Strategy

There is no doubt that there are, if not formulas, at least recipes for most fiction. These change over time as tastes in protagonists change, worries over crime wax and wane, and society turns from one set of problems to another.

The ever popular UK procedural is a nice example. Almost always well acted and often well scripted, it mixes and matches a variety of familiar characters, situations, and crimes. These are instantly recognizable to fans of the genre. There's the crusty, but savvy, DCI and his or her gifted, but occasionally difficult, subordinate. There's the clueless superior and the often snobby top brass. These come as part of a still functioning class system, often a target for up from the ranks coppers with no interest in making nice with the entitled.

Then there's the suspects, preferably both colorful and plausible, and the victim. The latter come in two varieties: young, beautiful, and regretted, or unmourned and not missed. You get the picture.

Unforgotten, a well made UK import now in its sixth season, is currently appearing on Masterpiece (PBS).  I have not seen earlier seasons but clearly the show has been popular in the UK. Season six suggests that its creators are unafraid to tweak the formula. They do this in two ways, in the highly cooperative and egalitarian relationship between DCI Jess James (Sinead Keenan) and her trusted colleague DI Sunny Kahn (Sanjeev Basjklar) and, even more importantly, in the characters of the all important persons of interest.

Possible perpetrators are usually a rum lot, each full of the big and little vices that lead mortals to murder and beyond. Not so in Unforgotten. There are four principle suspects, each with a significant other, who might or might not be involved as well. And here's the thing, they are all sympathetic, and not just sympathetic, but often admirable. What's more, each has been dealt a difficult hand. We have a college teacher bedeviled by sanctimonious students and spineless administrators and a young, autistic man with a bedridden mother. We have an Afghan refugee who has faced both danger at home and horrors abroad, and a provocative right wing pundit whose lover struggles to recover from a devastating spinal injury. 

In each case, our suspects are responsible for difficult but vulnerable companions: a rebellious teenaged daughter, that bedridden mother, the crippled lover, and a newly arrived Afghan without papers. Impossible not to root for these folks.

This cast of suspects – and they are, indeed, suspects, with forensic evidence against them, as well as quick tempers, family problems, and detectible lies – alters the nature of suspense in Unforgotten. How often do procedurals harvest tension from the unknown killer, set to strike again? The plot of this procedural rules out that strategy: the victim has been dead for four years and there were plenty of folks who disliked him. His murder was no random killing.

Instead, what keeps the viewer uneasy is the question: which of these basically decent people not only killed Jerry Cooper but dismembered him? And how could someone that we'd hate to to see in the clink take saw and knife to his carcass?

Good questions and the twin difficulties for the Unforgotten's script must have lain in selecting the appropriate killer and in reaching a solution that is both legit and consoling. I think they managed. The Unforgotten ends on rare notes of reconciliation, unusual in crime dramas but perhaps just the tone that is needed today. 

 *****

The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11