“If you touch her, I will not hesitate to break every bone in your hand.”
A/N: I decided that I’ll be doing prompt fills/writing requests in between my longer fics! If you have any prompts or requests you’d like to see, shoot me an ask with the prompt, character(s) and/or ship you’d like! They’ll probably be between 3k-5k but with my track record, who knows.
Anyway, onto the fic!
Prompt: “If you touch her, I will not hesitate to break every bone in your hand.” Requester: @beetlejuicebrainrot Warnings: Predatory behavior (some schmuck), mild violence Word Count: 1,786 Read on AO3
And Jonathan Creek solves crimes by making everything about his special interest and having an annoying nosy bitch friend who likes reading people for filth when it’s as inconvenient for them as possible
I LOVE murder mystery and I’m by no means an expert in it but I’ve seen enough examples of the genre across its history (mainly focused on British examples of the genre bc my tastes tend towards tropes that link back to the Golden Age aka Agatha Christie’s most prolific years) to say that I find the broad trends and how the genre has developed FASCINATING.
Like, taking the above detectives as keynote examples and focusing almost solely on British trends. You start off with guys who are portrayed as superhuman intelligent, then you add emotional and social context, then you get detectives who do all of the above but also pretend to be stupid, and then in the 80s/90s we had this wave of hyper-specific non-detectives that solved crime in niche ways. Dirk Gently is more detective fiction and sci fi than strictly murder mystery, but Jonathan Creek solving crime using his background in magic tricks is a good one, and there’s also Rosemary and Thyme, which is about two women solving crime using their background in gardening and horticulture (I liked it mostly but also found it frustrating because they only used the most obvious poisons and they were right there it’s like LADIES you are standing in a field of foxgloves going “I wonder what could have caused burning on the skin and respiratory issues and sudden death”). Then in the 90s onwards you also have the blurring of the procedural and the murder mystery with long-running shows about one (1) village that has so many murders you start to wonder how there can be anyone left to do the murders/be murdered next week/solve the murder.
And I’m soooo obsessed with Benoit Blanc because he takes notes from Christie trope-wise (it is correct to gather all the suspects into a luxurious house and pull some dramatic nonsense to get a confession), but instead of the billionth stale and misguided take on Holmes (superhuman intelligence, emotions bad, we must be objective) he takes character notes from Columbo and Marple (“I don’t care if you think I’m stupid lol xoxo gossip girl”), Poirot (“I have good intuition for emotional context and I believe it is vital and also I’m just a weird little guy”), Father Brown and Dirk Gently (will randomly say shit that makes you want to go “what ??????”), and he has so much flavour of his own. If all the little crime guys above solve crime x way, Benoit Blanc solves crime by being patient. Which, in our current world where everything is now and if it isn’t now it’s already ancient, and you have to finish it today, and 9 new cool things might happen in the next week and you can’t partake in all of them, and everything is on sale 75% off just for 24 hours, and you have to buy this and go here and take this opportunity
He is just sittin there quietly, hitting keys on his piano and waiting for gravity to bring the truth to him.
um wrong, columbo solves crimes by being a lil baby boy and extremely adorable!!!
