What I learned from Death and Other Details
- Brandi Bradley
- Jul 15
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 20
I am not a book reviewer. I am a writer. I am not pretending to be a reviewer or have affiliates incentivizing me to talk about these books, series, podcasts, etc. I am consuming these materials to learn more about storytelling and the craft of writing. If you are interested in knowing what’s new, now, and exciting in books, this is not where you want to be.
Like I have mentioned before, I need things to season before I can approach them.
Death and Other Details is a series on Hulu that launched when I was in a major surge of high quality television programming. I was watching Bosch Legacy. I was watching Only Murders in the Building. I was teaching. It was a whole busy, busy time.
Summer is a fantastic opportunity for me to get caught up on the shows I have missed or placed on the back-burner until I can get to them.
Death and Other Details is about a wealthy family celebrating the birthday of the patriarch and current CEO of the family business, who is in the midst of a tense merger with another powerful family. While in the middle of the ocean, there is a murder on the ship. Also, there is a world-famous detective and the daughter of the last case he never solved on board creating interesting tension. It falls in the category of a locked room mystery (or locked door mystery) made famous by Agatha Christie.
This series had an 80s vibe to it, despite that it’s so modern. Perhaps it’s the uber-wealthy and glamorous guests on the ship, but all the locales were gorgeous, the outfits were bespoke, and the boat seems to gleam in solid gold. What keeps it grounded is the shaggy detective played by Mandy Patinkin who seems hammered the whole time, but also sees everything happening on board this ship.
It hit a lot of the mystery novel conventions – professional detective, amateur detective acting as their assistant, two mysteries that become one mystery at the close, ending each episode with a scene that makes the viewer think one person did it but actually there is a perfectly reasonable explanation, and – of course – the amateur detective consistently and blatantly accuses everyone of being the murderer.
There were many aspects that I found to be useful, but others I wondered if they have reached the point of being overused – almost to the point of becoming a trope.
A convention – as I tell my students – is an expectation of the genre. People who like this genre are fans, and fans are here to be serviced. They want and expect certain things to happen in the story – for example in a locked room mystery there is an expectation of a body and the fact that the suspect list is limited to the people locked in that room. However, sometimes conventions become so over used that they become tropes. In the romance genre, many fans are embracing tropes, proudly wearing their “Enemies become Lovers” stickers on their laptops and water bottles. However, tropes are cliches and conventions are expectations.
The still useful conventions in Death and Other Details:
The most paranoid person is always right. I think in most mysteries there’s often a character whose ideas are dismissed because the rest of the crew does not want to believe something sinister could be happening. Often it’s the detective who is filled with skepticism. It’s interesting to see a non-detective in the ensemble identify that something is happening that everyone else is ignoring.
Everyone does bad things sometimes. There are no saints on this boat. Everyone has a dirty little secret they are hiding, including the detectives of this tale. It provides nuance when there are no outright heroes.
Voice-over. I love a detective voice-over. As a writer, I think if someone is going to write in 1st person, that voice needs to be incredibly strong and charismatic. Too often stories are written in first person so the protagonist can lament about their feelings. In detective mysteries, they exist to provide some levity and to move the story along. They also get the best cut lines before a chapter (or episode) ends. Mandy Patinkin's detective Rufus Cotesworth provides a grizzled and professorial voice over instructing the viewer (or as he references you, dear reader) to "look closer".
Aspects in Death and Other Details that are kind of becoming a trope:
The amateur detective consistently gets leads and then storms up to the suspect and accuses them of being a murderer. The reason why I wonder if this is becoming a trope is because I see this occur more and more, specifically in the teen detective genre. The worst offender, Spencer Hastings of Pretty Little Liars. Whereas a Veronica Mars detective will at least plant a bug in your car, office, or cell phone before making accusations. With locked room mysteries, there is a sense that time is of the essence, which means detectives make hasty decisions. It becomes exhausting to watch people be accused over and over again. I prefer when a detective can lure the suspect into a trap.
The amateur detective, Violet, suffers from having every character fall in love with them. It must be a rough life. Yes, she is charming and sexy. It makes for sexy banter with the suspects. It allows her to charm and seduce entry keys off people. After a while, it’s like … yep, this one’s in love with her, too. How do writers balance this line of attractive to unrealistically attractive? Is it possible to lose the reader (or viewer) in this case? As a reader, I like seeing sexually confident women. But sometimes even sexually confident, attractive women are turned down. By not showing her being bested by someone just not feeling her sexy vibe, it makes the character a little like on of Charlie’s Angels.
Money is the root of all evil. I think stories should have a little more to offer, but having a morale is a little cringy. And this one hammered the message of “Money is the Root of All Evil” every opportunity it had. And it was a hypocritical message as well because while it offered a 10 minute montage and monologue about how evil these rich people are, there was also an extended scene of luxury resorts and other opulent locals after that. And because of this message, there was an underlying message of “these rich people deserve to die” which to me is problematic. I’ll quote Michael Connolly (and also Dateline's Joshie Mankz), “Everyone counts or no one counts.”
I will say I appreciated how the show handled the flashbacks -- rain and overcast in the past and sunny and opulent in the present. Multiple time-lines are challenging, and lately I have been seeing many television shows becoming more and more clever using atmosphere, lighting, and subtle shifts to indicate switching of timelines (I'll be covering Dept. Q in the upcoming weeks). Writers have to do those things and also a header providing the date to indicate those shifts.
Stay tuned for more mysteries I am binging this summer and how I turn them all into teaching moments! Be sure to check out my previous post about what I learned from reading Night Film.
Looking for a mystery, check out Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder.
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