Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I love Masterpiece Mystery! At the moment there’s a series about Inspector George Gently. Man, that guy sounds like a pansy! How about Inspector Frank Forcefully, or Inspector Mark Macho, or Inspector Tom Toughguy? Those guys would get to the bottom of things! No beating around the bush with them: just beating around the suspects! They wouldn’t traipse around, pussyfooting like a ballerina! They’re hard boiled, like, um, eggs, or something! Oh, but aren’t eggs, even hard-boiled ones, really fragile and easy to crack? Okay, let me try this again: They’re hardcore, like, uh, pornography (?)! Well, maybe that’s a bad analogy too. That sounds too corrupt and horny. But they’re hard boiled, alright: that much, I assure you! And they’ll get to the bottom of, uh, hmmm; actually, maybe the pornography reference was apropos after all. But this Gently fellow: he sounds like he treats terrorists and murderers with kid gloves, doesn’t he? But maybe that’s by design!
Hey, what if, just for the sake of argument, this George Gently guy’s name was in actuality Steve Strongarm, or something like that? Well, maybe with that name, all the criminals naturally resisted him, taking his name as a kind of dare, so they wouldn’t talk unless he really threatened and abused them; or perhaps if they just heard that name, they considered he must fancy himself some kind of tough guy, so they instinctively rebelled against and challenged him no matter what he did: like if some guy named King was appointed to rule over a monarchy-loathing Democracy or something. So, perhaps perceiving this innate distaste with his moniker, he resolved to turn the tables on this situation (and consequently on these guilty criminal types) with reverse-psychology, and changed his name to George Gently, so as to trick treacherous criminals and vicious murderers into assuming he was a pushover, so as to tempt them into bragging about their power and misdeeds to dominate him, or to lull them into a false sense of security so they would betray themselves. Then it would be brilliant, using these killers’ natural prejudices against them, simply by re-branding himself with a wimpy-sounding name: It’s pure genius!
See? I knew he was smart and effective. Just as I suspected all along! And this illustrates once again that one should not judge a book by its cover (unless the cover is really great!).
This is Inspector George Gently, for those who are unfamiliar with this program(me):
