The Detectives Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Detectives on our screens are always flawed,
Unmarried or with superficial lovers
Sherlock Holmes was played by Jeremy Brett
On set, he kept a massive ‘Baker Street file'
Stuffed with the great sleuths mannerisms and ways
As Brett explained ‘some actors are becomers—
they try to become their characters…the actor's like a sponge,
squeezing himself dry..then absorbing the character's like a liquid"
Holmes was Brett's ‘dark side of the moon…moody, solitary, dangerous'

Poirot is forever David Suchet
The more that Suchet read about the Belgian, the more the man enthralled him-
His need for order, his carefully groomed moustache
His little grey cells always on full drive. ‘A man of faith and morals.'
The actor carried a dossier on Poirot around the set for years

John Thaw's Morse was solitary, beer soaked, bright
A cognitive curmudgeon with his love of classical music,
His classic Jaguar, his bouts of melancholy
His love of crosswords, pedantic, intellectual
With eyes of cut glass blue, hair white as sea frost

Brenda Blethyn's Vera is near to retirement
An employee of the fictional 'Northumberland & City Police',
Obsessive about her work and driven by demons.
She is always unkempt a working class Miss Marple wearing wellies
The list goes on, John Nettles as Bergerac
Racing round Jersey in leather jacket and jeans
Or later, tramping the blood-sodden lanes of Midsomer
Peter Falk's Columba, in his filthy crumpled mac….

Pick of the crop is a Frenchman, happily married
Unlike Rebus, Frost or a plethora of others
Rupert Davies as Maigret, Simenon's character
Unknotting the psychodynamics of murder
In the Paris of cobbled streets and bistros
Beginning with a match struck on a wall,
Simenon's Maigret: best sleuth of them all