As a kickoff to summer, I decided to finish up The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, HBO’s adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s series of a Botswanan female detective named Precious Ramotswe starring Jill Scott. It’s a totally charming show, and both its tone and content are incredibly different from anything else on television, which makes me particularly sorry that it never got the second season. Precious is neither an anti-hero nor your standard cop with a dark secret—she’s a profoundly nice woman with a streak of steel she acquired during an abusive marriage—and most of the people around her, from her rigid secretary to the hairdresser who refers her clients are also pleasant and kind. The bad people she encounters aren’t great villains. Instead, they’re often petty, weak, or angry, and taking it out on the people around them. And perhaps most importantly, her cases are similarly low-key.

The obsession with murder on American crime shows makes sense for a lot of reasons. Murder and rape, the other pop culture standby, are the crimes we take most seriously: they grab an audience’s attention and lend a sense of urgency to an episode. Murders provide opportunities to whip out the kind of high-tech wizardry that works so well as television transitions, whether it’s a medical examiner explaining something routine to Law & Order detectives, or the geniuses playing with awesome-looking toys on Bones. It also provides an excuse for harsh and theoretically exciting interrogations. And has become almost universally true in both prestige and network drama, there’s a consensus that we reach a truer understanding of humanity by venturing through the darkness rather than by heading towards the light. We’re more interested in divining the motivations of the most depraved people among us than exploring saints or simply good people who maintain from day to day.

This struck me because, despite their wildly differing locales, main characters, and relationships to the American cop show tradition (in one marvelous sequence in Ladies’ Detective Agency, the stylist, who is driving Precious’s secretary Grace, says how pleased he is that they’re bickering because it means they’re living up to trope), the show that most reminds me of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is The Unusuals. A short-lived ABC cop show with a ludicrously good cast, including Jeremy Renner, Amber Tamblyn, Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau, The Unusuals was distinctive among its network brethren in that that the detectives weren’t always solving murders. Yes, there was an episode where Goldberg and Perrineau’s characters took over an underground murder store as a sting operation and faced a quandary when one of their clients wanted to kill her abusive cop husband. But a lot of the time, the characters were rounding up a one-man band on a nuisance charge, solving a crime spree motivated by the medical bills of an old-school hood, or tracking down a reported zombie that turned out to be a man with Alzheimer’s who had escaped from a nursing home. These were absolutely smaller stories, but they could be beautifully written, revealing of a whole range of life beyond New Yorkers with their heads bashed in or their hearts shot out.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency worked that way by design. As detectives, Precious and Grace were guaranteed to get cases that either didn’t rise to the level of police attention or didn’t concern strict illegality. Watching Precious track down the records that prove a lawyer is committing insurance fraud to help fund an orphanage, or Grace investigate beauty contest candidates for their integrity (an assignment that tests her jealousy and sense of self) is charming and a much more wide-ranging perspective on Botswana than it would be if she was simply another tough cop. I’ve written that we might have an anti-hero glut on television. If we turn away from the old stand-bys, it might be nice to spend time with people who are pleasant rather than saints—and with scenarios that explore our more frequently unleashed petty impulses rather than our mostly-contained dark ones.

I like this Bitch Magazine encomium to girl detectives as competent, entrepreneurial role models, but I’m sorry to see the author make the common mistake of leaving out my personal favorite and frequently underlooked teen detective, Trixie Belden.

It may be that I have ties to, and thus a fondness for, the Hudson Valley in New York, Trixie’s home base. And certainly, it’s one reason I could relate to the 13-year-old tomboy detective better than any of her peers. While I had an active interior life as a child, I wasn’t as outrageously alienated as Harriet the Spy, and I couldn’t fathom many of the things that made up her upper-middle class New York City upbringing. Alternatively, Nancy Drew was a little too swish and cool for me, with her blue convertible and her college boyfriend, things that seemed impossibly far away for me as a young reader. But 13-year-old Trixie was perfect: she had short hair like mine, and like me, the regrettable tendency to get snappish with a younger sibling. Being a tomboy didn’t keep her from getting an identity bracelet from a boy, but that triumph was almost an afterthought in an adventure, if I remember correctly, that involved doping racehorses at Saratoga and being marooned some impossible-to-walk number of miles outside of town by the villains doing the doping who had apparently never heard of hitching a lift.

But it was more that Trixie was a beautifully-fitting, not particularly aspirationally-oriented, fiction suit for the kind of little girl I was when I read her novels. Though they’re certainly limited by the perspectives of the time in which they were written, the Trixie Belden books do a very nice job of bringing together characters of different backgrounds together in a way that bridged both class divides and two generations of young adult novels. The child of farmers, Trixie becomes friends with the wealthy Honey Wheeler, helping her become closer to the parents who shipped her off to boarding school for much of her life, and brings into her social group an abused orphan and a reform school kid, as well as her siblings. Some of her friends’ privations are throwbacks to another era — I suppose in retrospect they always collectively reminded me of the crew Jo March brings together in Jo’s Boys. And some of the novel’s moral dichotomies, like the idea that the rich are emotionally cold, can be a bit too on-the-nose.

But this is also a thoroughly modern world where boys and girls can be friends without complications and where girls can be leaders, a world defined but not consumed by the rise of computing and the allure of global superstars like Elizabeth Taylor. In some respects, the Trixie Belden books, like the Nancy Drew series, are the direct predecessor of books like the Gossip Girl series and other products of book packagers like Alloy Entertainment, the result of multiple authors picking up after one left off to keep a popular franchise alive. But Trixie’s storytelling and characterization roots lie in an earlier era when storytelling was meant to bring different kinds of children and young teenagers together around shared goals and values, even if those values were a little square.