In one of
the vintage episodes of Law & Order,
Detectives Briscoe and Green (Jerry Orbach and Jesse L. Martin) are
investigating the murder of a young woman whose body was found in an alley. As
they look into the case, they begin to suspect it might be connected to the
disappearance of a female college student several years ago.
Thinking
out loud, the veteran Briscoe asks the question, what were both victims doing
when last seen? Answer: Leaving a place to go somewhere a considerable distance
away. Followup thought: Being in New York City, perhaps they both called a
taxi.
Going where
that line of thought leads them, they eventually turn up a thoroughly creepy
taxi driver, who turns out to have killed not only the two young women in
question, but many others as well. (No spoiler alert necessary. If you happen
to catch this one as a TNT re-run, that summary only took you to the beginning
of the real plot, which has to do with attorney-client privilege.)
No Sin Against Father Knox
At first
blush, Briscoe’s hunch might be considered a sin against the Ten Commandments
of mystery fiction, composed in 1929 by the Rev. Ronald A. Knox, a Catholic
priest, converted from Anglicanism, and one of the fine British writers of
mystery novels in the so-called Golden Age.
In that
long-gone era, mysteries were so popular that almost anybody who could write a
comprehensible one could get it published and sell a few thousand copies. Most
of those books are long forgotten, and justly so, and quite a few of them used
story elements now considered beyond the pale. That they are so considered owes
a great deal to Father Knox and his commandments.
Among them
were, “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of
course,” and “No more than one secret room or passage is allowable.” Other
strictures address such matters as the use of unknown poisons and having the
criminal be someone who turns up only at the end of the book.
Briscoe’s
hunch might at first seem to be a violation of the Sixth Commandment, which
reads, “No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an
unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.” The key word is
unaccountable. Briscoe didn’t just guess; he thought through what someone
logically might do in a situation and it led to the cracking of the case.
When The Crime Labs Can’t Solve It
The vogue
in crime fiction and drama these days is for the boys and girls in the lab to
solve the case by coming up with an encyclopedia’s worth of information from a
single strand of hair or whatever. That’s well and good as far as it goes, but
the crime scene doesn’t always yield enough evidence. Sometimes what it takes
is a detective asking a simple question, then following the trail to which it
leads.
One of the
most famous cases of the Twentieth Century was solved in precisely that
fashion. A psychopath was terrorizing New York with a series of murders in
which people were randomly approached and shot by a poorly seen figure who
quickly disappeared.
After
months of frustration, with the victim count mounting, one of the detectives
asked a question: How would he get away? Most likely he had a car, and in New
York, where parking is tight, he may have had to park illegally. The detective
searched through parking tickets issued in the vicinity of the crimes, and the
same car showed up more than once. That was how they caught David Berkowitz,
a.k.a Son of Sam.
