Borderlands

I watched the last episode of the excellent Danish drama The Bridge on BBC. If you have not succumbed to its peculiar charm imagine a police procedural written by Ibsen. It's not Starsky and Hutch. Instead of Starsky you have an autistic female Swedish detective who wears leather trousers, drives an old bilious coloured Porsche and picks up men in bars. Her partner is a Danish policeman adept at impersonating a shambles.

The odd couple investigate crimes that takes place on the Oresund Bridge that links Sweden and Denmark.This second series involves eco terrorism and big business. The end was touching, unexpected and left room for a third series. It didn't outstay its welcome.

By chance I had also finished a crime novel called Borderlands. It was the first novel in a series of crime fiction set on the North West border between the six counties of N Ireland and Southern Ireland. The protagonist was a policeman in the Garda ( the Southern Irish police) called Inspector Devlin. He faced a similar problem to the detectives in The Bridge - bodies found on a jurisdictional border . He has to deal with suspects who flit North and South of the border.

I am not an aficionado but the appeal of crime fiction is the resolution. There is a crime, an investigation, a suspect apprehended and the mystery resolved. Courtesy of Hitchcock there is also a MacGuffin for suspense ( and padding).In the practice of criminal law matters may not be as clear. You may obtain an acquittal for an accused and still harbour doubts.

A dead body near a border need not be a crime. I cannot attribute the quote but I read that all borders are drawn in blood. Instead of a murder on the border between Denmark and Sweden or the North and South of ireland it may be an act of war between states.

The photo is of a memorial of the killing of three IRA volunteers by the SAS in N Ireland during the 1980s. To some it was an act of war. To others it was a crime and an act of murder.

Unlike fiction there is no resolution. The memorial is near Borderlands.