Rebus beyond retirement, as he has done. Luckily for my argumentation, Rebus and Cafferty are still ‘best fiends’ since they cannot be ‘best friends’ (a bit like Rust and Marty). Rankin has a great subplot about Cafferty’s misleading attempt to become the overlord of a young upstart, who actually becomes the next big thing in Edinburgh’s gangsterhood. Yet, Rankin needs a case… so here we go: serial killer it is.

Rebus has been accompanied in the series since 1993 (The Black Book) by Siobhan Clarke, a very solid female character who is crying out for her own series. In Standing… she has made it to Detective Inspector; she is now aspiring boss. Keen on the last criminal advances, she suggests that a profiler be brought into the case of the missing girls but her (tepid) attempt to sound properly up-to-date is dismissed. Obviously… for just as happens in True Detective not only the victims lack interest for the writer but also the killer. Perhaps aware that the figure, borrowed from American fiction, fits awkwardly the Scottish landscape, Rankin tries even less firmly than Pizzolato to convince us that his male wacko has a solid reason to kill. He is just there in both cases as the excuse for the cranky hero to succeed in the face of unadventurous authority. Siobhan simply looks on, letting Rebus proceed. In Marty and Rust’s case there is no female peer about (just a disappointed wife).

Let me recommend at this point Isabel Santaulària’s excellent study of the serial killer, El monstruo humano (http://laertes.es/monstruo-humano-p-815.html). My problem with this figure is not that it exists at all, even though clearly the fictional representations must multiply by now thousandfold the real thing. My problem is that he is used too often in a lazy way. Perhaps Se7en (1995) went too far to make any other serial killer interesting. Yet the problem with the ones these three true detectives have faced for me this week on each side of the Atlantic is that, I insist, they’re clichés (and blurry ones at best).

My colleague Bill Philips from UB, who leads a research team on the post-colonial detective novel, explained to me recently that readers no longer seek the thrill of the well-made detection story: they value detective fiction as social fiction. Fair enough – after all, I read Rankin for what he says about the dark side of Scotland. Yet, possibly as series as diverse as Bones or Sherlock show, detective fiction is and has always been about the main character. Both Pizzolato and Rankin (I don’t know about the female authors) are suggesting that it would be altogether nice to do away with victim and killers, let the detective be our own nihilistic, existential hero. This as odd as doing away with love in romance…

The matter with genre in fiction is that labels make promises: if its romance, it has love; if it is detective fiction, it has a case. I’m not against mixtures (SF and ‘noir’ blend beautifully in Blade Runner) nor against eccentric detectives. It’s just that if you’re willing to work on their characterisation you should also be willing to work on their case, for a very basic reason. A poor case spoils the picture, making the oddball detective just that, an oddity, instead of what he was meant to be: someone with a deeper insight into life’s dark side.

And no, Pizzolato, the light is not winning, at least not for the victims.

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