Another thing about TV and movie detectives

As I said about 26 Men, "The rangers' characters were never developed. They were just doing their jobs and their personalities were irrelevant."

I might add that this is true in detective stories in general. The detective doesn't set the story in motion and they're just doing their jobs, following the clues other people left behind. Even true crime stories focus on the personalities of the criminals and victims. The detective's personality doesn't matter. He's just following procedure.

But this is why you have fictional detectives like Columbo and Hercule Poirot. They need quirks to gloss over the irrelevance of their personality traits.

I read a teen detective story where the teenage detective liked to cook. I read a Japanese crime novel and the detective would write haiku.

I always wondered about that. I was in a creative writing class in high school and we were required to write a batch of poems, but the teacher told us we could include no more than two haiku, which I felt was disrespectful to the haiku as an art form. But, in this novel, it turns out the teacher was right. The detective cranked out haiku by the dozens.