Solving crimes can be straightforward. First, someone has to commit a crime1, then someone else has to gather the clues, consider their implications, then reveal the identity of the culprit. Not every creator seems satisfied with this approach—a few have even provided their detectives with abilities beyond the human norm.
Marty Hopkirk from Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
Private detective Marty Hopkirk is observant enough to realize in the pilot episode that a woman’s seemingly natural death from heart failure was anything but natural. Hopkirk isn’t quite adept enough to avoid tipping his hand to the paid assassin who murdered the unfortunate woman. This results in a fatal hit-and-run for poor Marty.
In the normal run of things, being dead is a tremendous workplace impediment. As a restless ghost, Marty can seek justice…if he can convince grieving fellow detective Jeff Randall that Marty isn’t simply a hallucination. Their success in solving Marty’s murder only brings more cases in which having a ghost on the team proves helpful.
William Henry Murdoch from Murdoch Mysteries
Faced not merely with commonplace mundane crime, Murdoch and the other police at Toronto’s Station House No. 4 must also contend with the American imperialists, illicit tunnelling machines, heavier-than-air flying machines, and the rudimentary orbital craft for which early 20th century Canada was so notorious. Accordingly, polymath Murdoch provides Station House No. 4 with a wide range of useful gadgets, including but not limited to night vision goggles, bulletproof vests, lie detectors, and radio tracking devices, the existence of which in early 20th century Toronto may come as a surprise2 to viewers unfamiliar with the minutiae of Canadian history.
Murdock’s intellectual gifts are not limited to a knack for invention. He possesses the requisite prodigious intellect that all police detectives should possess. Furthermore, his memory is nearly photographic, and his powers of visualization are so well developed that some viewers have speculated what he actually possessed was a limited form of post-cognition.
Louis Ciccone from Seeing Things
Middle-aged, overweight, if not divorced then working hard on becoming divorced, Louis is not much of a detective. In fact, Louis isn’t a detective at all. He is a reporter for the Toronto Gazette, one of Toronto’s many thriving newspapers. However, Louis possesses both a knack for stumbling over injustices that demand redress and sufficient moral character not to look the other way.
Key to Louis’ detecting avocation: limited post-cognition. Louis occasionally has visions of past events. These are enough to hint at what actually happened. Paranormal powers are not considered evidence in Canadian courts. Even if the visions were not often obscure, simply knowing the truth isn’t sufficient proof to satisfy the law. Therefore, Louis (aided by his long-suffering estranged wife Marge) must use his journalistic skills to find mundane evidence that will sway the legal system towards justice.
Hobo from The Littlest Hobo
Long before Jack Reacher began wandering from troubled town to troubled town, Hobo’s nomadic life invariably led him from one small town crisis to another. Canadians perplexed by unforeseen calamities outside their ability to resolve found themselves rescued by the ever-vigilant, ever-helpful Hobo.
Hobo’s most notable special ability was less an asset than a drawback: Hobo is a German Shepherd. Hobo must therefore investigate and intervene without the luxuries of hands or speech. The key to the dog’s remarkable abilities and keen insight into the human condition may lie in something revealed in a two-part episode: Hobo is enormously long-lived, as Hobo featured in the 1963–1966 TV series is apparently the same Hobo as in the 1979–1985 series. It is possible that Hobo is the same Hobo as in the 1958 movie. Is Hobo the helpful canine so experienced because Hobo is immortal? I can’t rule it out.
Yoru Morino from Goth by Otsuichi
Japan as a whole has a low murder rate and few serial killers. Therefore, under normal circumstances someone like Goth’s nameless narrator would have few opportunities to match wits with homicidal maniacs. In the world of the book, however, there is one region (not named) that abounds in vicious killers. There the narrator of this novel can indulge their taste for detection.
Key to the process: a knack not of the narrator’s but the narrator’s best friend, Morino. Morino has two abilities that make her invaluable to any would-be detective. First, for reasons that remain unclear, Morino attracts the homicidally inclined like bees are attracted to flowers. Second, Morino has turned genre-blindness into armor, apparently surviving her frequent brushes with death thanks to her sheer obliviousness.
These are hardly the only examples I could have used. It’s likely I overlooked some of your favourites. Feel free to extol the virtues of your preferred examples in comments below.
- Although The Dog Park Club subverted expectations by never clarifying if the crime the would-be, woefully unqualified investigators hoped to solve had ever occurred. Some readers—me, mainly—thought this was hilarious, but other readers hated it.
- Speaking of surprises: in one episode, supporting character George Crabtree mentions that one of his many aunts moved from Newfoundland to Ontario, was alarmed by Ontario’s abundant moose, and returned to Newfoundland. Surely, thinks I, Newfoundland has lots of moose. It does now, but not at the time the series is set. One of the writers knew that and worked it into the plot. What next, a mystery involving Nova Scotia’s Year of Free Beef? Animal lovers are advised not to drop “Year of Free Beef” into search engines.
Non-Canadians may be surprised at how common it once was for unattended dogs to wander into commercial establishments such as hotels or lumberjack contests to investigate crimes.
I was aware of the Littlest Hobo as a kid, but I don’t think I ever saw any episodes. However, I did watch a lot of Seeing Things with my parents, and remember it fondly. Louis is pretty much the definition of a reluctant hero, having his cases thrust upon him by the visions. As I recall, he also bumbled his way through a lot of the “action” aspects of crime solving.
Maybe Kolchak?
I’d say Kolchak was the opposite of an investigator with special abilities. He was an everyman and an underdog, generally at a huge disadvantage against his supernatural foes, constantly failing to get any proof of their existence, and only managing to defeat or survive them by the skin of his teeth. His one special ability was stubbornness, which was also his weakness, since he didn’t know when to stop pushing boundaries with his editor, the cops, etc.
Kolchak pushed boundaries with The Phone Company!
Is magic, when usable only by people with an inborn skill rather than any student, a special ability? If so, I’d nominate Sean O’Lochlainn, from Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories. Being able to reconstruct a crime scene in detail (~”I don’t understand — it looks like the victim was killed twice!” “The first time is when he was killed; the second is when he died.”) is extremely useful, ISTM going beyond even the best techniques available to today’s investigators.
“Is magic, when usable only by people with an inborn skill rather than any student, a special ability?”
I’d say that anything usable only by people with the inborn skill for it would be a special ability by definition. Although one could argue that an ability theoretically obtainable to anyone who studies the art could also qualify as special if the art is difficult to attain. Anyone can take a history class, for instance, but I’d say that holding a master’s degree in history would constitute a special ability.
While it’s a wack-a-doodle entry in this category, Dead Boy Detectives (2024) certainly plumbs irregular capabilities and perspectives with its two endearing main characters.
Well, Gil Hamilton technically brings something less to the table, as he solves crimes single-handedly.
Surely ‘triple-handedly’? Or am I imagining it?
Double-handedly at most. One of his physical arms was lost; that’s he discovered the third one.
Yeah, but after that he got a replacement arm
For that , he must come back from being a Belter to become a Grounder again, as explained in the story “Death by Ecstasy” (1969), appeared in collection “The long Arm of Gil Hamilton””(1976)
“Finally, is seemingly-inexhaustible wealth a special ability?”
Not if it’s inherited.
I’m assuming the umpteen occult detectives that populate urban fantasy & horror don’t count?
Then I’m going to suggest Dirk Gently, who may or may not actually be psychic. :)
IIRC, Dirk Gently wasn’t psychic, he just blundered through with bluster and claimed that lucky accidents fit into his theory of “the interconnectedness of all things.” He was a rather Kolchak-like figure himself, completely unlike the two live-action depictions of the character (the first of which tried to turn him into the Fourth Doctor, the second of which tried to turn him into the Eleventh Doctor).
If we’re talking psychic detectives, we could mention the TV series version of The Dead Zone from USA Network, developed by Michael Piller of Star Trek: TNG/DS9/VGR. That was an example of the kind of thing Robert Carnegie mentions, where the detective’s power is usually the only paranormal thing in the story and is used to solve mostly mundane/naturalistic mysteries. In the same category, you could throw in the occasional show about protagonists given the ability to glimpse the future in some way, such as Early Edition and Tru Calling. Then you’ve got weird Bryan Fuller shows like Wonderfalls, where the protagonist is given insights by inanimate objects that speak to her, and Pushing Daisies, where the protagonist can resurrect the dead (with limitations) and his detective partner uses him to revive corpses and ask who murdered them (which isn’t as straightforward as it seems).
There was one bit in his backstory where he pretended to get the answers to an exam clairvoyantly… and ended up 100% correct.
IIRC Dirk was a replacement for the Doctor originally. It’s my understanding that Adams wrote the outline as a Dr Who episode, but it wasn’t made to he replaced the Doctor with Dirk and finished it out as a novel.
To be precise, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is an amalgam of elements from two of Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who serials — “City of Death,” which was made, and “Shada,” which was half-made but abandoned due to a strike, though the extant parts were eventually released, first on video with Tom Baker narrating the missing portions of the story, and later in a version using animation to depict the missing portions. (Between those, there was also an animated remake of the whole story reinterpreted as an Eighth Doctor story with Paul McGann.) Maybe you’re thinking of Adams’s Life, the Universe, and Everything, whose Krikkit Wars storyline was based on an unmade Doctor Who premise.
However, my point is that the novels’ version of Dirk Gently (born Svlad Cjelli) is a pudgy, middle-aged slob of Transylvanian descent, but he keeps getting played on TV by tall, lanky, good-looking actors who look nothing remotely like that (Stephen Mangan and Samuel Barnett). A more faithful depiction of Gently might look like a cross between Carl Kolchak and Eddie Valiant. (In fact, the original novel on which Kolchak the Night Stalker was based describes Kolchak as a pudgy, balding slob of Romanian descent, basically a dead ringer for Dirk Gently. It’s conceivable that Adams was influenced by that novel.)
IOW, just like the 1980’s portrayal of Spenser For Hire; in the books by Robert Parker he was a bruiser, but in the TV series he was a pretty-boy. (Not the only thing wrong with that series….)
I can understand that in an action series. though. For a comedy like Dirk Gently, I’d think they would’ve been more open to casting a more rotund, slobby-looking character actor, particularly in the earlier British-made series. And it’s doubly odd because two unrelated adaptations departed from the character’s description in similar ways, albeit even more so in Samuel Barnett’s case.
Magic-using detectives should be eligible, e.g. Harry Dresden-Pottery, but it may be implied that the crimes in this discussion should not be occult. As they tend to be with those investigators.
I think Marvel’s Dr Strange’s first case (before his origin story) did involve a man persecuted in dreams by the demon Nightmare, but the human victim also had a mundane dark secret which was uncovered, and I think it’s implied that more or less everybody gets bothered by Nightmare sometimes, so that’s not the mystery.
I feel like ‘magical detectives who solve magical crimes’ probably belongs in it’s own list, but against that day I’d suggest Peter Grant from the Rivers of London series. Although he starts out as a lowley constable IIRC he’s made it to the rank of Detective Sargent so far.
IIRC, none of the crimes solved by Darcy and O’Lochlainn involved magic, although muggles commonly thought something they couldn’t explain must have been done by magic; offensive magic was generally black in a way that marked the practitioner irretrievably.
There were a couple that were genuinely magical, the one with the body double and also the Ipswich Phial.
I am currently about a third of the way through The Tomb of Dragons, third in “Katherine Addison”‘s trilogy about Thara Celehar, an elf (in a world of elves and goblins) who can communicate with the dead. Not infrequently this ability seems to get him involved in investigations into the circumstances of the deaths. Celehar started out as a supporting character in The Goblin Emperor, but a priest / detective seems to have more storytelling legs than an emperor does.
The protagonist of Diane Duane’s Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses has second sight. She also has a neural implant that records what she sees, producing admissible evidence.
Frank Black in Millennium.
Charlie Cale in “Poker Face” explores the advantages and limits of being able to detect subjective lies in identifying and solving crimes. Including when the perp knows about her ability and tries to game it.
Very good show! Charlie is played with pizazz by Natasha Lyonne, who’s punky sarcasm coupled with real empathy for the victims, many of whom she befriends prior to their deaths, makes for a refreshing series.
I enjoy Poker Face, particularly the throwback to classic episodic storytelling complete with ’70s-style Universal Television title font. But it revolves fundamentally around two devices I’m not a fan of — one, the fantasy that infallible lie detection is possible, and two, the conceit of a non-detective coincidentally stumbling upon murders on a regular basis. It’s a good thing it’s such a fun show, or those would really annoy me.
Also, as someone who grew up watching the old Mystery Movie episodes the show homages, I find it kind of disrupts the retro feel when the modern TV-MA profanity and graphic violence kick in.
I LOVED Seeing Things. I am not sure how I was able to access it from the States (maybe PBS)?
I am inspired to dust off my manuscript for the reboot of Littlest Hobo where he teams with Marvin The Marvellous Moose to solve crimes across Canada.
I am not gonna let a little thing like copyright stop me this time.
please have at least one crime that turns out to actually just be the house having an infestation of the North American House Hippo.
Their arch nemesis is Loretta the Lynx, who is constantly conspiring with nefarious ne’er-do-wells to make her scurrilous schemes come to fruition.
Obscure 1999 cartoon Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths, and Legends starred Nick Logan, who was (initially) a bounty hunter gifted with “the Sight,” allowing him to identify disguised aliens living among us. The origin of this ability is never explained, but it’s sufficiently unique that he ends up scouted to join the (MiB-like) Alliance’s “Detection unit,” despite being an unapologetic rogue agent who openly pursues his own agenda.
Premise: The main character is immortal and uses his centuries of learning to solve crimes. He lives in New York City with his elderly son (who has a different apparent ethnicity than him), who is his only living confidant. This is the premise of two shows: New Amsterdam (2008, starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Forever (2014, starring
Ioan Gruffudd).
Also, I’m glad to see Murdoch Mysteries mentioned. It is a silly show.
Wow, that there’s some classic spam. Which, if this seems like an odd comment, was swiftly deleted by the moderators.
Just how classic? I mean, were green cards involved?
Wow, I have not thought of Canter and Seigel in years and years. But this spam was closer in spirit to the Dave Rhodes Make Money Fast spam.
I’m impressed the spam got through.
Equally impressed that all the words are spelled correctly and they form coherent sentences!
That more than I can manage….
They must be legit!
I laughed out loud at reading a “Littlest Hobo” reference. I have dim memories of seeing the show in the middle or late sixties when we regularly visited my nana to watch shows on her color TV. There was the inevitable American network ripoff in the middle seventies on Saturday mornings called “Run Joe, Run” that likewise starred a German Shepherd. Like so much American television of that era the producers shoehorned in a ubiquitous “The Fugitive” angle by having the dog on the run across the country after being falsely accused of a crime (I’m not making this up).
Curiously enough the second incarnation of “Hobo” raised the weirdness stakes in the series finale by revealing Hobo to be a shape-shifting alien who had taken the form of a dog to study humans (again, I’m not making this up).
“Murdoch Mysteries” has been an on-and-off insomnia watch since the COVID lockdown. As someone else noted, it is a silly show that got even sillier when later showrunners started introducing steampunk plots. It’s proven impossible to catch first run on the CBC, appearing seemingly unannounced for its short seasons in-between seemingly endless hockey broadcasts. I keep meaning to do a proper watch from the first season but just can’t muster the ambition to pick up the DVDs from the library. Some shows are destined to be seen only piecemeal, I guess.
I think the entire run is available on CBC Gem, its streaming service.
Thanks but I’m in the states, near the border, and when I’ve tried to access Gem in the past I get a screen pop-up informing me Gem is not available for accessing in the states. My library actually has the show on DVD. I’m just not much of a binger and haven’t had the time or ambition to pick up a set. One of these days…
Cheers.
Gem isn’t accessible outside of Canada, which is really annoying. I even tried setting up the app while in Canada, hoping it would assume I was travelling later.
I’m loving the Littlest Hobo nostalgia. For some reason, I passionately hated that show as a child, and would leave the living room to go read in my room when it came on. This, unfortunately, has not stopped an earworm of the theme song taking hold.
While he’s not a detective, Piper the lich-doctor from Paladin’s Faith definitely investigates, and his ability to touch dead flesh and experience what killed it is sometimes useful. It also requires a vegetarian diet, since he can’t turn it off.
The character from Murdoch Mysteries who really belongs on this list is George Crabtree, who has an uncanny knack for accurately predicting future inventions and then completely misnaming them.
(Also, you have two Canadian series on the list, but you don’t include Constable Benton “New Incredible Abilities as the Plot Demands” Fraser of the RCMP from Due South? Really?)
In “iZombie” the protagonist, a medical student, can absorb people’s memories by eating their brains, thus leading to a fair amount of crime solving.
That show was good in many ways, but lost its way as it went on. At first, the memories and personality traits Liv absorbed from eating murder victims’ brains helped give her insights into her own life and issues, as well as aiding in the detective work, but in later seasons, her own personality completely disappeeared beneath the brain-of-the-week personalities (even to the extent of forgetting her own basic skills and knowledge if the victims didn’t have them), so Liv basically ceased to exist as a character in her own right and it was just about the shtick of Rose McIver acting like a different person every week. Also, while the show was admirable in actually exploring the impact of the zombie virus on the world and having the status quo grow and change massively in later seasons (instead of keeping it all eternally secret to preserve the “real world” status quo), the mythology got so big that Liv no longer had any real connection to it, and the show’s lead character became a distraction from its storylines rather than a meaningful part of them (although they did try to graft her back in eventually by giving her a new cause).
The short-lived BBC series Crime Traveller featured Jeff Slade, a detective whose investigations were made a lot easier by his friend Holly Turner, who had inherited a time machine.
In Forever Knight, a Toronto police detective happens also to be a vampire.
There was apparently a short lived Canadian made TV show based on Tanya Huff’s Blood books, featuring PI Vicky Nelson and vampire Henry Fitzroy (also bastard son of King Henry VIII) solving crimes in Toronto.
The Littlest Hobo” was something of a fixture on after-school tv here in Oz in the mid-late ‘60s – possibly into the 70s. As a youngster I assumed it was American, as the characters sounded like that to me. Apologies, Canada.
i suppose our equivalent – a seemingly super-intelligent crime solving animal – was Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Apologies for that too, world.
”Seeing Things” had quite a lengthy run here in the 1980s; I quite enjoyed it. At least by then I was old enough to realise that it was Canadian.
Oh, and I loved “Randall and Hopkirk – Deceased”, and have the DVD set somewhere. There was a short-lived remake a couple of decades back, but I’ve never seen it.
In an odd coincidence, I just discovered the day I saw that moose episode on Murdock Mysteries was almost exactly a decade before this article was posted…
Discovering Newfoundland didn’t always have moose was as surprising as discovering Kitchener’s parks didn’t have squirrels until about a century ago. They were deliberately introduced decorative species.
Brian Lane in New Tricks should be included, maybe? He has a very good factual memory and makes connections that the others tend to miss. Of course, all the UCOS detectives bring specific skills. And the DIs in Death in Paradise fixate on one small detail that helps them make the connection between that and the other officers’ discoveries/research/comments on the case and solve the crime (deconstructionist detecting, perhaps?).
RE: The Littlest Hobo: Wikipedia confirms that there was a two-part episode (“The Genesis Tapes, Pts 1 & 2”, broadcast in early 1984), that established, through the use of flashback footage from both the original movie and the first TV series, that yes, it was the same dog, either immortal or extraordinarily long-lived for a canine. He is theorized by both a scientist and an investigative reporter to be the first of a new species of dog with human-level intelligence. It should be noted that it’s the reporter who maintains that Hobo is a single individual dog, while the scientist postulates a population of up to a hundred of the new Meta-Canine species. At the conclusion of the story, Hobo manages to destroy the evidence gathered by the humans–it seems he prefers his anonymity.
As to his possible status as an extraterrestrial, although a number of people have attested online that they remember the episode in question, no copy seems to exist, and the Wikipedia episode guide makes no mention of it. Like the legendary final episode of the animated “Dungeons and Dragons” TV series, I think we might have an example of either wishful thinking or the Mandella Effect here,
I’ve heard hearsay that the dogs who played Hobo (in the second series) were extraordinarily intelligent, or at least extraordinarily well trained.
Apparently the Hobos loved to ‘steal’ work gloves from the crew, then play tug-o-war between scenes.
Wait, was Lobo a wolfen?
See also “Tru Calling” (aired 2003 – 2005), starring Eliza Dushku as a medical student who takes a job at the city morgue when her funding falls through. She discovers that when she touches the corpse of someone who’s died wrongfully, she is transported back to the day that person died, and can attempt to find out how/why the person died, and how to stop it from happening.
Every stop I make, I make a new friend
Can’t stay for long, just turn around
And I’m gone again
Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want to settle down
Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on
Yes, a Canadian show about a stray dog helping people.
I’m surprised you skipped Benton Fraser (also Canadian). A Mountie in Chicago who constantly tastes things at crime scenes for clues. Or for that matter, Jim Ellison from The Sentinel, who has super senses.
I might argue that Dirk Gently’s holistic approach – as seen in the books, not the TV series – might qualify under this banner.
Another one would be magician’s assistant Jonathan Creek, who used magic to help him solve mysteries. Well, to be more specific he used prestidigitation – stage magic, the art of fakery, as opposed to the casting of spells or psychic phenomena
What about the tv series Endgame. A world famous chess champion named Arkady Balagan is a man with agoraphobia who lives in a high end hotel (because he can’t leave). He uses his skill at analytic reasoning to solve crimes while having accomplices do the legwork for him. Nothing magical here, he’s special more in the way Detective Murdoch is.
Pushing Daisies. Being able to ask the deceased what they know of the person who killed them is very useful in an investigation.
Pie-making is also very useful.
I’m going to go super niche and suggest Sapphire and Steel, a British early 80s SF series I watched growing up. It starred Joanna Lumley and David Mccallum, who are humaniform interdimensional operatives. It was weird and wacky…
Bit late to the convoy, but there is a really cool (albeit sometimes borderline gross) comic series from John Layman & Rob Guillory called “Chew” where the lead FDA agent Tony Chu is a cibopath and solves crime by getting psychic visions from whatever he eats… Although his power is not always appreciated by his superiors.
Also, I learned a lot of (fake ?) cool words like Lagamousikian (ability to use pasta noodles as guitar strings) and Mnemocoquus (ability to cook memories into dishes)