Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Another unreal policeman.

Must I summarise the plot? Well, people keep bursting into flames. Noone knows what is causing this, but foul play is suspected. Find Detective Dee, the omniscient chop-socky protagonist and the game of Gomoku is afoot. It’s important not to obfuscate the main issue, which is that Detective Dee is a couple of hours of solid, uncomplicated entertainment. It has a strong central character, a fun plot, with plenty of twists, lots of fighting, plus a sprinkling of magic. It also features a world record - surely the largest ever murder weapon. It is excellent fun.

One aspect of the film which I found puzzling, however, was that it had one foot in the rational scientific world, and another in the supernatural. Of course, it’s a staple element of detective literature for a supernatural explanation to be posited for a phenomenon (The Hound of the Baskervilles), only for the rational detective to demonstrate the all-too-human origin for the events in question.

In Detective Dee, supernatural events occur alright, but the ‘rational’ explanations are not rational at all: for example, the ability to ventriloquise over long distances - an obvious impossibility - is an explanation for one of the minor mysteries of the film. In another scene, the ability of a character to seemingly split into three parts is explained by... puppetry? Hm. Hardly believable either. 

It seems that the Chinese have misunderstood one of the key elements of the detective genre: part of the ludic quality of the western detective story is the idea that the reader, or viewer in this case, is able to piece together the available evidence, and come to the conclusion before the detective. Western detective writers are tightly constricted by the confines of the possible, or even the likely. To reveal, at the end of a Holmes story, that there really was  a phantom hound would be deeply unsatisfactory. In Detective Dee world, the supernatural is also debunked, but only for a physical world in which pretty much anything is possible. Dee occupies an alternate reality, one where modern natural science has not arrived, but in which primitive inventions, such as martial arts, homeopathy, mechanics, ventriloquism (to name a few examples) have been honed to a degree bordering on the supernatural. 

This state of affairs has plausibility-sapping properties. Characters are omniscient one moment, but lacking a fatal piece of information the next. One second they can sense a footstep from half a mile away, the next, they are snuck up on by thirty foot soldiers. And of course, when almost anything is possible, the actual becomes less interesting. 

I don’t actually think that the Chinese have misunderstood the detective genre. I think they have grafted it onto another genre: the fantasy kung fu genre. The resulting chimera is an odd-looking beast which wouldn’t be allowed in any classical detective club, but nevertheless entertains in its own way.