Mark,
Re your question below:
> Why must these two [Mat's classifiction and mine]
be
> mutually exclusive? Yes, Mat
> set DINs up as a
> different animal from PPs, but couldn't they
simply
> be a subgenre? And
> although I am now convinced that Rebus,
for
> instance, does fit within
> the Doherty Dogma of Police Procedurals, isn't
it
> pretty obvious that
> there is a difference between them and, say,
the
> 87th Precinct books?
Mat's classification is useful for describging a certain type
of story in which the protagonist is a cop, but there's no
effort, or even pretence, of police work being portrayed
accurately. Two that come to mind are Ngaio Marsh's Inspector
Alleyn or Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan. In both cases,
the heroes are cops, but there's no sense, nor (and this is
the crux) is there MEANT to be any sense, that we're seeing a
fictional depiction of how real cops operate (notwithstanding
the fact that Chan is said to have been inspired by real-life
Honolulu police detective Chang Apana).
My disagreement wasn't with Mat's concept of novels featuring
cops that shouldn't be classified as police procedurals. It
was with Mat's assertion that the Rebus books fall into this
category.
As for McBain's ensemble approach giving a different feel
than Connelly's or Rankin's "lone-wolf" approach, I'll
certainly grant that. But Marric's "juggling of several
unrelated cases by a high-ranking police executive" approach
gives a different feel than William Caunitz's "through the
eyes of middle-management" approach. And they're all
different from the "law enforcement specialist" approach
taken by, say, Thomas Walsh in his novel about railroad cops,
NIGHTMARE IN MANHATTAN. That's a function, first of all, of
different writers with different styles, and, second of all,
of the infinite variety of law enforcement that novelists can
choose to depict. It's not a function of whether or not a
book is a police procedural.
JIM DOHERTY
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