cambridge-crime-fiction

leroy l. panek
prolific writers whose police books barely reached novel size. Indeed many
of McBain’s books read like embellished short stories. While each writer
strove to present police work in a realistic light, each also showed romantic
tendencies. Thus, McBain may nod towards the collective hero of the detective
squad, but he inevitably comes back to the idealistically portrayed Steve
Carella, and Linington provided a refuge from the mean streets by endowing
her Lieutenant Mendoza with independent wealth and an idyllic home life.
The other notable phenomenon of the 1950s and 1960s was the reflection
of the drive for African American civil rights in the introduction of black
police officers. With Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, Chester
Himes introduced black police detectives in the late 1950s, followed in 1970
by Ernest Tidyman’s character Shaft. In each case, however, the characters
are more like hardboiled private eyes than police officers. This was not the
case with John Ball’s Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night (1965). Here Ball
introduced some rudimentary police procedure and forensics and contrasted
them with the slip-shod practices and racism found in a small southern town.
But events in the United States in the 1960s changed the country and its
police profoundly. In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act which outlawed
job discrimination on the basis of race or sex. That had an impact. In
the same year, the US Supreme Court decided against the state in Escobido v.
Illinois and followed two years later by deciding against the state in Miranda
v. Arizona. Both cases resolutely established suspects’ rights to counsel and
protection from self-incrimination. That had an impact. Following an altercation
at a routine traffic stop, the Los Angeles community of Watts erupted
in riot, fire, and pillage in 1965. And after the assassination of Dr Martin
Luther King in 1968, major cities across America experienced the same urban
conflagration. That had an impact. So did the assassinations of Jack and
Robert Kennedy. Like these murders, in the 1960s Americans experienced
new and shocking varieties of crime: from 1962 to 1964 the Boston Strangler
made national headlines; in 1966 Richard Speck murdered eight nurses in
Chicago; in the same year Charles Whitman randomly shot people at the
University of Texas; in 1968 the first of the still unsolved Zodiac killings
took place near Los Angeles; and the next year Charles Manson and his followers
murdered Sharon Tate. Crime and the dark world of criminals had
its literary repercussions, too. Truman Capote undertook what he saw as a
new kind of fiction with In Cold Blood (1965), Vincent Bughosi anatomised
the Manson Family in Helter Skelter (1974), and finally Norman Mailer examined
murderer Garry Gillmore in The Executioner’s Song (1979). That
had an impact. In response to the needs of this wave of horrific crime, the
FBI, among other things, established a computerised database of fingerprints
and opened its profiling unit. That, too, had an impact. Finally, in 1968 at
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