Roy Grace's investigations: British TV detectives and their curious investigative methods

Roy Grace's investigations

Life on Mars' John Simm returns to play a British police detective in Roy Grace's Investigations, an ITV-produced crime drama that premiered on March 6 on Sky Investigation and Now. The cases of the Brighton inspector are inspired by the novels of Peter James published in Italy by Longanesi, part of a long and honored tradition of detective story in English literature. From the seminal figures of classic thrillers - from Sherlock Holmes to Poirot passing Miss Marple - to the most recent protagonists of contemporary novels, most often end up becoming heroes and anti-heroes of the small screen alongside an equally large array of police officers equipped with investigative genius and intuition designed especially for television. We take the opportunity of the first TV of the miniseries dedicated to Roy Grace to review some of the investigators with the most bizarre and different methods of the recent British television tradition.

Roy Grace (Roy Grace's investigations): the method psychic Content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Roy is a middle-aged man surrounded by an eerie sad aura. Sloppy, depressed and with a tendency to get too emotionally involved with the loved ones of the victims, he has good reasons for so much sadness: his wife has disappeared, without a trace, for five years now, becoming the only case that Grace has never had. Resolved . Treated with distrust by his superior and with reverence by his younger partner, the detective boasts an extraordinary approach to accumulating clues: the use of a psychic. Equipped with a map and a pendulum, his favorite medium looks for corpses or presumed corpses. Roy has complete trust in it, but the paranormal has not yet been able to help him with the mystery of the vanished companion.

Gene Hunt (Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes): the manesco method Content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Head of Sam Tyler (another plaintive detective played by John Simm) in the cult crime series Life on Mars and then the star of Ashes to Ashes, Gene Hunt is an old-time cop, in the sense that he firmly believes in the long-standing habit of stepping on suspects until they confess. Considered an orthodox method and of conventional use by the Manchester police in the 1970s, it proves valid up to a certain point: in the end even the innocent are self-accused. Over time, and thanks to the influence of the more civilized Tyler, Hunt will tend to resort less frequently to slaps and phones used as weapons, but this method will remain his favorite throughout his career.

Vivienne Deering (No Offence): the female method she is a shrewd, manipulative, protective woman who, due to a series of coincidences, finds herself facing important and complicated cases with her team, such as the crimes of a serial killer and an attack during a ceremony. Pragmatic, ironic and seemingly aloof, Viv stands out from most of her fellow detectives in showing admirable empathy and respect towards the people involved in her cases. The finale of the second season is one of the most touching ever seen in a police drama, English or otherwise.

John Luther (Luther): the personal method Content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Detective of the London homicide, the protagonist of the eponymous series owes his talent in solving cases to his extremely personal approach that makes it increasingly difficult to keep his distance from criminals. Luther gets totally involved in the investigation, which makes him aggressive, obsessive and vengeful. In many ways much more like an outlaw than a member of the police who enforces them, he himself resorts to illicit methods. His relationship with the irresistible psychopath Alice, whom he strenuously hunts down but with whom he will end up having a tumultuous relationship, makes him the least orthodox policeman in this ranking.

Father Brown (Father Brown): the religious method Content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Catholic parish priest of an English village in the 1950s, the priest who lends his name to this rural yellow belongs to the peculiar category of the religious detectives including (his) contemporary Grantchester, the medieval monk Cadfael of The Crimes of the Abbey, the American cousin Father Dowling and the most distinguished example of the genre, the English friar William of Baskerville of The Name of the pink. All have literary origins; the crimes they investigate take place in the upper and lower Middle Ages and in the 1950s, ie before the advent of modern investigative methods facilitated by fingerprints, DNA analysis and video surveillance systems. Father Brown, on the strength of a (un) fortune worthy of the Lady in Yellow who leads him to live in a microscopic village but full of murdered deaths, solves cases thanks to the intuition and knowledge of the soul of his parishioners.