IT’S A MYSTERY WHERE THE NEXT GREAT DETECTIVES WILL COME FROM

AS THE year Her Majesty delicately referred to as “bumpy” ebbed away last Tuesday, the final murder figures for London alone were published.

The final two killings set the overall figure at 150. That used to be more than the murder total for the entire country.

However, a police source assures me that detection rates have never been higher. Very rarely indeed is the word “unsolved” tagged on a murder file. In just about every single case we read “a man has been detained” within days of the announcement of the crime. This is not because a new generation of Hercule Poirots has been at work nor even a super-Inspector Morse. The key is forensic science.

First comes CCTV.We British are the most photographed people in the world – about 300 times per day per citizen. The police scan miles of film covering the area of the crime. The chances are the killer will be on it somewhere. Then comes “trace” evidence – fingerprints (of course) and the relatively new DNA which can identify a minuscule human trace with only a one-in-a-billion chance of it being wrong.

Sherlock Holmes, you’re redundant. Very few killers leave not a single tiny trace behind.

Eyewitness evidence looks good in court and may clinch it but Det Insp Science has usually identified the killer beyond a doubt. After that “due process” will lead the killer to the jail cell. There is, of course, one conclusion to all this.

Where will we get our next generation of super-sleuths to keep us entertained on a winter’s evening? Where is the next Morse, Endeavour or Jack Frost? A CCTV camera and a microscope are not very telegenic on a TV set.

Fret not, the human being is an ingenious fellow. Doubtless young screenwriters are beavering away in their garrets.