Detective Story

Although the depiction of the police had been fundamental to the establishment of the detective genre, from the real-life memoirs of Vidocq and various British officers in the 1900s to Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French and Inspector Maigret by George Simenon in the 20th century, their role in pre-war Anglo-American detective fiction was generally as a foil to the brilliance of the private or amateur sleuth. However, the 1950s saw a trend away from languid amateurs and private eyes alike. The police novel or “police procedural” was born—stories about how real police detectives go about solving real crimes.

As did its predecessors, the “procedural” obeys the rules of the detective story. The difference is that the reader consorts, not with geniuses, but with fallible, ordinary people, specially trained in detection, operating out of police stations. The most prominent early writers in this field were John Creasey, writing under the pseudonym J. J. Marric, with his tales of Gideon of Scotland Yard, starting in 1955; Salvatore Lombino, who also writes under the name Evan Hunter, using Ed McBain as his pseudonym for his 87th Precinct series from 1956; and Dorothy Uhnak, once a New York transit policewoman herself, who in 1968 broke through the male bastion with her series featuring a policewoman, Christie Opara.

Even so, by the early 1970s it was possible for one respected critic to foresee a “declining market” for detective fiction proper, with the final fading away of the Christie and Chandler generations and the rise of new kinds of psychological and spy thriller where detection plays only a small part. However, from the same decade onwards a new strain of police fiction developed, borrowing some of the procedural’s realism to reinvigorate the figure of the detective hero. In Britain this figure was most usually a detective inspector or chief inspector based somewhere outside London, with an efficient back-up team including a particularly loyal, Watson-like sergeant (sometimes promoted in step with the hero later in the series). Such inspector-sergeant teams include Wexford and Burden by Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter’s Morse and Lewis, Rebus and Clarke by Ian Rankin, and Caroline Graham’s Barnaby and Troy; Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe series gives the two leading figures more equal attention while P. D. James’s Dalgleish began in an older tradition of descending on a variety of well-heeled settings from Scotland Yard, only later acquiring a permanent sidekick in the shape of the abrasively working-class Kate Miskin.

In the United States, the police-team tradition of McBain and Uhnak was greatly extended by a host of writers such as Joseph Wambaugh, William Caunitz, and Lillian O’Donnell, while from the 1980s a variant on the “lone genius” detective re-emerged as the crime specialist working alongside rather than within the police: the psychological profilers of Jonathan Kellerman and Thomas Harris, the forensic medical officers of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs. Typically, such specialists pursue serial killers, whose rise to fictional prominence from the 1980s onwards partly responds to real social anxieties, but also offers a new way of blending the intellectual interest of detection with the anticipatory suspense of the thriller. The need to provide this mix often leads to the actual detection in much police fiction being completed earlier than in the traditional genre, leaving the hero’s battle with the criminal as the main focus. In the powerful novels of Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, detective and thriller elements become virtually inextricable from each other.

Although the detective story undergoes pendulum swings in popularity, it seems likely to endure as staple reading fare. Its strength is that it provides pleasurable excitement and satisfaction. It deals with evil, always fascinating, and at the same time promises that good will triumph, that all loose threads will be tied, and that the ending will be at least relatively happy and complete.