Focusing on three recent British film and television crime dramas, Mr Holmes (2015), The Fear (C4, 2012) and the English language version ofWallander (BBC, 2008-16), this article argues that older men in these texts are a site through which contemporary social and cultural anxieties about ageing and dementia are played out in highly gendered ways that link to social and philosophical reflections on power, autonomy and selfhood. The dramas, while very different in affective orientation and tone, nonetheless all produce reflections on the meanings of memory loss within figurations of masculinity in the crime genre which have a broader significance for thinking through the representational dilemmas of dementia.