Or, why so many fictional detectives annoy me

I think I’ve written on this subject before, but it’s been a while, so it’s worth another crack at it. I was recently reading a couple of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels, and I remembered why it’s so difficult to write a good detective story. I admit, Poirot is somewhat less irksome on paper than on film. Film adaptations tend to play up his condescending jerk side, possibly because readers and watchers of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe stories are used to jerkish detectives who pull informational rabbits out of the hat and call the reader stupid for not knowing that the rabbit was there all along.

It takes a delicate hand to write a mystery that hinges on information no one could possibly know, without annoying the reader, and some readers have a higher or lower tolerance for that kind of thing. In my experience as a reader, The Big Reveal is a hundred times more annoying if the protagonist is smug about it, and merely ten times more annoying if he brushes it off like it’s no big deal. Surprising developments in a mystery should provoke a reaction of, well, surprise, in the characters. Writers can also get away with having a jaded protagonist say, ‘I knew it! I knew this case was just like [previous case that may or may not have the exact same twist],’ because at least there’s a reason for the protagonist to be unsurprised, one that’s not simply, the protagonist knows everything about the universe and is waiting for all you peons to catch up.

Heyer is pretty good at this- not perfect, but her characters usually display reasonable reactions to The Big Reveal, and when they’re unsurprised it comes across as British stiff upper lip, rather than insider knowledge that they just now chose to share with their underlings. Patricia Wentworth is also pretty good at revealing information in a way that doesn’t annoy the reader. It’s telling, and may say more about me than about the stories themselves, that the less annoying detectives tend to be female- Miss Marple, Miss Silver, et cetera, are usually more tolerable. My best guess is that, because they go out in the community and listen to the gossip about their cases, it’s more realistic for them to have insider information. They also tend to be more forgiving of people, like readers, who don’t know everything, and even when someone like Miss Marple says, ‘oh, you didn’t know that?’ it comes across as dottiness rather than arrogance.

The male detectives- Wolfe, Holmes, Poirot- are more likely to sit back and let an underling do all the running around, then magically pull all the information together without ever having talked to anybody, then call the everyman underling- and by extension, the reader- stupid for not coming to the correct conclusion. This isn’t always true, but it’s enough to paint a general trend.

It’s also worth noting that the culture has changed somewhat since these stories were written. Back in the day, there was rather a reverence for genius that excused a lot of faults, especially when the genius was safely fictional and the reader would never have to meet that genius in real life. Nowadays, the downsides of genius are a little more obvious, and I think a lot of people have gone sour on anyone who says, ‘trust me, I’m an expert; I know better than you do,’ whether the person is technically a genius or not. Perhaps that’s why more abrasive characters provoke the reaction they often do. Competence is attractive; being a jerk about it is less so.

But this is all my opinion, and it’s worth approximately what you paid for it, so, tell me- have you noticed the same phenomenon? Have you ever written a protagonist like these fictional detectives?- and did you take any steps to avoid annoying the reader?