Detective Fictions and Movies

Being jobless for one month, I realize I can actually do whatever I want to as long as the law allows. It's always a great treatment to wake up late in the morning, comfortably lying on the bed and reading a few pages of detective fictions. I bought half of Agatha Christie's collection in high school, and finished most works of Seicho Matsumoto and Higashiro Keigo during my idle days in Peking University, both of whom are pretty good at creating a creepy and dreary atmosphere. There was a time when I didn't dare to walk through the long aisle in the dormitory alone at night to use the bathroom located at the other end of the aisle. But still, I enjoyed guessing who's the murder as I turned the pages, like most audience, I changed my answers from time to time and was always surprised by the end. 

Detective fictions are much more fun than movies of its kind - murders in movies are much easier to identify. When you see a famous actor/actress in the movie who however is not a detective, it's very likely he/she is the murderer. If some suspects are arrested by the (usually arrogant and stupid) police half an hour before the end of the movie, undoubtedly they've got the wrong person. If some good-looking people provide a perfect alibi, nine out of ten he/she is the murderer. Well, "Murder on the Orient Express" is an exception to all the rules above, but how likely is it to have 12 murderers in a case?

Among all the detective movies I've ever seen, one of the worst adaptation is "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" (2000), whose original fiction is a masterpiece, and my second favorite Agatha Christie's book. It is difficult to adapt a book whose narrator is actually the murder into a movie, but at least you shouldn't say things like "this is a journal in which the murderer had taken the trouble to record for posterity" in 90 seconds after the movie starts. The best part of this story is thus ruined at the beginning of the movie, which reminds me of another story. A guy borrowed a detective manga from library. When he turned to the second page, he found a character circled by some previous reader with a footnote aside: this is the murder. This is exactly how I felt when I watched "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd". I have no idea how the audience manage to sit still in the theater for the next 98 minutes.


Even if results are not leaked by adaptation and actors/actresses, movies are still less fun because much information is missed. Under a time constraint of 2-3 hours, the director shoot plots directly related to the story, but hints and side stories are always removed. I understand it's tedious to show everything in the book on screen, but as a fan of detective fictions, the story after filtering is no longer "authentic".  Also, you can probably enjoy the joy of thinking more by turning back to previous pages when some clues occur during reading, which is not feasible in theater. Btw, I think it can be very helpful to develop a spreadsheet of alibi to find out who's lying.


I've never read contemporary detective fictions, but I'd imagine both murder and detection will be very different with high techs - just as the BBC TV series Sherlock shows. However my favorite genre of detective fictions are still those old-fashioned ones whose detectives can solve cases without fingerprint verification or computer hacking, but logic and reasoning only, as what Poirot did in the "Sin under the Sun". The golden age is gone, but stories last.