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What is even more noteworthy is that Shaloub's new detective is both plausible and entertaining. Adrian Monk (Shaloub) is a former San Francisco Police Department detective who has had to leave the force because of a debilitating descent into obsessive-compulsive psychological disorder. It is a problem that the character has had at least since high school, but it reached a pathological, disabling level four years before the fictional beginning of the series, when Monk's wife was murdered. Mrs. Monk, an investigative journalist, was killed by a bomb in a parking garage, and despite Monk's and the department's best efforts, the case remains unsolved. Incapacitated by grief, Monk spent some time in a mental institution, and since his release he has remained in fairly bad psychological condition. He is terrified of germs, heights, crowds, confined spaces, the dark, and numerous other things, including milk. He cannot resist counting parking meters and fence posts and rearranging other people's room furnishings. He requires the attention of a full-time nurse, Sharona (Bitty Schram), who provides him with a continuous supply of wet-naps for use whenever he has to touch something dangerously filthy — such as when shaking someone's hand. Sharona also acts as his conscience, motivator, and personal secretary. Despite their frequent disagreements, the friendship between Monk and Sharona is strong and clearly quite important to both of them. Thanks in good part to Sharona's help, Monk is able to serve as a consultant to the San Francisco Police Department, working under his former boss, Captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine). The by-the-books homicide captain was highly skeptical of Monk's chances to succeed when the series began, but he has since developed increasing respect for the unconventional detective's abilities, even to the point of considering putting him back on the force full-time. Shaloub's performance as Monk is impressively subtle, and he manages to make this annoying character quite likable and sympathetic. What is most interesting about the show from a mystery-genre standpoint is that Monk's disability is the very source of his greatness as a detective. Monk's obsessive behavior stems from an intense need for symmetry and order, and a powerful hatred for disorder, which has obvious advantages for a detective. Upon entering a room, for example, Monk cannot stand to see a single thing out of place, and he can be very annoying in moving other people's possessions about in order to get them placed just right. But that obsessive passion for order causes him to notice things other detectives overlook, a matter over which he has no control, as when Monk notices a bit of cement residue on the shoes of a fellow airplane passenger, which ultimately leads to the latter being unmasked as a murderer. Likewise, while briefly staying at a mental institution, Monk notices a small strip of red cloth on the chimney, which causes him to accept another inmate's implausible assertion that he saw Santa Claus on the roof. It turns out, of course, that a person dressed as Santa Claus committed the crime and escaped by way of the roof. In another case, although all the other detectives assume that the deceased committed suicide by overdosing on pills, Monk realizes that it must have been murder because there is no water glass in the room. Thus, the producers make Monk's disability an advantage for him, without sentimentalizing or trivializing it in the slightest. In fact, they routinely flout current conventions in media treatment of disabilities, by regularly making Monk's condition a source of humor. For example, in the climactic scene of an episode dealing with an apparent attempted assassination on a local politician, Monk has to choose whether to descend into the filthy water of a storm sewer to pursue an escaping murderer and rescue Sharona. Heroically, he wades into the murky, waist-deep water, but only after laying a trail of Kleenexes on the metal ladder rungs by which he must descend into the tunnel. One suspects that the producers are able to get away with this unfashionable puckishness because their treatment of Monk's disability is so evenhanded. In addition to causing him great trouble and making him a superb detective, Monk's condition actually saves his life in the pilot film. While walking down a street, he abruptly changes direction to touch an item he has missed, and a car that was about to run him down misses him by a hair. For a series with a psychological difficulty at its center, Monk is mercifully, and surprisingly, free of psychologizing, which is for me the absolute bane of modern mystery fiction. A mystery is a romance, after all, and the essential appeal of a romance is located in the story, not the characters (as G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis both pointed out on numerous occasions). And because the story is paramount, the one thing a romance cannot bear is psychology, which is what makes so many modern mysteries so tedious: The incessant probing into the psychology of the various characters is fundamentally impertinent. It is impertinent because what makes the mystery important to a reader is the various possible motives behind the crime: what might have caused a person to commit a heinous act. And the motives, to be relevant and impart any useful knowledge, must be ones that the reader can correctly imagine most people entertaining, or the crime is irrational and hence can teach us little of importance about human nature as we are likely to experience it. That is why most good mysteries are based on simple motives derived fairly directly from one or more of the Seven Deadly Sins. And so it is with Monk, where the killings are done for money, sex, revenge, and all the other terrible, awfully conventional reasons for which these things are done in real life. The use of a highly unconventional detective provides sufficient originality to allow the producers to be daringly conventional where it really counts — and that makes Monk very enlightening indeed. — S. T. Karnick is editor-in-chief of American Outlook magazine, published by the Hudson Institute. |
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ne of the most
difficult things to do in popular fiction is to create a new, really original
detective. Nearly every imaginable conceit (and many unimaginable ones),
has already been tried, from super-geniuses to paraplegics to cats. It
is remarkable, then, that producer-actor Tony Shaloub and his fellow creators
of the USA Network series 
