Girl with the Woolly Sweater: ready to join the greats?

NEVER mind The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The one we're all wondering about is The Girl with the Woolly Sweater, The Killing's Sarah Lund.

Lund is an unfathomable, detached, single-minded, apparently Plain Jane, estranged from her child, living like a squatter, as closed as an oyster and a stranger to anything resembling a womanly wile.

Yet more than any Salander-style body-mod, her sweaters have got men all over the world deluding themselves that they are the one who could capture her heart.

One reason is that The Killing is in Foreign, so you can't look away in case you miss a subtitle. Research shows that if you gaze into the eyes of a perfect stranger for a minute or so, you begin to desire them. The same applies, I suppose, to TV.

Also, of course, Lund is damaged. She's not, you know, right. There's a bit missing, to compensate for the bit extra that she does have. And it doesn't hurt that she's scorching hot without being out-of-range beautiful.

Hot, and, of course, crackers. Her ruthless moral sensibilities and emotional chill draw our gaze, to make us imagine what it would be like to have that intensity focused on us, and wonder what heart beats beneath the Gudrun & Gudrun jumper.  Like men throughout the ages, we dream of being the one to make the ice maiden melt.

What women think of Lund, I have no idea.

The writer of The Killing, Soren Sveistrup, has also pushed it in an unusual direction, especially for TV, in that there's no back-story.

Television is obsessed with the back-story of its detectives. A TV series counts itself a poor fish if we don't at least feel we know why the detective is as he or she is: drink, childhood violence, atonement, adultery, betrayal, playground bullying... anything, it seems, can turn a person into a detective. Except for just wanting to be one.

Perhaps it's the job itself. The fictional detective brings order from chaos. He or she must be special. As Raymond Chandler wrote, in The Simple Art of Murder, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid", before going on to say "I do not care much about his private life."

But we do. The intimacy of TV, and our confessional culture, make us care.

So sometimes we have The Detective With The Weird Life. James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux has his three-legged racoon, his bait shop, his reformed alcoholism and his fat out-of-control sidekick Cletus Purcel. Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch is an emotional disaster zone, plus his actual name is Heironymus. Ian Rankin's Rebus is a solitary piss-artist.

More venerably, we also have The Detective With No Bloody Life At All. This is a collection of classic, golden-age sleuths. Billy No-Mates, almost all of them, apart from the usual sidekick. Lord Peter Wimsey's has his manservant Bunter, The Saint has his Orace, John Creasey's Toff had Jolly.

And in the lead is Agatha Christie with a foot in both camps, with Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple (who is essentially Poirot in drag) and the strange, other-worldly Mr Quinn.

So: is Sarah Lund in this pantheon? We need to see more of her. But she's off to a good start. No life is one thing. Pulling off, triumphantly, no back-story on TV is something else.

But the bar is high. The anorexic, substance-abusing, exclusively homosocial, idiot-savant, ill-educated, unofficial, ruthless king of detectives still reigns. The dressing up! The small boys! The superciliousness and the brawling! The crucial sidekick! Yes: Sherlock Holmes is back, recreated, in an extraordinary act of reincarnation (and after the trouble Conan Doyle took to kill him) by Anthony Horowitz (who originally adapted Midsomer Murders for TV, but it doesn’t show), in The House of Silk.

Now there’s a detective, and a man who could thaw Lund’s heart. But, of course, he’d get nowhere. Like melting ice off a duck’s back.

• The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, Orion. ISBN 978-1-4091-3382-7

• The Killing continues on BBC 4 on Saturday at 9pm

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