RE: Joseph's recent post
"If he/she is a good author they will conform to reality or
be realistic
(like real)."
That sound like the same point I made. A writer who knows his
stuff writes
with authority. A writer who wings it does not. The
discerning reader can
make this distinction even if s/he knows nothing about the
subject the
writer is writing about.
"Also they must entertain. Would Mike Hammer have lasted as
long as he did
in real life?"
The police procedural is defined by its technical accuracy.
The PI story
is not, and the Hammer series, deriving from the fevered
fantasy of
Carroll John Daly, are less even dependant on technical
accuracy than most
other PI stories. Therefore, it's fair to judge a purported
police
procedural on its technical accuracy; it's not necessarily
fair to judge a
PI story by that standard.
"In a history of the LAPD I read the book goes into great
length about
'Dragnet' and how it helped clean up the image of the LAPD.
Not only clean
up. but turn it into the ideal PD. When in truth James Ellroy
is much
closer to a police procedural then 'Dragnet.'"
Webb sweated the details regarding everything from rank
structure and
organizational make-up to the exact shape of the doorknobs of
an LAPD
detective squadroom. Ellroy doesn't, at least not to the same
degree
(though he's a lot better at it than Linnington). Ellroy's
depiction of a
totally corrupt LAPD is, I suspect, at least as exaggerated
as Webb's
squeaky-clean image. The author of the book I think you're
referring to,
*To Protect and To Serve*, had a definite anti-LAPD (and by
extension,
anit-police) agenda. - Jim Doherty
--UNS_gsauns2_2929076260--
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.