Miker,
Re your questions below:
> I read Jim Doherty's evolution of police
procedurals
> in the 40s and 50s,
> but I don't recall anything from the 30s. Do
the
> 30s predate hardboiled
> procedurals? I've read close to twenty from
the
> Thirties . . .
I alluded to this when I said, in my '40s post, that there
had been procedurals prior to the '40s, but that they were
almost always "procedurals by default." In other words the
authors, who happened to have inside knowledge of how police
worked, wrote cops stories that were authentic because they'd
already acquired the inside knowledge. However, there was
little sense that their cop stories were significantly
different from cop stories in which the authors lacked prior
knowledge of the law enforcement profession. And there was
virtually no attempt on the part of writers who DID lack
knowledge to make up for that lack by researching their
subjects.
In the '40s two things happen. Writers, from a number of
different mediums, who know little about police work (and
even some writers who already have prior knowledge about
police work) start to actively research their subjects in an
effort to add to the verisimilitude to their fiction. And
some critics begin to notice the trend. While the term
"police procedural" isn't coined (though Anthony Boucher
comes close in his review of V AS IN VICTIM), there starts to
be a realization that the realistic treatment of the law
enforcement profession in fiction is a significant movement,
amounting to a separate sub-genre of the mystery.
Some examples of pre-40s writers who produced crime stories
that, in retrospect, are recognizable as being police
procedurals include Basil Thomson and Henry Wade in Britain;
Georges Simenon in France; and MacKinlay Kantor, Thomas
Walsh, and Leslie T. White in the US. Basil Thomson was a
high-ranking officer in Scotland Yard and Henry Wade was a
magistrate and a local sheriff (which doesn't mean QUITE the
same thing in Britain as it does in the States, but which
does put one in regular contact with cops) who had regular
dealings with the police. Simenon was a journalist with
contacts in the Surete and the Paris Prefecture. MacKinlay
Kantor and Thomas Walsh were also police reporters, and
Leslie White was, among several other cop positions, a
criminal investigator for the LA County DA's Office. They
just naturally made use of their inside knowledge of police
work in their fiction, but it was not necessarily with the
self-conscious INTENTION of presenting police work
realistically. It was just the natural consequence of the
inside knoweldge they already had.
Significantly, there was no sense that one of Kantor's
Glennon Brothers stories in the pulps (the Glennons were two
Irish cops in a very good series of short stories by Kantor
prefiguring, in some respects, SIGNAL 32; the best of the
series is called "The Search for the Brown Sedan"), for
example, was different, on account of the greater level of
authenticity, than, say, one of Carroll John Daly's stories
about NYPD Detective Satan Hall, which were completely
non-authentic. They were both regarded as tough cop stories
written for the pulps, period. The difference, apparently,
became evident only in retrospect.
I just got hold of two novels by Leslie White, both published
in the '30s, that I'd like to comment on, but this post is
starting to run long. If you're interested, I'll send a post
about the White novels later on.
> Another quickie Hammett question: Does
Hammett
> avoid simile and
> metaphor completely?
No. One simile that occurs to me right off the top of my head
is from the best Op story, "The Gutting of Couffignal." On a
boring security assignment, the Op is keeping awake by
reading an action thriller. He describes the melodramatic
plot and allows that his stripped-down synopsis makes the
story sound ridiculous. However, he insists that "in the book
it was real as a dime."
Not on the level of some of Chandler's more poetic images,
perhaps, but it IS a by-God simile.
JIM DOHERTY
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