Underrated Fictional Detectives
Ask most readers to mention a fictional detective, and the odds are pretty good they’ll mention at least one of the following: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Philip Marlowe, Dick Tracy, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys.
But there are plenty of other detectives who don’t get as much time in the limelight, though they are well-loved and appreciated by readers of detective fiction.
Dirk Gently
Douglas Adams gave the world intergalactic hitchhikers, dolphins who can tell when the end of the world is nigh, and build-your-own-planet workshops, among other marvels and oddities. But he also gave the world Dirk Gently: a “holistic detective”: a detective that sees the connections between all things in life, the universe, and everything. Dirk starred in two books: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Unlike detectives who deal with the more usual kind of suspects and witnesses, a typical day in the life of Dirk Gently may find him and his cronies dealing with Nordic gods who got stuck on Earth on their way to Valhalla, extraterrestrial beings who create beautiful music, or an airline ticket counter clerk who’s suddenly been turned into a soda vending machine. Oh, yes, and the occasional murder as well.
George Gently
Not to be confused with Dirk, Inspector George Gently is the creation of novelist Alan Hunter. The forty-six books are set in the east of England, predominantly Norfolk, in the 1960s and 1970s. The books were later adapted into the Inspector George Gently television series starring Martin Shaw; the series moved the action to the northeast of England, mainly in the area of County Durham, Northumberland, and Newcastle. As befits a series set in a time when the world was rapidly changing, Gently and his colleagues often find themselves in the middle of cases involving civil rights, women’s rights, spies, the IRA, the military, and changing attitudes toward the police.
Jack Spratt
Yes, this is Jack as in the “Jack Sprat could eat no fat.” And who may be the same Jack that built the house, climbed the beanstalk, and accomplished any number of other nursery rhyme feats. He is also one of the starring detectives in the Nursery Crimes books by Jasper Fforde: a spinoff from Fforde’s Thursday Next series.
Jack is divorced from the “wife who could eat no lean”, and now has a blended family with his new wife Madeleine, his children from his first marriage, her children from her own previous marriage, and a new baby boy. And his daughter’s boyfriend, the Greek god Prometheus. (It’s complicated.)
Jack and his colleague Mary Mary (quite contrary) originally appeared as secondary characters in The Well of Lost Plots: characters living in a sort of limbo in an unfinished detective novel. But redemption comes (and the fourth wall is well and truly broken) when Jack and Mary, through Thursday’s intervention, get the chance to star in a nursery rhyme-themed series of crime books.
The first book, The Big Over Easy, involves a murder, and what a murder it is: Humpty Dumpty’s big fall off the wall may not have been an accident. The second book, The Fourth Bear, throws the most famous case of fairy-tale burglary into question: was it really Goldilocks who ate the smallest bowl of porridge, or is something more sinister afoot?
Jules Maigret
When readers think of the twentieth century’s so-called Golden Age of detective fiction, they generally tend to think of British or American authors. But France and Belgium were well represented during that era by Jules Maigret, the creation of Belgian-born author Georges Simenon. The powerfully built Parisian detective with a fondness for pipe smoking and a keen interest in psychology made his debut in 1931’s The Strange Adventure of Peter the Lett.
Between 1931 and 1972, Maigret starred in seventy-five novels and twenty-eight short stories.
As a young man, Maigret joined the Paris police force as an officer, and worked his way up the ranks to eventually become commissioner. He is a family man, married to his wife Louise. The marriage is generally a happy one, even if Louise generally refers to her husband rather than by his given name, at his insistence.
For Maigret, it is not enough to discover who committed the crime. It is crucial to understand why as well.
Like Poirot, Maigret has his own version of order and method. For Maigret, one of the most crucial aspects of an investigation is to understand the psychology of the victim and the suspects, and he will often put himself in another person’s shoes in order to determine why a crime was committed.
Tommy and Tuppence
Before there were Nick and Nora Charles, there were Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. Agatha Christie’s bantering “Young Adventurers” made their debut in 1922, a good decade-plus before Dashiel Hammett introduced Nick and Nora in The Thin Man. The first book, The Secret Adversary, found Tommy and Tuppence–both young and unemployed in London immediately after the end of World War I–setting up a detective agency, both as a source of excitement and as a source of much-needed income. Their very first case sets them on the hunt for a missing packet of top-secret documents and pits them against a band of nefarious villains both domestic and international. Over the decades, Tommy and Tuppence would appear in four more books, do more spying and sleuthing–including as Britain entered World War II–start a family, and eventually settle down into retired life (or at least, as much as the regular intrusions of crime and derring-do will allow them to).
Parker Pyne
“Are you happy? If not, consult Parker Pyne.”
C. Parker Pyne is another Christie detective who doesn’t quite get the same limelight as Poirot and Miss Marple, but is beloved by readers all the same. Pyne is a retired civil servant living quietly in London. His career has done well enough to afford him many opportunities to travel around the world. But more often than not, when Pyne goes away on vacation, he will spend that vacation sorting out someone’s thorny problem.
Unlike Poirot and Miss Marple, Pyne generally doesn’t have anything to do with murder. Most of his business involves sorting out problems of the heart: people who are unhappy in their marriages, wives wondering what to do when their husbands get a wandering eye, and so on. However, Pyne does sort out the occasional theft, foils the plans of a group of jewel thieves-turned kidnappers, and has a little chat with a husband about why it’s not a good idea to secretly substitute one’s wife’s jewelry with paste imitations.
Sergeant Cuff
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone is seen as one of the earliest examples of the detective novel as modern readers know it. The titular diamond–looted from a temple in India–is given to society girl (and heiress) Rachel Verinder as an eighteenth birthday present, but the same diamond mysteriously vanishes during the night.
In comes Sergeant Richard Cuff of Scotland Yard, who is a most unusual detective. He is a gloomy, dour man with an unusual interest: the growing of roses. While speaking with Franklin Blake about the Moonstone’s disappearance, Cuff makes regular remarks about the different varieties of roses growing on the estate grounds, even getting into a not-so-friendly debate with the gardener.
Detective fiction is full of sleuths who have interesting or unusual hobbies outside of work. Cuff, in his own way, is a spiritual ancestor to Nero Wolfe, with his passion for growing orchids.
Cuff disappears for a while in the second half of the book, but returns near the end to tie things up. It is revealed that he has been conducting his own investigation outside what is documented in the book. He presents all of this in a nice, neat, methodical report, in a manner that both Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot would have approved of.
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Erin Roll is a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader. Her favorite genres to read are mystery, science fiction, and fantasy, and her TBR pile is likely to be visible on Google Maps. Before becoming an editor, Erin worked as a journalist and photographer, and she has won far too many awards from the New Jersey Press Association. Erin lives at the top floor of a haunted house in Montclair, NJ. She enjoys reading (of course), writing, hiking, kayaking, music, and video games.