Why is the Police Procedural so popular?

Fifty years after Nineteen Red Roses

At first it is hard to see why something as niche as this could sell in large volumes to a general readership. We are talking about a crime novel set in a more or less realistic police setting, using police working procedures as a central element. Police procedurals have been around in a small way back to the days of Wilkie Collins in the late1880s - a little more than fifty years after the Metropolitan Police came into existence. In Denmark, police procedurals became hugely popular with the 1973 release of the police thriller Nineteen Red Roses, written by a 55-year old policeman by the name of Torben Nielsen and soon after the biggest block-buster film that Denmark had seen in a long time. Though there were similarities to La Mariée était en noir by François Truffau, the plot is really materially different if you ask me. I read it when I was about twelve and immediately read the rest of his books as soon as I could get them from the library. The Swedish writer team Wahlöo and Sjöwall had started rolling out their own crime novels almost a decade earlier and I swiftly moved on to them and discovered weird little things about Swedish police cars with built-in tape recorders. I never found out what those were used for by the way. Plenty of very good British police procedurals to add to the list, going back to Morse and ahead to the police detective archetypes by Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson, in the United States Michael Connelly, and the more unconventional gender roles in the books by Stephen Booth, Stuart Macbride and the fabulous Sophie Hannah. Many others too.

The Sine Qua Non

As a reader of police procedurals you can consider yourself entitled to the following: A detective who likes one particular style of music (country and western, say, or jazz or 1960s rock), has a dysfunctional social life, is addicted to at the very least alcohol and likely also stuff that can be smoked, maybe snorted, injected or taken as tablets. The protagonist is almost certainly marginalised in terms of career prospects. Things had been going reasonably well before IT happened. Now the detective has been demoted or moved to a highly undesirable posting, or made to focus on administration, cold cases or making up the numbers in terms of racial or gender diversity required by the powers that may be. The detective will be led by a useless yet friendly superior who will be unable to defend him/her against the Sauron of Policing, the unspeakably evil upstart who now holds some superior office, ACC probably. Or the detective will be led by a regrettably competent yet evil middle manager and only relying on the occasional intervention by a benign yet unpredictable superior officer.

If possible, the series will be set in a scenic location, be it remote countryside or ancient university city. Desirable film rights and all. Failing that, it will be some place so terrible that no tourist would ever set foot there, all dilapidated garages, rotting print works, strip joints, burner phone shops, dubious kebabs, gangland bars and - if the novel is by Callum McSorley - manual car washes.

The detective may have colleagues on the team. If so, they will either be painfully inexperienced and likely to get the detective shot or imprisoned (maybe both) or battle hardened old frauds trying to eat as much and do as little before they can claim their pensions. Alternatively they will be competent but evil. Either will do or a combination will also work. Evil but incompetent is just funny - this works too but it is a different novel.

Ruined by technology?

If set in present day, building the plot needs some careful elimination of modern technology. It really is not good when the murderer is caught on CCTV and his DNA is swiftly and competently recovered from the murder weapon by a magnificent SCO team and processed by a state of the art forensics lab with an overnight result. No, no. No mobile phone trace of the kidnap victim all the way to that remote caravan for example, passing every CCTV camera on the way. A good police procedural does short work of this kind of thing. Clever criminals plan their way around the little handful of CCTV cameras that are not on the blink. The evil Detective Super will not allocate the necessary man hours to go through the CCTV footage because he needs the staff to do something else that we all know is useless and probably politically motivated. DNA evidence is lost, or the crime lab has been outsourced and nobody knows how to get analyses expedited unless they are drinking buddies with the chief DNA wizard or supplies him with his party drugs or caught his teenage son up to no good. If you have had the good sense to set your novel in the hills you can also count on phones being without signal and airwave radios being broken or not being able to call in back-up at the critical moment.

The format works but why?

Beats me but you only have to look at the airport newsagent shelves - or mine for that matter. Reason one. Readers can immerse themselves in the story and try to guess along, perhaps clues have been inserted at kind intervals and the convention is that salient information needs to be given out well in advance and no persons introduced conveniently at the very end of the plot. No last moment evil twins for example. What I have indirectly touched on here is that the narrative should be linear or as close to linear as one can get to work. You may have to jump twenty years ahead but readers won’t enjoy flitting back and forth, it is not that kind of a story. Reason two. This type of crime novel lends itself extremely well to witty dialogue and stinging sarcasm. Make sure you don’t read too much John Rebus dialogue before going into an important meeting where you want to leave everyone with a positive impression rather than destroyed and dissected. Quite possibly the writer took six weeks to come to think of the witty repartee that the protagonist flung at his incompetent boss at a seconds notice. We can’t know but we want to pretend that yes we too can do that kind of thing and be the sarcastic king of the moment, without having to direct traffic in the rain as punishment. Reason three. This may be more important than you think, but police procedurals can be a very good vehicle for societal criticism and for value based debate. If you write a 200-page diatribe against greenwashing, racial profiling or 20 mph speed limits it may help you vent and if you manage to find a publisher so good luck with the type of readership this will get you as an author. Far better, then, to insert this type of discussion into the backstory. No reason why both sides to the greenwashing debate could not be held by people in the story and this is far better than them being seen as held by the author. It is not at all a given that the author seriously hates Rugby Union even if he makes the most hateful character in the book a huge fan of this fine game.

I hope you enjoyed these thoughts about why on earth people want to read police procedurals. I almost certainly missed stuff and got many things wrong. Let me know.