Scroll down for the best episode of "The Explorers Club" yet.

Spy vs. Spy
What I like to call "The Litvinenko Affair" tonight on 60 Minutes.

Building a Mystery*
I don't particularly like mysteries, which seems odd since I own more individual issues of Detective Comics than any other comic book title. Then again, these days the Batman, the World's Greatest Detective, doesn't do all that much detecting. In the course of a typical adventure, the Caped Crusader will be investigating a clue left behind at the scene of the crime (detection), but before he can trace that clue back to the perpetrator in question said renegade will ambush the Dark Knight. Frenzied melee ensues and the alter ago of billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne once again proves himself to be an elite, nigh-unconquerable master of personal combat (action). Cases almost never reach their conclusion due to detection, nearly always truncated by, on the villain's part, hasty and ill-advised confrontation. Now, the action is one of the many things I love about comic books, but would it not be right and proper to feature stories involving detection and deduction in a book titled Detective Comics? I have digressed somewhat from my original point.

I am a greater fan of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent than of original blend Law & Order because I find the policing, investigatory aspects of most stories more compelling than the legal wrangling (which usually leaves me feeling as if our justice system has nothing at all to do with justice). At the end of next week, my favorite back-to-back detective shows return with new episodes: Monk and Psych. I love Foyle's War, and I quite enjoy Prime Suspect. I have always intended to make a project of the Poirot series starring the brilliant David Suchet (and if I enjoyed the episodes sufficiently, to add Agatha Christie to the long, long list to books to read "someday").

What I mean when I say I don't particularly like mysteries is that I derive no pleasure from attempting to solve a mystery. I don't piece together the clues and try to deduce "whodunit" ahead of the fictional detective or detectives whose exploits I am following. Many mystery fans see themselves as detectives in their own right, sly sleuths who are one step ahead of their fictional idols. Not I. Perhaps this contributes to the quirk in my personality that drives me to watch mysteries and detective stories as a significant portion of my television viewing, but not to read mysteries as part of my novel consumption. Watching television is for me a more casual, passive activity than reading books; reading a mystery (and in the interest of discolsure I have read several of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales), perhaps I feel some obligation to "investigate" the clues the author has sprinled throughout the text and deduce the solution ahead of the detective protagonist. And much as I enjoy novels, I don't find much joy in piecing together clues.

And then of course there is the contrived nature of many fictional mysteries, but that happens in television as well as in prose; so, it is a separate issue which I shall not address for the nonce.

Do you enjoy trying to out-sleuth the fictional sleuths of whom you are a fan? I'm curious.

*My fondness for Sarah McLachlan's music may seem incongruous with my fanaticism for The Aquabats!, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, and Less Than Jake, but to all things there is a season. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any one philosophy, even one as august as ska-punk. Sometimes, I jones for Sarah.