It’s been a few years since I reviewed the Murder, She Wrote episode Murder In a Minor Key. I recently re-watched that episode and re-read my review and while I don’t take back a single thing I said in the review, I do think that I missed something, because in spite of all of the cheesiness and the plot holes, there is something captivating about that episode.

On reflection, I think that for all of its foibles (such as a tuning fork being used as a murder weapon) and plot holes (a woman carrying on an affair and saying that her lover wasn’t involved because her husband was “her problem” killing her husband in a moment of frustration because he neglected her), it did capture the sense of excitement and adventure that golden age mysteries had.

The first element of this is that it had a sense of something unusual breaking into the ordinary. This is often missing from Murder, She Wrote episodes because there are, generally, long-standing hatreds and rivalries established early on. Here, we have an apparently placid environment which suddenly breaks down. That’s much more of a golden-age feel, and also produces much more of a sense of mystery. “Which of the people who hated the victim finally got him?” is a fine question, but it’s not nearly so much a golden-age question.

Another major element of the golden-age mystery is the helplessness of the police, to the point of them barely investigating. This can be taken almost to the point of being silly, and this was remarked upon even during the Golden Age. Consider the opening of G.K. Chesterton’s short story The Mirror of the Magistrate, first published in 1925:

JAMES BAGSHAW and Wilfred Underhill were old friends, and were fond of rambling through the streets at night, talking interminably as they turned corner after corner in the silent and seemingly lifeless labyrinth of the large suburb in which they lived. The former, a big, dark, good-humoured man with a strip of black moustache, was a professional police detective; the latter, a sharp-faced, sensitive-looking gentleman with light hair, was an amateur interested in detection. It will come as a shock to the readers of the best scientific romance to learn that it was the policeman who was talking and the amateur who was listening, even with a certain respect.

“Ours is the only trade,” said Bagshaw, “in which the professional is always supposed to be wrong. After all, people don’t write stories in which hairdressers can’t cut hair and have to be helped by a customer; or in which a cabman can’t drive a cab until his fare explains to him the philosophy of cab-driving. For all that, I’d never deny that we often tend to get into a rut: or, in other words, have the disadvantages of going by a rule. Where the romancers are wrong is, that they don’t allow us even the advantages of going by a rule.”

“Surely,” said Underhill, “Sherlock Holmes would say that he went by a logical rule.”

“He may be right,” answered the other; “but I mean a collective rule. It’s like the staff work of an army. We pool our information.”

“And you don’t think detective stories allow for that?” asked his friend.

“Well, let’s take any imaginary case of Sherlock Holmes, and Lestrade, the official detective. Sherlock Holmes, let us say, can guess that a total stranger crossing the street is a foreigner, merely because he seems to look for the traffic to go to the right instead of the left. I’m quite ready to admit Holmes might guess that. I’m quite sure Lestrade wouldn’t guess anything of the kind. But what they leave out is the fact that the policeman, who couldn’t guess, might very probably know. Lestrade might know the man was a foreigner merely because his department has to keep an eye on all foreigners; some would say on all natives, too. As a policeman I’m glad the police know so much; for every man wants to do his own job well. But as a citizen, I sometimes wonder whether they don’t know too much.”

This would be taken into account in later detective stories; it became common for the amateur to work with the police and leave to the police the things that the police are good at, such as knocking on every door for three blocks and asking everyone if they saw something until they find someone who did, or asking every hardware store within a hundred miles if they recently sold a large crescent wrench to someone who did not look like a plumber. Indeed, Poirot would come to say that it is for the police to assemble the facts and for Poirot to figure out what they mean. This is eminently reasonable and in some sense an improvement in the genre, but that development did trade something for what it gained: anyone might go and investigate for himself; the police will only cooperate with a select few.

Murder in a Minor Key had that feeling of the main characters doing something that anyone could do. Chad and Jenny were just college students who happened to be friends with the composer who was accused of the crime. They had no official connections with anyone, no credentials, and until the end, no cooperation from anyone. (How they got cooperation for the re-enactment is not explained because I don’t think it could possibly have been justified. The police detective who is present says that he’s only there because the school asked him to cooperate, but why on earth did the school ask him to cooperate?)

This sort of setup is very hard to do well, but it is also very exciting, and that can make up for a lot.