cambridge-crime-fiction

leroy l. panek
But the police novel began slowly. Until the mid-1980s, police novels
formed a very small pocket in the garment of crime fiction. Moreover, the
few critics who found them worthy of comment defined the genre by applying
to the police novel the criteria of the detective story developed in the
1920s and 1930s –the need for clues, for a surprise ending, and all of the
other conventions adhered to by critics and writers alike. Thus the notion
formed that the ‘police procedural’ should be a standard mystery novel in
which police work influenced the ways in which characters behave and also
provided the ancillary furniture necessary to stretch the surprise detective
plot into the length of a novel. This definition never quite worked. From
early on it left such important and influential fiction as McKinley Kantor’s
Signal Thirty-Two (1950) and then Joseph Wambaugh’s The New Centurions
(1970), The Blue Knight (1972), and The Choirboys (1973) outside the
genre. The restrictive definition, moreover, overlooked the fact that from the
late 1960s onwards the police novel began to appear in a variety of forms
from the standard whodunit to the thriller and even to the love romance.
And regardless of their narrative structure, all of these forms focused on the
same essential point – that crime and police work have a unique impact on
the way men and women work as well as the way they live.
While the police novel’s origins can be found at mid-century, most of its
practitioners began from or after the 1980s: Joanna C. Hazelden’s list of
police fiction posted on the Chicago Public Library’s website (2002) cites
thirty-nine police writers who began writing after 1984 compared to nine
whose first works appeared between 1970 and 1983, and six who began writing
police fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. And such significant recent writers
as Robert Daley, Ridley Pearson, Patricia Cornwell, and Dan Mahoney do
not appear on her list. No matter how slowly it started, however, the police
novel began immediately following the Second World War and its apprenticeship
extended from the publication of Lawrence Treat’s VasinVictim
in 1945 roughly to the publication of Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys in
1973.
For Treat, VasinVictim was simply another attempt to provide the kind of
variety within a pattern that drives the market for detective mystery novels.
In VasinVictim he introduced a pair of New York police officers, Mitch
Taylor and Jub Freeman. With Freeman Treat simply carried on the tradition
of scientific detection begun at the turn of the century by his character’s
namesake, R. Austin Freeman. With Mitch Taylor came the innovation:
Taylor possessed traditional, routine police wisdom combined with cynicism,
exhaustion, and the attitudes and values of the lower middle class. In short,
in Mitch Taylor Treat introduced a character who mirrored the background,
attitudes, and aptitudes of real police officers.
156