Murder Most Trivial

by Robbie Rae

Of all the crimes man can commit, the most heinous of all is unquestionably murder.

This is backed up by the severity of the sentence it carries: life imprisonment or the death penalty.

The victims of murder are not just the dead, but also the living the dead leave behind. The former pay with their lives, while the latter are left to mourn their loved ones with unimaginable bitterness at the fact that the loss came at the hand of another person (the ultimate in defeat).

It’s surely something that stays with you every day for the rest of your life, such is the absence of any kind of adequate closure.

So when you take all that into account, you’d think we might take it a little more … well … seriously

What I mean is this.

Dr. Mark Sloan is the protagonist in the show ‘Diagnosis Murder’. He works in a hospital and, as a sideline, likes to solve multiple murders with his son, Steve, who happens to be a police detective. I suppose you could say solving murders is Dr Sloan’s hobby. Someone gets killed and then Dr. Sloan, in between being doing his surgical work, solves the case. Something for which I presume the shellshocked living relatives are enormously grateful.

This light-hearted and badly-produced show ran for 8 years on CBS.

This mesmeric maltese-looking chap is ‘Detective’ Adrian Monk. He has OCD and the comic corollary of his condition is the uncanny knack of spotting details that can help solve murder cases. He’s not even a homicide detective any more. But murder seems to follow him wherever he goes. When he goes on holiday, there’s a murder. When he goes to the bank, there’s a murder. Even his wife was murdered. And in his own bumbling way Monk manages to solve all of them.

The final episode of this light-hearted murder comedy, in which Adrian solves the murder of his wife, holds the record for the most watched scripted drama episode in cable television history.

Watch your back, brutal killers of the innocent. It’s an old lady with a magnifying glass (essential equipment in all serious investigations). And she’s onto you. Jessica Fletcher is a novelist who also has a sideline interest in solving gruesome and tragic murders. She is co-opted by the police to … well, by now you get the picture.

Jessica’s trashy little show ‘Murder, she wrote’ ran to 12 seasons on US TV.

Here’s a fictional colonel with a colorful surname and a conical constitution. He’s a character in the popular children’s board game about murder.

We’ve all played it.

You see this pattern of glibness emerging?

Is it not a little strange that the worst crime of all, with the most severe sentences, which destroys lives in the most horrific ways … is it not strange that this crime should be treated in such a trivial way in popular culture?

To test this absurdity, maybe we could try subsituting murder with a few crimes which carry a lesser penalty of law.

Can I for a moment suggest we create a board game about child abuse? I dunno, rather than ‘Cluedo’ we could call it ‘Paedo’.

Was it Reverend Purple in the library? Or Stepfather Pink in the bedroom?

Or a TV show called ‘It looks like Rape, Doctor’, in which a comical ophthalmologist with dyslexia makes good his troubles with the written word to think laterally about cases in which women have been sexually assaulted. It will be badly acted, scripted and produced. But it’s targetted mainly at a daytime demographic, so it’s fine, right?

Is it likely that the boardgame would be a success across generations? Or the TV show would run for 8 seasons or so?

I imagine it’s more likely that people would think I was a disgusting and twisted fuck and tell me to get out of their office at the commissioning stage.

But murder?

Murder’s trashy and fun.

Unless, you know, you happen to be one of the victims of the crime and have to be reminded of it every day by the lowest representations of the tragedy you could possibly imagine.