“Is that the idea?” asks David Oyelowo, hamming it up outrageously as a beleaguered West End playwright. “Gather all the suspects and interrogate each one of us in turn until the mystery is solved?” That is indeed the idea in See How They Run, the latest murder mystery with a retro vibe. Sam Rockwell as a Scotland Yard detective with a peculiar cockney accent, and Saoirse Ronan, as an overeager policewoman, investigate murder in London’s Theatreland in the 1950s. The setting allows for nice period costumes worn by an ensemble cast of familiar faces (Adrien Brody, Ruth Wilson, Shirley Henderson) regaling us with diva-like behaviour as we try to guess which of them has blood on their hands.

Also on the mystery lover’s agenda this year is Amsterdam, in which Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington are prime suspects in a 1930s murder plot. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, sequel to 2019’s Knives Out, is another of the whodunnits in the vanguard of this current retro trend, with Daniel Craig, freed from Bond-age, camping it up with a wacky Southern accent as Benoit Blanc, “the last of the gentleman sleuths”.

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington star in “Amsterdam”. Photo: 20th Century Studios

Along with the all-star cast, a detective speaking with a peculiar accent is a salient feature of this subgenre. Just listen to Kenneth Branagh’s attempts at Hercule Poirot’s Belgian accent in his own recent remakes of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. I’ve lived in French-speaking countries for the past twenty years and can tell you he’s got his fricatives completely wrong. Branagh shows once again that he can’t direct for toffee (why is the camera twirling around?), though the films are saved by their glittering casts, fabulous vintage wardrobes and preposterous plot twists, served up in exotic locations (nowadays mostly rendered by CGI, alas). In any case, realism is not on the menu.

Throwback murder mysteries are definitely having a moment. Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, in which mismatched neighbours Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez team up to solve a murder in their Manhattan apartment block, is now in its second season. Like Knives Out, it’s nominally set in the present, but despite the three amateur detectives collaborating on a True Crime podcast, the formula is a throwback to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction with its locked-room mysteries, airtight structure and social pecking order.

Steve Martin and Selena Gomez in “Only Murders in the Building”. Photo: HBO

As George Orwell pointed out in his 1946 essay The Decline of the English Murder, the perfect murder is chiefly a middle-class pursuit, the motive invariably involving sex, status or money, and “should be planned with the utmost cunning.” Orwell blames the decline on American influence, citing as symptomatic the random crime spree of a US army deserter in wartime England (dramatised in Bernard Rose’s 1990 film Chicago Joe and the Showgirl) though ironically it seems that Americans are just as responsible as Brits for the current retro-mystery revival.

Why does this formula appeal to 21st century audiences? The most obvious reason is that mobile phones, social media and surveillance footage have changed the nature of crime and its detection, enabling murderers to be tracked or even filmed committing their crimes, their alibis easily dismantled, and internet search histories examined for “untraceable poisons” or “how to chop up a cadaver”. Setting your murder in the past, or ignoring modern technology altogether, absolves you of having your characters constantly complaining about poor cell phone reception, or of short-circuiting the narrative by looking everything up on Wikipedia.

But maybe, too, we’re growing weary of real life being so hard-boiled. Poirot, or Philip Marlowe, or Nick and Nora Charles would have despaired (or, in the case of Nick and Nora, felt compelled to order another round of dry martinis) at today’s real-life murders, more likely to be a result of squalid opportunism, toxic masculinity or gross stupidity than cunning plans by criminal masterminds.

Just as conspiracy theorists cling to disproved theses because they find the alternative – that life is chaos – more frightening than the idea of some unfeasibly efficient agency pulling the strings from the shadows, it’s more fun to think of Professor Plum dead in the library with a candlestick than to imagine the poor old geezer dying from internal bleeding after having been pushed to the ground by a member of the Metropolitan Police. Which brings us to another source of retro-crime comfort: the idea that there is a deductive genius who will step in like a deus ex machina and summon all the suspects to an accusatorium in the drawing room, where he will talk us through the case, showing his reasoning every step of the way, and we won’t be left forever wondering who killed who, or how on earth you can foment a treasonous insurrection and not end up behind bars.

The retro-detective is righteous and incorruptible. He is there to speak truth to power, not uphold the status quo, or manhandle protestors, or enforce unjust laws. So long as modern whodunnits tip their hat to the old school, we can bask in the illusion that the cops are on our side, that they would never, ever pose for selfies with a murder victim’s corpse, or be themselves the direct cause of someone’s death. Unless, of course, it’s the murderer who pretends to be a cop in that Agatha Christie story I shan’t name, in case you’re one of the few people left who hasn’t yet read or seen it.

Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist and photographer

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Arts & Culture, August 2022, Billboard

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