Modern Crime Dramas and the Essential Unstable Detective

There was a time when the hero detective was at most deeply eccentric; otherwise, he had ardent purpose, he was infallible, he was more brilliant than me or you — it was only a question of when and how he would solve the mystery. That’s not the case any more.

I’m not a scholar of the genre, but it would seem to me that the progenitor of the character was Sherlock Holmes,