Detectives Use Their Minds to Fight Crime on TV

Crime happens every day all over the world and we usually learn about it remotely, through the newspaper or television news programs. The unlucky among us may have witnessed criminal activity first hand through a burglary robbery or even homicide. Crime is a fact of life as it always has been but now we can watch how crimes are committed and then how they are solved through our TV sets. Always popular since the first novelist wrote about the first detectives like those imagined by Edgar Allan Poe or Sherlock Holmes 1887 character Arthur Conan Doyle, the fictional detective was warmly received when television programming began. We love to watch how crimes are solved and perhaps there is a little of the sleuth in most of us. It takes intelligence to solve crime and those fictional crime solvers are always entertaining to watch from week to week.

Actors put the “character” in fictional stories

The BBC has had a long time commitment to entertaining as well as educating the audience, and characters like Colonel March of Scotland Yard, Sherlock Holmes and his intrepid partner Dr. Watson, and the medieval Monk Father Brown. We each have our particular favorites and relish the moment in the program that depicts the solving of a particularly heinous crime. Actors like Warner Oland who portrayed super sleuth Charlie Chan in a highly popular series of movies chased down evil in the form of Gravelle played by Boris Karloff in a movie titled Charlie Chan at the Opera and we watched intently because those vile characters scared us! But the hero, Chan, solved the mystery and brought justice in the end.

Armchair detectives do it from the safety of their living rooms

We, the viewing audience, can participate from the safety of our living room chair while the detectives risk their lives to solve the cases and bring the evildoers to justice. We admire their tenacity and consider them wise while they merely follow a well written script and make a tidy living in the process. Who has not shouted out the clues that will ultimately solve a case when our favourite TV detective fails to notice obvious evidence? It’s fun to be an armchair sleuth. There is apparently a little Sherlock Holmes in many of us and we love outwitting the “bad guys” if only through our TV screen.

Imaginative writing provides an evening of entertainment

Authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie provide us with well thought out characters that we love to follow in each new installment of book or through our television programs about detectives. Today we find an even more intense and detailed style of program in shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Law and Order, Bones, and Crime watch where we find the crime solvers go into far more detail regarding blood evidence, DNA, and fingerprinting, sciences which were not even available in the old world of sleuthing and books on Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Modern technology helps solve crimes but the old mysteries and following along as their characters solve crime will never go out of style.