True Detective, Monsieur Spade, and Our Struggle with the Coziness of Crime

Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures. We crave comfort, conviction, and routine. This doesn’t mean we aren’t also animated by novelty, but there’s a kind of “novelty capture” protocol we often enact when faced with new intel. We want to process it, to understand it, to normalize the weird and extreme within the everyday.

And crime fiction is one of…