This is the decade that the police procedural starts to
coalesce into its own distinct sub-genre, and is also almost
(but not quite) the decade that the term
"police procedural" gets coined.
There had been police procedurals in the '20s and
'30s, but these might be termed "procedural by default," by
which I mean the authors happened to have inside knowledge of
police work and naturally used it when they wrote stories
about cops. Basil Thomson in England, and Leslie White in the
US, had both been cops. Thomas Walsh and others had been
police reporters. They had the straight scoop, or something
approximating it, so they naturally put it into their
fiction. But no one was actually making an effort to research
the subject in order to make their fiction more
authentic.
In the post-war era, this changes. Lawrence Treat makes a
concerted effort to find out what police work in NYC is
really like before sitting down to write V AS IN VICTIM (and
in his review of this book, Anthony Boucher uses the word
"procedural" but doesn't quite define it as a separate
sub-genre, yet; he WOULD do so in 1956). Likewise playwright
Sidney Kingsley in his 1949 stage play DETECTIVE STORY.
Likewise Stewart Sterling in his novels about an NYC arson
investigator. Likewise MacKinlay Kantor in his
screenplay-turned-novel SIGNAL 32. Likewise Jack Webb in his
1949 radio series DRAGNET. John Creasey never researched
ahead of time, but he would have his books about Inspector
West of the Yard read over by a technical advisor so that
inaccuracies could be corrected in the second draft.
Suddenly it becomes a point of pride to present the police
work accurately, not merely a consequence of being in the
know from prior experience.
In the 1950s, with DRAGNET simultaneously the most popular
radio drama and most popular TV drama, scores of novelists
would imitate the "procedural" model with varying degrees of
success, and the term "police procedural" would be used to
define a separate, distinct school of crime writing.
JIM DOHERTY
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