William Link, cocreator of Columbo, speaks. My educated guess is that the interview, of which this video is just a brief excerpt, is from sometime in the 90s.
It's interesting that he advises young screenwriters to read old murder mysteries. Interesting and canny. The "pop" that he talks about, quoting Peter Falk, is applicable to a lot of kinds of stories. And there are ways to set it up. You might not figure out the latter part until some revisions have been done. Everyone's different.
He's pretty much right that the inverted mystery was new to TV, even if some Victorian fiction writers had experimented with it.
2 comments:
That was a fascinating excerpt of an interview with William Link. He's right to advise young television writers to read more mystery books in order to understand how to write a clever plot. It was shocking to hear that even in the 90s writers weren't reading.
Ah yes, the pop is that moment when the detective notices a crucial detail that was previously overlooked, and this new insight leads to the truth. I love those stories.
The first example of an inverted detective story I thought of was Malice Aforethought (1931) by Francis Iles that was written before television and almost before movies.
I don't know if you ever read any of VanGulik's Judge Dee books but it was he who introduced me to the fact that all the old Chinese mystery novels were inverted mysteries. Van Gulik, who was a diplomat with an interest in Chinese literature, discovered Judge Dee (Dee Goong An), a magistrate during the Confucian era who investigated crimes and determined punishment. VanGulik translated the first novel and went on to write more.
Link knows (well, knew) whereof he speaks. He and Levinson wrote all kinds of things, including The Execution of Private Slovik which starred Martin Sheen as a real-life soldier executed for desertion. Always with that structure, though. Sad to say, a lot of screenwriters tend to see written fiction as irrelevant, at least to their interests. I can believe that Peter Falk had trouble finding good scripts when he took over Columbo. From what I've seen the long 90s era had a handful of episodes that stood with the best of its 70s era, but a lot were substandard, and the writing had a lot to do with it.
Yeah, there's something joyous about seeing someone coming to a realization, even if the subject matter is in theory grim.
I see that Malice Aforethought is celebrated for its first sentence: "It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Doctor Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter." That one is hard to beat.
I know I've read some of Van Gulik's Judge Dee books. I'm guessing he was following the structure of the original Dee stories. He was seriously into Chinese culture. And in fact he married the daughter of a Qing dynasty mandarin.
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