Mark, The TV series Angel, about a vampire PI (I think it was
spun off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) has been novelized
(or perhaps just "tied-in") by Max Allan Collins in a series
of paperback originals. Given my own biases, I feel compelled
to mention a few of police procedural novels with
occult elements. Les Whitten's The Progeny of the Adder, a
Doubleday Crime Club edition from the mid-'60's, is
a DC-set cop novel in which the Metropolitan PD's Homicide
Squad is on the trail of serial killer. It starts
out as a straightforward, Dragnet-style police procedural,
and then, as the cops learn more about the killer they're
pursuing, morphs into something else. It may remind
you a bit of Jeff Rice's melding of The Front Page with
Universal Studios' horror line of the '30's and '40's, The
Night Stalker, featuring a reporter rather than a PI or a
cop, but it predated both the novel, and the TV-movie and
subsequent series that novel inspired. Whitten also
wrote another occult-themed cop novel, this one with a rural
setting, called Moon of the Wolf, which also became a
TV-movie. David and Aimee Thurlo have begun an occult-based
cop series featuring Navajo Lee Nez, a New Mexico state
trooper, who is attacked by a Nazi vampire during WW2 and
becomes one of the undead. Years later, Nez, now
immortal thanks to his undead status, rejoins the New Mexico
State Police as "Leonard Hawk." There are, so far,
two books in the series, Second Sunrise and Blood
Retribution. JIM DOHERTY
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