So, for reasons which it would be redundant to go over, I’ve been watching a lot of BBC detectives of late. I finally succumbed to the lure of a Britbox subscription even though I resent the way they shell-game all the shows I want to watch between one subscription or another; look, if I wanted to be nickel-and-dimed for television programming I could have just got cable TV. Capitalist greed, feh.
Anyway, I’ve been cycling between Inspectors Lynley and Morse, with a chaser of Poirot on rewatch, and found myself adoring the sergeants in each.
As far as I’m concerned DS Barbara Havers is the primary reason to watch the Lynley series. Scrappy, working-class, intuitive, she has like 50 chips on her shoulder and flies off an average of three handles per episode, and still she comes off as more stable than Lynley, whose love life only escapes being a weltering disaster by net volume. Lynley is a very good cop, and somehow he’s the only person who can get on Havers’s wavelength long enough to realize she’s also a very good cop. Havers spends most of three seasons on the knife edge of getting sacked, and every time it gets close you can just see the WTF on Sharon Small’s face, like a furious little bulfinch about to go on the attack.
Meanwhile, DS Robbie Lewis was already on my radar thanks to my having watched Inspector Lewis around the time it was being aired. I loved Lewis as a chief inspector and I love him even more as Morse’s sergeant, though he’s pretty much the diametric opposite of Havers in personality: even-keeled, pacific, and meticulous. He looks like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and Morse often laughs at him for being the kind of young family man who won’t say a cuss word and critiques the realism of pornographic films collected for evidence.
It’s that dramatic difference between the two sergeants that helped me tease out the thread of a trope I love: the loyal second-in-command. Because this is what Havers and Lewis have in common, so strongly that it carries a huge amount of emotional freight in both series.
As far as DS Havers is concerned, Lynley’s name is “Sir.” She doesn’t call him anything else, even when she’s throwing him a life preserver off the side of a speedboat. Even when Lynley at his most irrational chews her out for things beyond her control, she lets it ride and does what he says for the time being, because she trusts him in general. She argues with him, and occasionally disobeys him to follow up a lead, exactly so far as their dynamic will allow without breaking under strain.
DS Lewis, meanwhile, makes me laugh. He pokes fun at Morse poking fun at him. He comes back at Morse’s occasional intemperate accusations with a patient denial. He makes a mockery of class distinctions by refusing to complain about them. He fills in the gaps and asks the follow-up questions and helps Morse bend rules and gets conked on the head in dark places. He makes a fantastic catch in a cricket game, and looks over to where Morse is sitting in the audience, only to find him disappointingly asleep.
I love this dynamic because it is not a simple power differential. These characters are not equal in terms of the hierarchy they’re in, but they have the respect of their partners and a lot of room for maneuver. Occasionally the dynamic gets flipped topside and the sergeant is taking care of their boss. That’s my other bulletproof kink, honestly, and all my favorite working partnerships have it: Hazel and Bigwig, Breq and Seivarden, Peter Burke and Neal Caffrey, Simon Illyan and Miles Vorkosigan. No matter how much of this trope you dish out, I’ll still be back like Oliver Twist with my empty bowl and limpid eyes.
In fact, I’m fixing to dish bowlfuls of it out myself if I can ever get the plotting for The Lantern Tower off the ground. Curse this pandemic for spifflicating my creative season of the year.
Ah well. Back to the detectives tonight, I expect.