I don’t remember January being a month particularly suited to detective stories. It’s not like October, where King and Jackson and Lovecraft come so easily to hand, their gothic gumshoes so endlessly vexed by unnatural culprits. No, January is a time for large books that offer an excuse so you don’t have to go outside much. It’s a time for motivational speakers preaching strong muscles and toned waistlines and temperance. It’s a month scrubbed of the ceremonies that lighten December’s dark, cold weight. What is the detective doing here? Even True Detective: Night Country is set in the waning days of December; the raw promise of a new year would clash with a tone at once resigned, elegiac, and frightened.
But here they are, detectives of every stripe, every one of them haunted. I don’t know the production background of Monsieur Spade or Death and Other Details, but I do know True Detective was meant to be on our screens earlier than this. January is probably just a coincidence, but it is instructive to line these three up against each other and try to understand what we want our detectives to be.
Let’s start where it all, for our purposes, began: Sam Spade. It’s October 3, 1941, perhaps the deadliest year on record for conflict deaths, although you wouldn’t have any way of knowing that then. Next year could be far worse, and by some estimates, it was. In 1941 Western history -maybe all history- is about the war, and in a few months Americans will be completely immersed in it. But today, should you find yourself able, you could be one of the first people to watch one of the greatest movies ever made. The Maltese Falcon has been around since the 1930 novel, and its hardboiled protagonist was not the first detective by any means, but the film ushered in what Roger Ebert called a genre “waiting to be born.” Film noir began with Sam Spade, and it is his meanness, his harshness, that defines it. Filmed as a hero, Spade is nevertheless a profoundly anti-heroic character and film noir is a genre that resists simple heroics. Its men prefigure the Don Drapers and Tony Sopranos and Al Swearengens of this world far more than its Steve Rogers.
The plot of The Maltese Falcon is actually irrelevant for our purposes; it’s just the character we need to understand before we talk about AMC+’s new series Monsieur Spade. That, and a famous late line from the original film, when it’s revealed Brigid O'Shaughnessy killed Spade’s partner. O'Shaughnessy has been his lover, and although he couldn’t keep himself uninvolved. He says,
I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. . . . The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you.
Monsieur Spade opens in 1955. Brigid didn’t make it those whole 20 years, in fact, Spade got her out early because she claimed to be mortally sick. She seems to have recovered rather quickly, because she lives long enough to have a little girl with a French lowlife, hire Spade to take the seven-year old child to her father, and die in a train derailment in Istanbul. The father is somewhere in the south of France, but nowhere to be definitively found, so Spade is left with the girl. He picks up a rich wife with lightning speed, having grown both more romantic and more practical regarding women, then we cut to 1963. Spade’s wife has died, leaving him a wealthy French landowner with a dying vineyard. The girl, Teresa, has been sent to be educated by the local nuns. It’s been 82 years since we first heard Humphrey Bogart do his Sam Spade. It’s been 22 years since Spade smashed the falcon, and his own surprisingly naïve illusions. Who is he now?
One of the most surprising things about the new series, from Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide) is that Spade has changed so much. When resurrecting a dead legend, there’s a compulsive tendency to make them who they are when we saw them last, but Monsieur Spade has grown. He’s no longer in San Francisco, he’s no longer a PI, and he’s no longer attracted to terrible dames (ok, maybe a little). Sam has developed emphysema and has been told to give up cigarettes. He even almost does, for a whole day or so. The series unfolds in the shadow of the Algerian War and is about shattering an illusion of peace. It could have easily been about an old hero putting on the fedora again, lighting up, and going out to kick some shady bad guy ass. That would have been the safest route for the creators to take, but they have more to say than that and no interest in pandering to an audience of Bogart devotees.
For being so famous and so beloved, Sam Spade has appeared in precious few pieces of content. There’s the original novel and a handful of short stories, two bad early film versions of Falcon, then that bright blaze of 1941 cellophane. Then nothing, really, unless you count a smattering of radio plays. The film was too famous to recycle, maybe, then the character went through the usual 20th century ringer of reevaluation and parody, but soon slid into legend. But we are in the era of resurrection, reboot, and regurgitation. If you tell enough studio execs you can bring back Sam Spade, someone is going to bite. But the show transcends it’s status as just another reboot, partly by refusing to reboot anything except Sam himself. The plot of The Maltese Falcon was always its least important element; Frank and Fontana have brought back the only things about the original that mattered and done the character justice.
Detective as gruff antihero is a familiar trope, but in many ways we’ve moved far from the stylish cynicism Bogart embodied so well. We could all see Bogart’s characters were squishy at heart, that there was a child-like yearning for a mother, a true lover, a lost self. The True Detective series presents a different kind of detective, less self-assured, more grizzled or haunted or mad. Each season of the show, which premiered in 2014, has featured a duo of unlikely detective partners. Each season has been a chance for Actors with a capital A to ply their trade on the small screen, from Matthew McConaughey to Colin Farrell to Mahershala Ali and now Jodie Foster. I’ve always been skeptical of the excessive chat in this show, something pointed out perfectly in Emily Nussbaum’s review of season one. Characters never stop talking, endlessly jawing about the universe and the nature of evil and the nature of how annoying their wives/mistresses/girlfriends are. She writes,
The series, for all its good looks and its movie-star charisma, isn’t just using dorm-room deep talk as a come-on: it has fallen for its own sales pitch.
To state the obvious: while the male detectives of “True Detective” are avenging women and children, and bro-bonding over “crazy pussy,” every live woman they meet is paper-thin. Wives and sluts and daughters—none with any interior life. Instead of an ensemble, “True Detective” has just two characters, the family-man adulterer Marty, who seems like a real and flawed person (and a reasonably interesting asshole, in Harrelson’s strong performance), and Rust, who is a macho fantasy straight out of Carlos Castaneda. A sinewy weirdo with a tragic past, Rust delivers arias of philosophy, a mash-up of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the nihilist horror writer Thomas Ligotti.
She goes on to say of Rust,
He’s our fetish object—the cop who keeps digging when everyone ignores the truth, the action hero who rescues children in the midst of violent chaos, the outsider with painful secrets and harsh truths and nice arms.
For a lot of True Detective’s run, this has been it’s problem. It wants us to want this kind of detective, to “fetishize” him, to see him (he’s somehow always a him, even when they try to make him a her) as what a true detective is. He’s far from Sam Spade, though he shares that childlike one-sided yearning, the emotional equivalent of opening your arms wide while holding a knife.
Self-knowledge comes slowly and the series struggled to both correct these issues and keep the elements that made its first season great, which include a truly scary horror mythos that remains poised on the knife’s edge of actuality. We never know if the supernatural is in this universe or in the minds of the universe’s madmen, a trick few shows even try to pull off. But now, with a long hiatus and subtle creator banishing (no more Cary Joji Fukunaga who seems the most appropriate person to receive Nussbaum’s incisive critiques on the portrayal of women in the series; no more Nic Pizzolatto, for less sordid reasons). Instead, the new season is packed with talented women, including director Issa López, Jodie Foster, Kali Reis, and Fiona Shaw. Barry Jenkins’ production company, Pastel, is among those executive producing. The new season is being hailed as a return to the strengths of the first season, but López has stated that she sees it as a dark mirror image instead, saying, "Where True Detective is male and it's sweaty, Night Country is cold and it's dark and it's female." It is indeed all those things, and there’s something about that inversion that lets me enjoy the Lovecraftian horror of its setting and events in a way I couldn’t enjoy season one. But are these detectives true in a way that others are not?
That pesky true has always bugged me and, in my opinion, always weighed the series down. That true is necessarily exclusionary; it suggests untruth in others. If you’re not tortured, if you don’t have a weakness for the femme fatale, if you’re just a regular person who wants to make murder happen less often then you are perhaps unworthy of our culture’s mythologizing. Carey Mulligan in the excellent 2018 miniseries Collateral, for instance would not be a true detective. She isn’t tortured or yearning. She has no need driving her, no philosophy to expound. She’s just a pregnant woman trying to solve a crime because crime is bad and she wants her and her child to live in a society with less of it. In the world of True Detective, it is not enough to want balance and order in the world, to have Christian ethics and to live through them. You must also live with one foot in the grave, in the netherworld.
Spade would have said these guys talk too much; a True Detective character is like Spade if he’d joined a Lovecraft book club at a never-ending talk-therapy retreat. There’s a glamor to men like Spade, even as they should scare us with their intentional nihilism. We rightly look back to that age as a golden one for detective fiction. It’s why a mystery series set in 2024 often looks like it’s set in 1930. Death and Other Details, starring Broadway and Criminal Minds legend Mandy Patinkin, is one such yarn. The series is a locked room mystery set on a luxury cruise liner, one that has been built to look like its from the golden age of mystery down to the last detail (there’s some jokes about how hard it is to find 1930s towels, which I don’t think I’d want anyway). Patinkin plays Rufus Cotesworth, who is frequently described as “the world’s greatest detective,” a la Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. He was famous, but now he’s apparently kind of a hack and is working private security for rich people. This cruise liner is chock full of rich people who are all there to celebrate a mega-rich guy’s birthday or something. Among them is Imogene Scott, a non-rich but very clever young woman who has a history with Cotesworth. Death and Other Details has Only Murders in the Building envy, it has Knives Out on the brain and Nancy Drew in its closet. And it’s very fun, if a far lesser entry in the January detective lineup when compared against the other two. It is having a lot more fun with murder, in a way Kenneth Branagh would do well to take note of for any future Agatha Christie novels he wishes to mangle (Christie, after all, is all plot and no character, so there’s plenty of room to maneuver in an adaptation).
Imogene and Rufus represent a third kind of detective. If we go to Spade for his hardboiled stylish meanness, to the true detectives for their trauma-driven obsession, we go to these guys for the comfort of the magician. They can’t make the dead reappear, but they can reveal the killer with a flourish and make the audience gasp at their mysterious skill. These detectives have more in common with Pierce Brosnan’s Bond womanizing and stopping terrorists back to back and sometimes simultaneously or Mary Kate and Ashley, able to “solve any crime by dinner time.” These are detectives who may nominally claim an inciting trauma, but the superhero powers it’s given them are presented as basically worth it. Stories like this often have all the style of Spade but they’re somehow… snuggly, hence the genre’s most recognizable moniker, “cozy mysteries.”
It is no bad thing, to join the section of the pantheon that includes Nancy Drew and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and Scooby Doo. It’s the table most of us would want to sit at in the lunchroom. Which is all to say, Death and Other Details is the weakest of the three here, but also the most palatable and will probably be the most viewed and purely enjoyed. It is a very human impulse to take the unsettling and make it humor, to take a crime and make it something old ladies and dogs could solve. Should we ever get any cross-universe Avengers-style murder squad, my money will be on the cozy detectives making it out alive, with sense of humor intact. They have what the hardboiled and the true lack: resilience.