The short version is that I started noodling around with this character dynamic (the Reylo fans would perhaps call it a dyad) when I was first watching Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games. Eventually it would grow into the lead characters from Wolf’s Trail.

In France Criminal Games is just the middle section of a long-running series call Les Meurtres d’Agatha Christie, which retells various Agatha Christie mysteries, with newly invented detectives, in the French city of Lille in one of three time-periods: 1930s, 1960s, or 1970s. In the English speaking world, the 1960s portion was retitled Criminal Games and became a lot more popular, comparatively speaking, than the 1930s portion before it or the 1970s portion after it. (This feels almost as complicated as explaining Robotech or Voltron, for some reason). At any rate, the mysteries in Criminal Games are generally fine, since they take their plot basics from middle/lower-tier Christie novels and stories. The show had something of Christie’s taste for the eerie and gothic, but unlike Christie, tended to endorse the woo-woo occult stuff as real (if this annoys you, skip this show’s adaptations of Dumb Witness, the Pale Horse, The Mirror Cracked, and the Sittaford Mystery).

The lead sleuths in Criminal Games are reporter Alice Avril and police inspector(1) Swan Laurence. She’s a young, passionate feminist (and occasionally a hypocritical one) who wears blue jeans in an era where those were rare on French men, let alone French women. He’s a sarcastic, womanizing Parisian(2) in sharkskin suits, who joined the Resistance in WWII, might have been in Intelligence at some point after the war, and got bounced from the Paris police force when he started investigating Someone Important and refused to back down when warned off. He gets pigeon-holed as a male chauvinist, but a lot of his worst pronouncements are about trolling Alice, and his real beef with Alice Avril and Marlene Leroy (his ditzy but brave secretary) seems that they both act in a pretty immature way, which aggravates him because he’s an old bachelor insistent on all the things covered by comme il faut.

Anyway, the “human interest” side of the character dynamics started out as a quasi-flirty love/hate thing between the reporter and the detective, but never worked well because of the huge age gap and experience level between the two actors: when the series started airing, she was a twenty-nine-year-old model and soap opera star who tended to be kind of shrill in the funny bits, and he was a fifty-one-year-old stage veteran who could make people laugh by raising his eyebrows. Then Marlene started stealing scenes and eventually whole episodes, partly because she was a fabulously dressed Marilyn Monroe wannabe, and partly because she was played by another stage veteran, about midway in age between the other two leads. The show went through a bit of a harem comedy phase, when a female coroner showed up, every bit as chic and pretentious as Laurence himself, and then after that character proved to be a dud and was killed off, the show settled into a Kirk-Spock-McCoy trio, with Alice as McCoy, Swan as Spock, and Marlene as the moderating influence ala Kirk.

I enjoyed the show all the way to its rather outlandish finale (a full-fledged musical), but I found myself asking, “Well, how WOULD you do that feisty girl/posh guy thing? You’d narrow the age gap of course, and you’d make him less of a jerk and her less of an idiot, and…”

But where all that led is a story for another time….

(1) this is functionally what he seems to be in English-speaking terms; his actual title is Commissaire.

(2) There isn’t a good English-language parallel for the combination of snootiness and obnoxiousness that Parisians are seen as being. The stereotypical “regular” New Yorker has the rudeness and self-importance but not really the poshness. The stereotypical Reader of the New Yorker Magazine, and the stereotypical Boston Brahmin, and the stereotypical upper class twit of Britain has the snooty superiority combined with a more passive-aggressive manner. The stereotypical Parisian is both convinced of his superiority, and blunt about it, in a way that doesn’t match with these English-language stereotypes.