Re Doug Bassett's comment on the Shell Scott series:
> Now reading Prather's KUBLA KHAN CAPER. I've
decided
> the Shell Scotts are very hit-or-miss, but
this
> looks
> to be one of the good ones.
It seems to me that last February or March, James Reasoner
commented on a Scott book, and mentioned Shell's unusually
friendly relationship with the LAPD.
(I know I was out of the loop then, but I still
occasionally looked in on the Archives). He compared Shell's
friendship with Homicide Captain Phil Samson to Mike Shayne's
with Miami Police Chief Will Gentry.
Being a Shayne veteran himself, Mr. Reasoner's comparison
with the Shayne/Gentry relationship is understandable, but I
think a better analogy (and the one Prather probably wanted
his readers to subliminally make) was Mike Hammer's close
friendship with Captain Pat Chambers. The two cop characters
share a rank, captain, a position, commander of homicide, and
have similar sounding names. I think Prather conceived of
Scott as a lighter-hearted West Coast version of Hammer. It's
worth noting that, like Scott, Hammer always had good,
personal relations with the police. His problems were with
the pettifogging official institutions of law enforcement,
rarely with the individual people in the who served those
institutions.
However, it's quite true, as Mr. Reasoner points out, that
Prather's sympathetic portrayal of the police is somewhat
unusual in PI fiction. I think this might stem, at least
partly, from a work-for-hire gig Prather had in the
mid-50s.
Under his pseudonym of "David Knight," Prather wrote the
first of a three-novel trilogy based on the popular,
pioneering police procedural TV show
*Dragnet* for Pocket Books (the other two novels were written
by Richard Deming). The book, entitled *Case 561*, had Joe
Friday and his partner tracking a cop killer. The real-life
case from which Prather derived his plot, by the way, was the
same one used for the pre-*Dragnet* movie *He Walked by
Night*, which featured a young radio actor named Jack Webb in
a supporting role, and which gave that young actor the idea
for a radio show that authentically depicted police
work.
Anyway, I think Prather probably came to develop a great
respect and admiration for the LAPD as a result of the
research he did for the *Dragnet* novel. Although pre-*Case
561* Scott books were never unsympathetic to cops, post-*Case
561* entries always seemed to be particularly
cop-friendly.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 19 Jul 2001 EDT