Police Fiction

The evolution of crime/detective fiction culminates in the 20th century with the police procedural novel. However, the roots of modern police fiction can be traced to the 19th century. Police fiction developed in conjunction with and parallel to developments in law enforcement in Europe and later in the United States. The real-life exploits of criminal investigators and the methods used by police detectives influenced the works of writers of fiction.

In 1829, Eugéne François Vidocq, the former criminal who became chief of the SÛreté, published his Memoires de Vidocq. Vidocq's account of his career inspired a number of writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, “the father of the mystery short story” and creator of the brilliant armchair detective, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin (Richardson, 1999, p. 479). In England, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins offered the early British police detective in the context of a fictional investigation. Inspector Bucket appears in Dickens's Bleak House (1853), and Sergeant Cuff is the officer on the case in Collins's The Moonstone (1868).

In the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, police officers have recurring roles. However, as in Poe's three short stories (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter”), the law enforcement officers play second fiddle to the brilliant protagonist. Anna Katherine Green, often identified as “the mother of the detective novel,” gives a more significant role to Ebenezer Gryce, the New York lawyer and police officer who makes his debut in The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer's Story (1878).

In his study of the police procedural novel, Dove (1982) notes that the police officers in early classic detective fiction and in private eye (or tough guy) crime fiction share several characteristics in common. Perhaps the most important characteristic is that these representatives of official law enforcement either seek the help of the amateur detective or private investigator, or they resent and obstruct the investigation by the non-law enforcement hero. Sometimes, they do both. In these early works, police officers are sometimes portrayed as bumbling, brutal, and/or corrupt. However, after his analysis of the works in which they appear, Dove (1982) argues that these fictional police officers are a “mixed bag.” There are negative images of police officers in early crime/detective fiction, but there are also depictions of competent law enforcement officers. There is the suggestion in some works that police officers are capable of handling the ordinary run of cases, but are not up to the challenge of the more complex puzzles that the brilliant amateur and the private investigator (PI) are called on to solve (Dove, 1982).

However, by the 20th century, police officers had become more visible in popular culture. The [Page 341]Pinkerton agent—hero of the volumes published by agency founder, Allen Pinkerton, and model for the fictional PI created by Dashiell Hammett—was supplanted in popular culture by the “G-Men,” or government agents. The production code introduced by Hollywood in the 1930s to avoid external censorship offered a list of do's and don'ts to which moviemakers were required to adhere in order to receive the Hays Office seal of approval. Prominent on this list was the mandate that “crime must not pay.” Crime movies that had featured gangsters as heroes now offered G-Men as the protagonists. At the same time, radio offered programs such as “Gangbusters,” “Policewoman,” “Treasury Agent,” “Dick Tracy,” and “Dragnet.” Created by Chester Gould, the “Dick Tracy” comic strip debuted in 1931. Created by Jack Webb, “Dragnet” began as a radio show in 1949 and moved to television in 1951. Scholars point to the important contributions made by Dick Tracy, the comic strip cop who also became a star of radio, television, and feature films, and Joe Friday, the taciturn, deadpan LAPD detective portrayed by Jack Webb, to the development of the police procedural (Collins & Javna, 1988; Dove, 1982; Roberts, 1993).

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