That’s because the story runs over many episodes and is typically intricately plotted, so you need recaps. “I suspect they were first seen in Cold War spy thrillers, which in their use of duplicity, aliases and paranoiac themes, have much in common with the new wave of TV crime drama that has really popularised them. “They’ve been around for a while, though nothing like in the numbers they are now,” says Christina Bunce, a director of the Professional Writing Academy, which develops online writing courses with John Yorke, a celebrated TV drama producer and authority on televisual story structure. Cohle’s wall (Crazy Walls are always referred to as singular, even if they’re a three-wall sprawl) was the best-dressed in a year that saw many strong contenders, including Molly Solverson’s secret basement number in the TV reboot of Fargo the collage that takes over half of 221B Baker Street in Sherlock or Saga’s beautiful, Scandi-monochrome, OCD-precise boards in Danish/Swedish crime hit The Bridge. It looked good, like a newly-opened hipster stationery shop, and from the lingering shots, you knew the director wanted us to clock it. In True Detective, Matthew McConaughey’s character Rust Cohle had a storage locker containing all his conspiracy-clutter evidence of a “sprawl” of child abuse and murder, three walls of chipboard, newspaper cuttings, “Missing” posters, vintage video equipment, notes, maps and photographs, all set off by satanic-ritual gear and lit by industrial arc lights. In set-design terms, we have entered the age of the “Post-it Procedural”: last October, I sat in a cinema and watched back-to-back trailers ( Before I Go To Sleep and A Most Wanted Man) with strongly-featured Crazy Walls, before watching Andrew Garfield construct another, rather un-super, Staples-ish number in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. ![]() It’s all very hard to tear yourself away from, and if it’s the future of crime detection, it also marks the point at which the “Crazy Wall” went crowd-sourced and global.Ĭrazy Wall is the catch-all term for the boards on which investigators pin up and plot out all their clues in crime and spy thrillers, and recently it has become unthinkable for almost any serious TV drama not to have some sort of board for the characters to contemplate as they try to work out the kinks of a theory. ![]() These complement the “Maps, Photos, Etc” section of the podcast’s website, which gathers yet more documents. The Serial page on internet forum features, among other things, analysis of statements and police reports, guides to the protagonists’ mobile phone records and dozens of maps used to collate and chart evidence. I say “listeners”, but they tend to be a bit more than that, spending their free time hunting out new clues, mapping out locations (it was a real-life crime, remember), and building theories that they share on social media. Written and presented by US journalist Sarah Koenig, it has become a global phenomenon, with more than five million listeners. The show explores a real-life murder that took place in Baltimore in the US in 1999. And if you doubt the public’s appetite for solving crimes, you need look no further than the huge success of the weekly podcast Serial. There was much criticism, but really it was no surprise: four years earlier, in July 2010, the Home Secretary Theresa May published a white paper floating the idea of volunteer armies of “community crime fighters” and “getting people more involved in the work of their police forces”.Īnd while the news suggested petty crime was depressingly out of control, the initiative had a certain appeal, to men anyway - I doubt I’m the only one ever to have entertained fantasies of tracking down the guttersnipe who nicked my bike. People who had been burgled or had cars broken into were asked to speak to neighbours or look for CCTV footage, or even comb out second-hand shops and websites for signs of their property - this soft snooping freeing up overstretched police resources for more serious misdemeanours. In an official report published that day, the government admitted that some British forces had begun asking crime victims to investigate their own offences rather than assigning officers to the job. On Wednesday, 3 September 2014, policing in Great Britain crossed a line.
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