Recently Bill Hagen wrote
"As long as the world seems generally accurate, I look for
realism in
probability of behavior and event within the given
world."
The difference is this. A police procedural is a type of
mystery whose *raison
d'etre* (if I'm spelling that correctly) is its technical
accuracy. This is not
true, or at least less true, of PI books, spy books, crook
books, etc. The
pattern was set by Jack Webb's *Dragnet* on TV, and by
McBain's 87th Precinct
books and Marric's Gideon books in print. Three very
different styles of
storytelling, but what they all had in common was a keen
inside knowledge of the
law enforcement agencies being depicted in their work. When
Anthony Boucher
first coined the term "police procedural" in 1956, he noted
that main
characteristic of this type of mystery was the accurate
presentation of police
work. Technical accuracy *defines* the police procedural more
than any other
sub-genre of crime fiction.
Elizabeth Linnington, under her many names, was a
self-described police
procedural writer. She wrote "how-to" articles enjoining
other potential
procedural writers to sweat the details. In interview and
articles she bragged
about how much she herself sweated the details in her novels.
Consequently,
it's fair to judge her by that standard, since it's the
standard she set for
herself. And by that standard, she failed.
Further, I would submit that when writers make certain pacts
with their readers
depending on what kind of story they are writing. Someone who
sets out to write
a fair-play whodunit is making a committment to put any clues
needed to solve
the mystery in plain sight so that readers can compete with
the detective.
Someone who sets out to write a PI story had better not
feature a little old
lady amateur sleuth as the hero. Similarly, someone who
promotes themselves as
a police procedural writer has committed him or herself to
presenting police
work as accurately as possible wwithin the story s/he
constructs.
Finally, I would also suggest that a writer who really knows
his/her stuff will
be able to write about that profession with an authority that
another writer,
just making it up as s/he goes along, cannot capture, and
that this authority
will be obvious even to those readers who know little about
the subject.
--UNS_gsauns2_2927003240--
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