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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25677
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25677
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

No one can know the writer's reasons but themselves, but I would point out a couple of things:

- If the detective is the star of of the show, you want them in frame. When you see a scene from a character's POV, you see what they see, you don't see them. 

- The natural way in which you get to know someone is not from inside their head, but from the outside. The omniscient POV is the normal and natural POV of western literature because it allows the reader to see the character both from the outside and from the inside. Both the cinematic POV and the close POV close one of those windows. Thus the both tell you less, not more, about the character. 

- As you point out, any story which follows the trope of the big reveal depends on the detective knowing things that the reader does not know. That is hard to do if the detective is the POV character.

An interesting example of when the Detective is not only the POV character but the first person narrator are the Longmire mysteries. What is interesting in this case is that Longmire is a taciturn and unknowable man. Using him as narrator allows the author, Craig Johnson, to limit what the reader can see or know of Longmire. It also allows him to frame the secondary characters, and the Wyoming setting, which is very much a star of the books.

It is worth pointing out in this connection that the detective is not always the focus of a mystery. A mystery can also focus on the character of the criminal.

POV is a camera angle, and where you place the camera determines where the focus lies. But you don't place the camera on the thing you want to focus on, you place it opposite to it.

Original score: 11