The Police Procedural Part 1

 Anyone who has seen "Dragnet", "Law and Order," or any NCIS franchise is familiar with police procedurals.

Since the 1950s, the police novel has opened the genre with a real challenge to traditional assumptions, achieving the realism that the Golden Age and hard-boiled writers never could.

Early writers commented on police procedure but de-emphasized it. Poe, in "The Purloined Letter," details the police search of the room. Gaboriau describes the insides of police stations, but Mr. Lecoq does his work outside of them. With Doyle, the police are seen as incompetent. And in the Golden Age, individual inspectors (such as Sugg in Sayers or Japp and Battle in Christie) work almost independently from other cops.

We get to the real procedural through George Simenon's Inspector Maigret in the late 1940s and through the 1950s. In Maigret novels--which are many--Maigret is shown conducting weary, routine investigations and often more than one side-by-side. The main feature is not the puzzle, but the psychology of criminals (Simenon had made a study of psychology) and the character of Maigret: a solid, persistent middle-class man who does his duty and enjoys a pipe at the end of a long day with his feet up at home.

But the real impetus for the police story comes from American radio. Early radio detective dramas imitated Golden Age puzzles, even offering prizes to listeners who called in the solution. Some shows provided the puzzle on, say, Tuesday night and the solution on Wednesday. Sherlock Holmes was an early presence in radio detective drama. In the Depression era, however, American radio began to feature hardboiled detectives and hard-nosed cops and FBI men who worked with them in America's mean streets. The public was concerned about urban crime, gangsters, and later, saboteurs and spies. Shows were introduced by real police chiefs; James Davis of the LAPD introduced "Calling All Cars" and police Colonel Norman Schwartzkopf narrated "Gangbusters." This added realism to police drama.

Then came shows like "Broadway is My Beat" and "The Line-up" which had the ingredients of the true police procedural: sordid crime, hard-boiled cops, police routines of investigation, alibi checking, paperwork. The most important show was "Dragnet" with Jack Webb, which began in 1949. Webb had starred in several hard-boiled shows beforehand, but he really found his voice and character in Sergeant Joe Friday. Friday's terse, no-nonsense toughness imitated the hardboiled detectives, but his narration that referred to time, place, and procedures in cop-lingo set the tone for the subgenre. "It was Tuesday, November third, and I was working the day watch out of Homicide. We were answering a call on a 10-14..."  Dragnet moved successfully to TV, and other TV shows in the 50s imitated it: "Highway Patrol," "Naked City," "The Untouchables."

Perhaps the first American novel to be called a "police procedural" was Lawrence Treat's "V as in Victim" in 1945. The story features two detectives. One is a Golden Age type named Job Freeman who is an eccentric and loves scientific gadgets. Mitch Taylor is the cop, a cynical and exhausted working-class man. Treat did not pursue this concept, but he formed a bridge.

In the mid-1950s, Ed McBain began his "87th Precinct" novels, combining dark humor, grisly details of crime scenes and autopsies, authentic police station atmosphere and routines, and realistic characters in a broad cast. Everyone else imitated McBain.

While they all have cops as heroes, they differ significantly. Some explore characters' complexity and others don't. Some follow traditional rules of detection and some focus on shocking portraits of violence and depravity. Dell Shannon's Luis Mendoza drives a Ferrari; Joseph Waumbaugh's Bumper Morgan drives an old Ford. McBain's Steve Carella enjoys married bliss with his beautiful deaf-mute wife Teddy, while most others are alienated and lonely.

Next time, we'll consider 10 distinctive features of the police procedural.