No reason

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Poll #1488447]

Comments

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

COLUMBO COLUMBO COLUMBO COLUMBO

Sorry, I just wanted to get there first. Also, caffeine.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Also Law & Order CI (at least the ones that don't throw out a red herring in the teaser).

Also the episode of Criminal Minds which opened with Jason Alexander's serial killer introducing himself and confessing to a kidnapping/impending mass murder.

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

R. Austin Freeman (of Dr. Thorndyke fame) wrote a number of these "inverted detective stories."

I suppose the original one is Oedipus' investigation into the murder of Roger Ackroyd Laius. (Or maybe Cain's murder of Abel, where God is the detective.)

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

but the Noir literary genre could pretty much be defined as "hardboiled fiction from the point of view of the criminal, after he's done the deed, yet not before he kills a few more hookers", and even the Marlowe stories tended to start from the "we know who did it, the matter is understanding what has actually been done and gathering evidence to prove it" position.

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

The crime fiction of the 1950s, for instance, does produce a lot of "the criminal's POV" story, but if noir includes writers like Hammett and Chandler, I'd have to disagree with your generalization. Sometimes Marlowe knows who committed the murder (or other crime) because he witneses it; otherwise he has to figure it out, and sometimes he doesn't. Chandler famously remarked that even he didn't know who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. Hammett (in The Thin Man) does make a big deal about the difference between knowing someone committed the crime and proving it, but that's at the end of the book, not the beginning.