One of my favourite TV detectives when I was growing up was Colombo. Although I wasn’t quite aware of it at the time, looking back, I think the thing that made me like actor Peter Falk’s character so much was that he was simultaneously a dishevelled nincompoop and as smart as a whip. It was a great contradiction. Criminals often got tricked by the former trait and then caught by the latter. Call it the old Principle-22-Switcheroo.

I was flicking through the channels the other day and noticed a re-run of an episode called, ‘A Bird In the Hand’. I joined the action after the murder had taken place. Someone was being filmed getting in to their Rolls-Royce and when they started the engine, the car blew up. Colombo had been watching the film. Looking for contradictions.

Lots of people seem to love watching detective programmes. I think its because they’re a type of puzzle. Can we work out who the perpetrator of the crime is before the detectives do. I’d have to say the genre became less appealing to me after I learned TRIZ. Mainly because TRIZ taught me that detection of a crime is all about contradictions. Someone is lying. They’re pleading their innocence, when in fact they did it. Spot the contradiction and you’re well on your way to solving the mystery. Connect the contradiction to an Inventive Principle (or perhaps more than one if the writer has done their job well), and the mystery is solved.

What Colombo had spotted in the film, as the cameraman panned across the car scene was that one of the peripheral characters flinched and closed their eyes tight before the explosion. Only someone with a devil-in-the-detail detective’s eye would’ve spotted it. A fraction of a second in a grainy panning film. But enough to give the game away. The flinching character was flinching before the explosion happened because they knew it was about to happen. Bam. Principle 10, Prior Action. Contradiction solved. Crime solved.

I’m not sure I have the energy to go through all the other 70+ Colombo episodes to reverse engineer the contradictions and their resolution, but I’m willing to make a fairly safe bet that a big part of the success of the series, and the reason I loved it, is that the contradiction resolutions could be connected back to a broad spectrum of the Inventive Principles. Most scriptwriters keep re-using the same old tricks. Colombo’s writing team, in my memory at least, was a cut above.

How about that for a Masters thesis dissertation topic?