Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane would have a hard time making sense of much of today's world. I came to that conclusion after spending the last week at the Christopher Coleman murder case.

Hammett and Spillane wrote crime stories back in a time when people had secrets. For young people in the audience who don't remember a time before social media, secrets are things you don't want the world to know about. Like an affair. Cops and detectives in the old stories had to look for things like matchbooks with the names of hotels on them. That's how they could prove that people were meeting on the sly.

Not anymore. Along with jurors and the rest of the spectators, I watched — or heard — videotapes of Coleman and his lover, Tara Lintz. These videotapes were not the work of some private detective with a telephoto lens. The lovers made the tapes themselves. "We are in Hawaii being bad," announced Coleman on one of the tapes.

Perhaps it's healthy not to have secrets, but if you are already planning to murder your family to be with your lover — that is what the state is alleging — it doesn't seem wise to make videotapes celebrating your affair.

Affairs are not the only things that are videotaped these days. So are police interrogations. On Wednesday, we spent the entire day watching the interrogation of Coleman. The officers were unfailingly polite. They didn't shout. They didn't curse.

The police had not yet learned that a series of threats Coleman had earlier reported actually came from his own computer, and so they had not even considered the unthinkable notion that the murders were all premeditated. Instead, the interrogators operated on the premise that Coleman killed his wife in a rage, and then snapped and killed his two little boys.

"Something happened, and you said, 'Oh, my gosh! What in the world have I done?'" suggested interrogator Sgt. Dave Bivens of the Illinois State Police.

I thought about the detectives I used to know. They wore fedoras. They were loud and profane and impatient — and that was with each other. In the pre-videotape days, it was not unusual for a suspect to tell of interrogators shouting in his face, pounding the table, and maybe hitting him in the head with a telephone book.

During a break, I saw Bivens' father, Jim. He used to be an investigator for the state police. I have known him for years. He probably has a fedora in his closet.

"'Oh, my gosh'?" I said.

"I don't know where Dave learned that kind of language," he said.

By the way, Dave Bivens and Justin Barlow, then a Columbia police detective and now a deputy U.S. marshal, were impressive interrogators — courteous but insistent.

The film was surreal. The walls were gray. A black-and-white clock dominated the wall. There was little action. Suddenly, an attractive young woman walked in. Keeping with the colorless motif, she wore black slacks and a whitish blouse. She had a gun on her hip. Her name was Abby Keller, and she was an investigator with the state police. She was there to take photographs of Coleman and collect his clothes for evidence.

When she asked him to take his shorts off, the screen was partially blackened so we would not see him in his underwear. I do not know why the sight of a man in his underwear would have offended our sensibilities.

The day before, we had seen autopsy photos. In addition to the photos of the boys, there was a close-up of Sheri Coleman's face and neck. Her face was bruised. Her neck bore three ligature marks.

That is the kind of evidence Hammett and Spillane would understand. Obviously, she fought off the killer's first two attempts to strangle her before succumbing to the third.

And really, the human side of things hasn't changed since they wrote their stories. On Friday, a series of Sheri's friends testified. Several of them were very attractive. All seemed nice. They knew Sheri from work or church. They were the kind of young women the 10 women on the jury could identify with.

In this new age, witnesses sometimes do not have to rely on their memories to recall conversations. For instance, one of Sheri's friends had saved a text message exchange. It began with a message from Sheri. "Can you pray for me?" "Of course, friend! What's up?" "Chris wants a divorce ... He said me and my kids are in the way of his job."

Hammett and Spillane would not have understood the technology, but the significance of the message would have resonated with them. They could not have written better dialogue.