I’m always intrigued by the dissonance inherent in the ubiquitous detective-show conceit which features a well-read or know-it-all genius detective with an impressive academic pedigree and a strong humanities background.
This dissonance lies in the notion that someone with humanities training, which places enormous value on human collective achievement and freedoms, would wind up putting that training to best use as part of an institution whose very nature is to punish, a process which is intrinsically dehumanizing. In life, the police are the agents by whose mobilization the state may rob people of their lives, of their futures, of their liberty, of their humanity. Which begs the question, why would someone with a humanities degree find fulfillment in employment like this?
The necessary answer, as well as the obvious one, is that the police system as it is represented in detective television shows, and all mass-consumed mystery stories concerning the police, is hardly realistic, being both extraordinarily benevolent and exceedingly necessary. In detective shows, the police detective solves crimes, by and large, to safeguard the downtrodden, help the ill-used, and avenge the mistreated—to catch assaulters, torturers, murderers, terrorists, Ponzi schemers, money launderers, corrupt officials, to prevent them from hurting people ever again or to return things to their rightful guardians.
In fiction, the punishment of the criminals is backgrounded—the story usually ends when the criminal is exposed and caught. These detectives are construed as both protective and compassionate, always working hard and doing the right thing. They bring safety, happiness, and fairness to a world after someone has attempted to upend this dynamic. In fictions of the police, more than anything else, the police restore goodness to a world that is, by default, good, removing the malefactors who choose to terrorize it.
In these fictions, being a police officer is heroic, even godly work, and not just anyone is cut out for the job. The ideal candidate, as it’s represented often, is brave and capable and cunning, yes, but also erudite and worldly. This detective usually has significant knowledge of seventeenth-century opera and Renaissance art and Roman history and probably speaks Latin. He can decode all your codes and cyphers, solve your riddles and your puzzles, maybe plays the violin, definitely plays the piano. If you quote anything, he’ll respond by telling you who said it, with a small, approving nod.
This archetype comes to life in characters like the Oxford-educated Inspector E. Morse in Colin Dexter’s novels as well as the television adaptations Inspector Morse and Endeavour, Ngaio Marsh’s Eton and Oxford-educated inspector Roderick Alleyn, P.D. James’s longtime police detective Adam Dalgliesh, the Cambridge-educated Inspector Lynley in the BBC program of the same name, even Brooklyn Nine-Nines Captain Ray Holt, a connoisseur of classical music and an antique globe collector who is angered by etymological ignorance and is married to a Columbia University classics professor.
Sometimes this figure isn’t officially a member of the police, but works specifically for them, like the CI Neal Caffrey in USA’s White Collar (who does not have a formal education but is fortunately an expert on everything in art history), and even Adrian Monk in Monk, who attended UC Berkeley and has an encyclopedic mind. Sometimes this character is a woman, like the well-educated and high-born Sgt (Lady) Harriet Makepeace from Dempsey and Makepeace. Sometimes, this detective is a member of the clergy, and therefore highly educated, like James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers, or G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown.
Detective shows have developed this relationship further: there seem to be two main categories of exemplary, “well-educated” investigator: the streetwise, working-class detective, and the erudite, urbane individual. Most of the crew of Law and Order seem to have been educated in New York’s City University (CUNY) system, while Olivia Benson, of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, is the daughter of a college professor and can speak English, French, and Russian, as well as some Spanish, and attended Siena College, a Franciscan Liberal-Arts institution. In many cases, as in Inspector Lynley or White Collar, the polished and cerebral investigator and the career cop character with working-class origins end up teaming up. But the detective show’s formula suggests two modes: a character who is a good detective partially because they have been in this milieu for their whole lives, and the character who is a good detective partially due to a large education and numerous, polished skills that would easily suggest they do something much more highbrow, for a living.
I call this latter trope the “scholar detective,” but it is a version of another historic mystery conceit, that of the gentleman detective—a figure that has existed since the first detective known to literature, C. Auguste Dupin, a rare book collector who solves crimes that baffle the police. Dupin was created by Edgar Allan Poe, and appeared in three stories from 1841 to 1844. And certainly, the scholar detective trope knows no greater fame than as embodied by Sherlock Holmes, whose consulting detective side-hustle was made financially possible by his other job of writing academic, anthropological texts.
Detectives like Dupin and Holmes are men of knowledge and culture, but not exactly of leisure—in the ways Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot are. Still, most of the scholarly detectives that have graced fiction since the nineteenth century were amateurs, whose education and critical-thinking skills contrasted them with the more coarsely-characterized, ineffective, working-class police detectives on the force.
But, especially in the last thirty years, many popular and contemporary detective stories have played with these tropes, casting their intellectuals not as amateur sleuths but as actual police officers. In works like these, among many others, “the police” becomes the prescribed occupational outlet for someone with tremendous historical, philosophical, and artistic knowledge—someone “a cut above”—who wants to do real, practical good with all of this knowledge. The frequency with which this appears makes me wonder if “police detective” is the answer pop culture most eagerly provides to the question “what does one do with a humanities degree?”
*
In 1975, the philosopher Michel Foucault wrote that “police and prison form a twin mechanism,” and this inextricable duality is conveniently left out by detective shows. So are all other elements which represent the modern carceral system as it exists, in real life: as one which reduces prisoners to namelessness, abhors community, punishes with isolation, hinders creativity, destroys families, and removes fundamental human rights.
In life, most of the people who wind up in prisons are there because they are already vulnerable, either economically, socially, or medically (including psychologically), or because they are targeted by the system specifically. Prison removes individuals from society, and in doing so alienates them from it; when it releases them, they are returned without their previous freedoms, rights, prospects, reputations. The police and the prison system are inexorably linked, and operate, as Michel Foucault has written, “as a circuit that is never interrupted. Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send a number of them back to prison.” It is overly brutal to the powerless, while it is also overly clement to the powerful.
In 2020, in light of the protests over the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the many other black men and women who have suffered or died at the hands of the police, the television police procedural was scrutinized more widely than it had been before (although activists like Rashad Robinson have been calling the genre for what it is, for years). The detective procedural is a vehicle which inaccurately represents the institution of the police as being motivated by humanitarianism and which often excuses coercive or problematic behavior by cop characters as necessary for the sake of the greater good.
Critically, as writer Courtney Kemp has pointed out, these shows represent a justice system that isn’t white supremacist; unlike real life, almost no one in a police procedural or mystery novel or television show will be arrested or tortured or killed because they are black. “On TV — unlike reality — rarely is someone arrested because of his/her/their race. They are arrested because they are the guilty party — a fact backed up by evidence and interviews that the audience witnesses in real time, by good police work and, in the case of our favorite national fetish, DNA. And when our law enforcement characters get things wrong and mistakenly convict an innocent man, they do their best to find the correct guilty party.” In these shows, the justice system is fair, and the officers working are moral.
Indeed, in many fictional representations of the well-educated police detective, from Golden Age classics to contemporary prestige television, the detective solves severe crimes. Occasionally assaults, sometimes rapes, mostly murders. Countless murders, serial murders, baffling murders. Making these serious crimes the domain of the well-educated detective accomplishes several things. One, it provides an imperative, a critical danger, which justifies the police and the entire justice system to begin with. In many cases, the goal is to identify the perpetrator, and put him behind bars, a setting he deserves for the nature of his crimes. When a serious crime has been committed by accident and there has been some sort of cover-up (as is the case in many episodes of Britain’s long-running Midsomer Murders, for example), the shows are sympathetic, but not condemnatory, of the inconvenient prison system that lies beyond the dénouement, often shrugging off the unfortunate outcome as having to lie in one’s already-made bed.
This trope most easily presents the element which might be considered the soul of the mystery story: an unsolvable puzzle. A crime scene with a dead body and no perpetrator is the ultimate conundrum, one which requires critical thinking and close-reading skills if justice is to be served. In other words, these programs force high-stakes practical applications out from scholarly instruction. Yes, the detective (in all the forms and genres in which he/she/they appear) is a reader above all else, and then also a kind of writer. Paul Auster has famously explored this paralleling of the detective as reader and writer in his New York Trilogy, most notably the first installment, “City of Glass.”
But making a police detective a humanities scholar also reads humanity literally out of the humanities, interpreting humanities education as a kind of cerebral manufacturing plant for a conscience. This detective (whom I refer to as a “he” because the well-educated detective is a traditionally masculine archetype) seems invested in the lives of his fellow men, even if he is gruff or prickly. He is a guardian, a protector, ultimately moved by social empathy and responsibility. Those various maniacs who break with this bond, your opera-loving serial killers and art-obsessed criminal masterminds (as in a particularly salient episode of Endeavour), are seen as all the more terrible because they ape this development, and therefore violate it; with their love for languages or history or art does not come a love for the species who made those things.
This last bit is not a crime; as I’ve just said, the murder mystery has always been primarily concerned with, and has been employed as a metaphor for, a kind of epistemology (the discipline of knowledge-gathering). Just as literary scholars and historians hunt through texts and archives to piece together meaning within them, so does the literary-minded detective root through these crime scenes and tomes alike, searching for clues, putting them together to make arguments about intent, effect, meaning, and purpose.
The mystery genre, which is leagues away from the real “mysteries” that the real police must solve, is above all, a literary design—which means its bester, solver, must be a literary figure. It’s ironic, really, how the mystery genre must rely on a cultural understanding of the police, and yet ask it to function completely differently. The idea that “police detective” has become, in literature, the sort of ideal endpoint for someone who has accrued so much knowledge clashes, almost humorously, with real life. To become a police officer of any kind in New York City, for example, one must have earned 60 credits from a two-year-college or served in the military for a commensurate amount of time.
But, although a well-educated police detective like an Endeavour Morse or a Roderick Alleyn is ultimately a fictional creature, the pedigree of that character can be tracked to real questions about the purpose of a humanities education and its function in maintaining a colonialist, or at least white/Western, sense of order.
This question clearly tracks to the Victorian era; when asked what Oxbridge grads should do with their humanities degrees, the famous Oxford professor Benjamin Jowett declared that they should take the foreign office exam and become colonial administrators. In keeping with this imperialistic impulse, by and large, humanities programs have not separated themselves from a tradition which offers the western world cultural hegemony.
Thus, in many of these shows, the ways in which “the best detective on the force” is often a well-educated white male savant with a brain-library of western literature/history, reveal how idealized Western “education” and Western “policing” are deeply historically intertwined, both being rooted in a kind of imperialist, white supremacist tradition that originally sought to elevate a certain class of white men above non-white or non-Western men, and which linked the privilege of education to the right of control. These characters are also given great justification for their police work; they save humanity from predators (an excuse which is similar to justifications of British colonial policing), which gives further credence to the worldview they promote.
Similar examples from adventure or thriller stories give us characters like Indiana Jones or Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code—professors and academic experts who become detective-like figures, traversing the world, collecting artifacts and solving puzzles and offering input on historical or cultural traditions that they have decided to clarify for their own audiences. (To be clear, here, I’m not talking about the aspects of the Indiana Jones movies that involve saving historical objects from Nazis. That is very important and fights back against a current of white supremacism!)
On the level of craft, I think some of the smartest mystery programs are the ones which understand this trope and play with its expectations. Endeavour, which ran for nine seasons from 2013-2023 and is responsible for some of the greatest television “mystery” episodes I’ve ever seen, attempts to point out the fictionality of its main character, the brilliant, opera-adoring Oxford dropout Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans), slightly. Throughout the course of the series, Morse’s jovial friend, Jim Strange, is promoted from friendly constable to higher and higher positions because he isn’t a difficult figure for the police to embrace. And, throughout the seasons, he slowly conforms more to the ignorant and cultish police culture, forcing Morse to stand even more alone in both his quest for justice and his hunger for knowledge.
In this way, it is possible to read Endeavour’s Morse as ultimately a kind of fiction, an exception which might prove the rule about the nature of the police, overall. But the fact that Morse is the best detective in Oxford, for who he is and what he knows, also clinches the distance between the mystery genre and the entities it represents.
