The Devil's Bargain

Does there come a point when you’ve read and seen too many thrillers? When your knowledge of the conventions makes a plot development less than surprising?

I ask because there’s a murder in this at about the two-thirds mark and, after many many episodes of Silent Witness and all kinds of other detective stories, I saw straight through the one mistake the murderer makes. (It’s all to do with marks on the body found post-mortem.)

And I’m wondering whether, were I a younger reader, and had read fewer such stories, I would have been taken by surprise. There’s a Jim Thompson novel – The Grifters, published in 1963 – in which a corpse’s face is unrecognizable due to a gunshot wound. Except that anyone with even a little ballistics knowledge – and I do possess that very little knowledge – would know such damage couldn’t have been inflicted the way it’s inflicted in the story.

It doesn’t harm the story, which is less about forensics than character, but even so it niggles. Just as the murder in The Devil’s Bargain niggles. Wouldn’t the murderer, simply by virtue of being alive in the age of Silent Witness and CSI, have known that the method he used would be detected?

I’m just musing here. I don’t want Stella Rimington dragged to the public square and executed. Because I did enjoy the book; it moves at a terrific clip and I’ve read far, far, far worse thrillers. But I just can’t help wondering: doesn’t the murderer ever watch TV?