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| My choice for John Thatcher |
The changes created a problem in my fan fiction and elucidated for me an archetypal need in detective fiction.
My fan fiction for Thatcher is an attempt to solve the Bones problem from a M/M standpoint: outside of Boston Legal and romance books, is it possible to have an ongoing "slow burn" gay romance alongside murder mysteries?
Which brings one to--what are the components of the successful "slow burn" romance with television murder mysteries?
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| Damien |
Think Alan and Denny from Boston Legal.
Bones and Booth have friends (a scooby-gang), but they eventually, always, cycle back to each other, even before they marry. This is, in fact, part of what makes them so entirely satisfying to viewers. They are a variation on the couple on an island, where I also place Scully and Mulder. Although they are not literally on an island, their complementary personalities place them on a metaphorical island.
Elementary impressively does this with Sherlock and Joan, despite not taking them down the intimacy path. Nearly every episode comes back to a conversation between the two friends at the Brownstone.
Many Castle episodes revolve around Castle sitting at Kate's desk to shoot the breeze. Miss Fisher episodes often end with Phryne and Jack reflecting on the case. And as mentioned above, Boston Legal uses this approach with Alan and Denny, which I will discuss in another post.
In my Emma Lathen fan-fiction, John is a closeted gay banker who married and successfully conceived three children. He also never strayed since he has a deep personal distaste for such shenanigans (which attitude influences some of his decisions with his new lover). His wife died approximately 10 years before the books begin when Thatcher was 50ish, a detail I kept although I shortened the time frame between her death and the first case/book.
Thatcher forms a relationship with Damien Smith, a Sloan lawyer, 23 years Thatcher's junior, who helps him solve crimes and eventually moves into his apartment. I (mostly) kept the time period (1970s) so gay marriage--and for relatively conservative men, an open gay relationship--is off the table, but the most important people know (Thatcher's daughter, Charlie Trinkam, other colleagues at the bank, Miss Corsa who pretends she doesn't know). In the meantime, they solve crimes!
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| Not a bad book--but |
| Thatcher's personality is subtly altered. |
However, I discovered that the qualities of exclusivity, privacy, and total reliance that I'd given the relationship--and that appear with Bones and Booth/Holmes and Watson--didn't entirely work if Thatcher lost his wry self-aloofness.
The bon vivant personality that appears in the later Lathen books gives him a more man-of-the-world anything-goes attitude. Instead of going off on his own--with one other person--to contemplate the answer to a riddle, that Thatcher works alongside a crowd, and he doesn't seem particularly interested in the outcome. He is just going along.
In Going for the Gold, where Thatcher is still Thatcher, Thatcher reflects that "[it] would be impossible to convince Withers [bonhomous man-of-the-world] that anyone standing alone, however briefly, did not yearn for integration into the nearest group."
The Thatcher of the later books, in which he loses much of his fundamental personality, is very much a guy who never stands alone.
The group approach might in fact be more common to true criminal investigations (as numerous police procedurals indicate). But literary crime-solving couples need that "us versus the world" island for the relationship, and the crime-solving, to work.
There's a reason Holmes and Watson are the forever-together prototypes.
