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The police procedural is a sub-genre of the mystery story which attempts to accurately depict the activities of a police force as they investigate crimes.

Characteristics

The police procedural distinctively details the activities of a police officer or a group of police officers, as opposed to those of an amateur detective or private eye. Whereas the typical detective novel concentrates on one crime, the police procedural frequently attempts to depict the work of police officers in solving multiple crimes simultaneously. Police procedurals are more likely than other types of crime fiction to have the perpetrator's identity known to the reader from the outset, as opposed to the whodunit convention of having the criminal's identity concealed until the climax, though many police procedurals are also "fair-play" whodunits in which the identity of the perpetrator is kept hidden until the end.

In a police procedural, the principal crimes are generally solved by the story's end, although minor crimes may remain unsolved. More often than in is usually the case in other forms of detective fiction, the procedural is likely to spend considerable time showing us the personal lives of the investigator(s). Police-related topics such as forensics, autopsies, the gathering of evidence, the use of search warrants and interrogation of suspects feature strongly compared other types of detective fiction. For example, the protagonists in a police procedural may witness an autopsy in person, whilst in a traditional whodunit, the autopsy will only be alluded to. Some examples of police procedurals have pathologists or forensics experts as the main characters, with actual police officers playing only a minor role.

History

There were earlier precedents, but Lawrence Treat's 1945 novel V for Victim is often cited as perhaps the first "true" police procedural [http://www.mysteryguide.com/hist-police.html. Another early example is Hillary Waugh's Last Seen Wearing .... Even earlier examples, predating Treat, include the novels Harness Bull, 1937, and Homicide, 1937, by former Southern California police officer Leslie T. White, P.C. Richardson's First Case, 1933, by Sir Basil Thomson, former Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, and the short story collection Policeman's Lot, 1933, by former Buckinghamshire High Sheriff and Justice of the Peace Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher writing as "Henry Wade."

It has been suggested that the radio drama Dragnet was "The most famous procedural of all time ... Actor/producer Jack Webb's catchphrase, 'Just the facts, ma'am,' has become a permanent part of the culture."* Webb also authored a non-fiction police procedural of the Los Angeles Police Department called The Badge in 1958 (reprinted by Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, 2005). In it he describes the procedures of the LAPD as it attempts to professionalize itself and its image into that of a scientific bureacracy in which crimes are solved by the work of many policemen and not by the genius of one mind, as detective fiction liked to suggest.

Written stories

Ed McBain

Perhaps the best example of the police procedural is the work of Ed McBain, the pseudonym of Evan Hunter. Starting in 1956, he wrote dozens of novels in the 87th Precinct series. Hunter continued to write 87th Precinct novels almost until his death in 2005. Although these novels focus primarily on Detective Steve Carella, they encompass the work of many officers working alone and in teams, and Carella is not always present in any individual book. Hunter has used many different narrative approaches over the years, and the 87th Precinct novels are often works of great power, depth, and emotional richness, and often contain moments of terrific (if sometimes gruesome) humour.

John Creasey/J.J. Marric

Perhaps ranking just behind McBain in importance to the development of the procedural as a distinct mystery sub-genre is John Creasey. An incredibly prolific writer of different kinds of crime fiction, from espionage to criminal protagonist, he was inspired to write a more realistic crime novel when he found that his next-door neighbor was a retired Scotland Yard detective who challenged Creasey to "write about us as we are." The result was Inspector West Takes Charge, 1940, the first of more than forty novels to feature Roger West of the London Metropolitan Police. The West novels were, for the era, an unusually realistic look at Scotland Yard operations, but the plots were often wildly melodramatic, and, to get around thorny legal problems, Creasey gave West an "amateur detective" friend who was able to perform the extra-procedural acts that West, as a policeman, could not.

In the mid-1950's, inspired by the success of television's Dragnet and a similar British TV series, Fabian of the Yard, Creasey decided to try a more down-to-earth series of cop stories. Adopting the pseudonym "J.J. Marric," he wrote Gideon's Day, 1955, in which George Gideon, a high-ranking detective at Scotland Yard, spends a busy day supervising his subordinates' investigations into several unrelated crimes. This novel was the first in a series of more than twenty books which brought Creasey his best critical notices. One entry, Gideon's Fire, 1961, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Mystery Novel. The Gideon series, more than any other source, helped establish the common procedural plot structure of threading several autonomous storylines through a single novel.

Dell Shannon

A prolific author of police procedurals, whose work has fallen out of fashion in the years since her death, is Elizabeth Linington writing as "Dell Shannon". Ms. Linington, who wrote under her own name as well as a number of pseudonyms, reserved her Dell Shannon pseudonym primarily for procedurals featuring Detective Luis Mendoza (1960-1986). These novels are often considered severely flawed due to the author's far-right political viewpoint (she was a proud member of the John Birch Society), which occasionally works its way into the novels in the form of racism, sexism and extreme homophobia. However, they have a certain naive charm in their depiction of a kinder, gentler California, where the police were always "good guys" who solved all the crimes and respected the citizenry. It should also be noted that Miss Linington's novels were all seriously deficient in the single element most identified with the police procedural, technical accuracy.

Georges Simenon

It is hard to say whether the Inspector Maigret novels of Georges Simenon represent procedurals because of their strong focus on the Inspector himself, but the cast of supporting characters frequently includes repeating members of his staff and some would argue that they qualify. More importantly, Simenon did seem to be making an effort to give an accurate depiction, or at least the appearance of an accurate depiction, of law enforcement in Paris. Moreover, Simenon's influence on later European procedural writers, like Sweden's Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, or the Netherlands' A. C. Baantjer, is obvious.

Joseph Wambaugh

Though not the first police officer to write procedurals, Joseph Wambaugh's success has caused him to become the exemplar of cops who turn their professional experiences into fiction. The son of a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, policeman, Wambaugh joined the Los Angeles Police Department after a stint of military duty. In 1970, his first novel, The New Centurions (novel), was published. This followed three police officers through their training in the Academy, their first few years on the street, culminating in the Watts riots of 1965. It was followed by such novels as The Blue Knight, 1971, The Choirboys, 1975, Hollywood Station, 2006, and acclaimed non-fiction books like The Onion Field, 1973, Lines and Shadows, 1984, and Fire Lover, 2002. Wambaugh has said that his main purpose is less to show how cops work on the job, than how the job works on cops.

Other police officers who have gone on to become police novelists include New York City Transit Police Detective Dorothy Uhnak, NYPD Detectives William Caunitz and Dan Mahoney, FBI Agents Paul Lindsay, Arthur Nehrbass, and Christopher Whitcomb, US Secret Service Agent Gerald Petievich, Scotland Yard Special Branch Detective Graham Ison, Soviet Prosecutor's Investigator Fridrikh Neznansky, and the previously mentioned Baantjer of the Amsterdam Municipal Police.

Detective novel writers

It is difficult to disentangle the early roots of the procedural from its more common cousin, the detective novel, which features a police officer as protagonist. By and large, the better known novelists such as Ngaio Marsh produced work that falls more squarely into the province of the detective novel. Nevertheless, some of the work of authors less well known today, like Freeman Wills Crofts' novels about Inspector French or some of the work of the prolific team of G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, might be considered as the antecedents of today's police procedural. British mystery novelist and critic Julian Symons, in his 1972 history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder, labeled these proto-procedurals "humdrums," because of their emphasis on the plodding nature of the investigators.

Significant radio and TV series

Prominent American police procedurals broadcast on radio / television include:

  • Dragnet was a pioneering police procedural. Beginning on radio in 1949 and on television in 1951, Dragnet established the tone of many police dramas in subsequent decades, and the rigorously authentic depictions of such elements as organizational structure, professional jargon, legal issues, etc, set the standard for technical accuracy that became the most identifiable element of the police procedural in all mediums. Occasionally accused of presenting an overly idealized portrait of law enforcement in which the police were invariably presented as "good guys," the criminals as "bad guys," with little moral flexibility or complexity between the two, it should be noted that many episodes depicted sympathetic perpetrators while others depicted unsympathetic cops. Further, if Jack Webb may have seemed to go to extremes to depict cops in a favorable light, it should be noted that most depictions of cops at the time of Dragnet's debut were both unsympathetic and unrealistic. Webb's depiction was meant, at the time, to offer balance.

  • Hill Street Blues (1987-1990) featured a number of intertwined storylines in each episode, and pioneered depiction of the conflicts between the work and private lives of officers on which the police procedural was centered. The show had a deliberate "documentary" style, depicting officers who were flawed and human, and dealt openly with the gray areas of morality between right and wrong. It was set in an unidentified metropolitan area. The show was written by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll

  • Law & Order, a long-running series (1981 - present) focusing on the two 'halves' of a criminal proceeding in the New York City criminal justice system: the investigation of the crime by the police detectives and the subsequent prosecution of the criminals by the district attorney's office. The success of the original Law & Order inspired four other spin-off series; Special Victims Unit (1999), Criminal Intent (2001), Trial by Jury (2005) and Conviction (2006); the first two are more heavily police procedurals than the latter two. As well as being a police procedural (focusing primarily on the criminal investigations as opposed to the characters personal lives - although, unlike Dragnet, presenting a more complex picture of the police department, with many cases involving police corruption), this program also relates to the courtroom drama and 'forensic pathology' subgenres, inspiring such other programs as the Crime Scene Investigation series.

  • Life on the Street (1981-1998), a police procedural focusing on the homicide unit of the Baltimore city police department. Critically praised (although frequently struggling in the ratings), the show was more of an ensemble piece, focusing on the activities of the unit as a whole (although significant characters such as Detective Frank Pembleton and Detective John Munch became popular with viewers).

  • NYPD Blue (1989-2005) explored the internal and external struggles of the fictional 15th precinct of Manhattan. The show gained notoriety for profanity and nudity never previously broadcast on American network television. NYPD Blue was created by genre veteran Steven Bochco and David Milch.

Prominent British procedurals include:

  • The Prime Suspect series, featuring Helen Mirren as DCI (later Superintendent) Jane Tennison, which focussed both on the police investigations and on Tennison's conflicts with her fellow officers as a prominent female detective in a heavily male-dominated work environment.

  • The Bill, a drama series focusing on both the uniformed and plain-clothes police officers working out of an inner-city London police station. The original conception of this series was as purely procedural, with an almost fly-on-the-wall approach that survives to a greater or lesser extent to this day.

Comic Strips and Books

It has been suggested that the comic strip, Dick Tracy, is actually an early procedural because of its emphasis on the details of police investigation. Indeed, in his introduction to a 1970 collection of Tracy strips entitled The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, no less an authority than Ellery Queen suggested that Tracy, predating Webb, Treat, Creasey, and McBain, was the first truly procedural policeman in any fictional medium.

Certainly Tracy creator Chester Gould seemed to be trying reflect the real world. Tracy himself, conceived by Gould as a "modern-day Sherlock Holmes," was partly modeled on real-life law enforcer Eliot Ness, and his first, and most frequently recurring, antagonist, the Big Boy, on Ness's real-life nemesis, Al Capone. Other members of Tracy's Rogues Gallery, like Boris Arson, Flattop Jones, and Ma Famon, were inspired, respectively, by John Dillinger, Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, and Kate Ma Barker.

More to the point, Gould made a genuine effort to sweat the details, to portray police work realistically. Once Tracy was sold to the Chicago Tribune syndicate, Gould enrolled in a criminology class at his old alma mater, Northwestern University, made friends with members of the Chicago Police Department, and began spending a lot of time doing research at the Department's crime lab, all to make his depiction of law enforcement more authentic. Ultimately, he hired a retired Chicago policeman, Al Valanis, a pioneering forensic sketch artist, as both an artistic assistant and police technical advisor.

Later stories, in which Gould veered into wild space opera and extra-terrestrial contacts, mitigated somewhat against the strip's being recognized for its early use of realistic police procedure, but any examination of the Tracy strip from its beginnings in 1931 through the 1950's makes Gould's status as a pioneer in this sub-genre clear.

The huge, immediate success of Tracy led to many more police strips. Some, like Norman Marsh's Dan Dunn were unabashedly slavish imitations of Tracy. Others, like Dashiell Hammett's and Alex Raymond's Secret Agent X-9, took a more original approach. Still others, like Eddie Sullivan's and Charlie Schmidt's Radio Patrol and Will Gould's Red Barry, steered a middle course.

Aside from Tracy, perhaps the best police strip was Kerry Drake. Written and created by Allen Saunders (who received no credit), and illustrated by Alfred Andriola, it diverged from the metropolitan settings used in Tracy to tell the story of the titular Chief Investigator for the District Attorney of a small-town jurisdiction. Some years after the strip's debut, during a personal crisis, Drake, decides he should engage in police work closer to the street level, and resigns from the DA's Office in order to join his small city's police force. As both a DA's man and a city cop, he fights a string of flamboyant, Gould-ian criminals like "Stitches," "Bottleneck," and "Bulldozer."

Other syndicated police strips include Zane Grey's King of the Royal Mounted, depicting police work in the contemporary Canadian Northwest, Lank Leonard's Mickey Finn, which emphasized the home life of a hard-working cop, and Dragnet, which adapted stories from the pioneering radio-TV series into comics.

Early comic books with police themes tended to be reprints of syndicated newspaper strips like Tracy and Drake. Others adapted police stories from other mediums, like the radio-inspired anthology comic Gang Busters, Dell's 87th Precinct issues, which adapted McBain's novels, or The Untouchables, which adapted the fictionalized TV adventures of real-life policeman Eliot Ness.

More recently, there have been attempts to depict police work with the kind of hard-edged realism seen in the novels of writers like Wambaugh, such as Marvel's four-issue mini-series Cops: The Job, in which a rookie police officer learns to cope with the the physical, emotional, and mental stresses of law enforcement during her first patrol assignment.

With super-heroes having long dominated the comic book market, there have been some recent attempts to integrate elements of the police procedural into the universe of costumed crime-fighters. Gotham Central, for example, depicts a groups of police officers operating in Batman's Gotham City, while Metropolis SCU tells the story of the Special Crimes Unit, an elite squad of cops in the police force serving Superman's Metropolis.

The use of police procedural elements in super-hero comics can partly be attributed to the success of Kurt Busiek's groundbreaking 1994 series Marvels, and his subsequent Astro City work, both of which examine the typical superhero universe from the viewpoint of the common man who witnesses the great dramas from afar, participating in them tangentially at best.

In the wake of Busiek's success, many other writers mimicked his approach, with mixed results – the narrative possibilities of someone who does not get involved in drama are limited. In 2000, however, Image Comics published the first issue of Brian Michael Bendis's comic Powers, which followed the lives of homicide detectives as they investigated superhero-related cases. Bendis's success has led both Marvel Comics and DC Comics to begin their own superhero-themed police procedurals (District X and the aforementioned Gotham Central), which focus on how the job of a police officer is affected by such tropes as secret identities, superhuman abilities, costumes, and the near-constant presence of vigilantes.

While the detectives in Powers were "normal" (unpowered) humans dealing with super-powered crime, Alan Moore and Gene Ha's Top 10 mini-series, published by America's Best Comics in 2000-2001, centered around the super-powered police force in a setting where powers are omnipresent. The comic detailed the lives and work of the police force of Neopolis, a city in which everyone, from the police and criminals to civilians, children and even pets, has super-powers, colourful costumes and secret identities.

However, just as Gould's introduction of science fiction elements into Tracy made that strip less believable for many readers, the notion of realistic cops working in a world where costumed, super-powered vigilantes and criminals actually exist is a problematic concept, seemingly at odds with the rigorous, naturalistic realism that is the procedural's hallmark.

The future

Over the years and into the 21st century, the police procedural has grown and mutated to meet the changing tastes of readers and viewers. In its earliest years, the police were sterling and honourable; lately, the stories have been enlivened by the addition of concepts of moral doubt, and the corruptibility of one or another officer.

Additionally, modern detection methods now provide a considerably wider field for today's novelist or screenwriter to depict interesting and little-known day-to-day activities of the police. It seems reasonable to assume that the police procedural, as a form, will continue to rise and fall in popularity, but never disappear entirely.

The top ten police procedurals

According to the (UK) Crime Writers' Association (1990):

  1. Hillary Waugh: Last Seen Wearing ... (1952)
  2. Ed McBain: Cop Hater (1956)
  3. Colin Dexter: The Dead of Jericho (1981)
  4. Reginald Hill: Underworld (1988)
  5. Reginald Hill: Dead Heads (1983)
  6. Martin Cruz Smith: Gorky Park (1981)
  7. J. J. Marric: Gideon's Day (1955)
  8. Ed McBain: Sadie When She Died (1972)
  9. H. R. F. Keating: The Murder of the Maharajah (1980)
  10. Joseph Wambaugh: The Onion Field (1975)

According to the Mystery Writers of America (1995):

  1. Tony Hillerman: Dance Hall of the Dead (1973)
  2. Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö: The Laughing Policeman (1968)
  3. Martin Cruz Smith: Gorky Park (1981)
  4. Tony Hillerman: A Thief of Time (1988)
  5. Lawrence Sanders: The First Deadly Sin (1973)
  6. Hillary Waugh: Last Seen Wearing ... (1952)
  7. James McClure: The Steam Pig (1971)
  8. Joseph Wambaugh: The Choirboys (1975)
  9. P. D. James: Shroud for a Nightingale (1971)
  10. Ed McBain: Ice (1983) and John Ball: In the Heat of the Night (1965) (tie)

Source

External links

Detective fiction

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Police procedural".

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