Guest Post: RESEARCHING FOR THE POLICE PROCEDURAL by Jim Doherty (Part Four)

Please welcome back SMFS list member Jim Doherty as continues delving into the various ways of researching and writing the accurate police procedural. This is a multi part series that began on Saturday and will run through tomorrow of this week.

3) THE JOSEPH WAMBAUGH METHOD – BE A COP

            If you want to write about a particular job with authority, the best way to research the job is to do the job.

Herman Melville, was sailor on Naval, merchant, and whaling vessels before writing novels like Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby Dick.   He would later say that his time at sea was what gave him something worth writing about.  And whether you regard his books as thumping great adventure novels, or poetic allegory, they are all technically accurate depictions of what the life of a seaman was like at that point in history.

Readers, particularly American readers, like books about the workplace, and if you’re a veteran of that workplace, you can write about it with authority.  And that’s why military novels by soldiers, medical novels by physicians, trial novels by lawyers, and espionage novels by spies are all so popular.

Joseph Wambaugh was not the first cop to turn his experiences into fiction.  He was preceded by, among others, Leslie T. White, Gordon Gordon (in collaboration with his wife, Mildred), and Dorothy Uhnak in the US; by Maurice Procter, John Wainwright, and Peter N. Walker in the UK; and by A.C. Baantjer in the Netherlands.  Nor is he necessarily the best (though he’s certainly one of the best).

 And he’s undoubtedly the most famous.  Moreover, he’s been successful in a variety of forms.  Novels like The New Centurions, The Blue Knight, and Hollywood Station.  Non-fiction about cops like The Onion Field, The Blooding, and Lines and Shadows.  The creator of the award-winning TV series Police Story.  An award-winning screenwriter adapting his own work to movies like The Onion Field and The Black Marble.  And, though he wasn’t the first, he certainly started a trend.  Hundreds of cops, including me, have turned their real-life experiences into fiction in the wake of Wambaugh’s success.  What had been a tiny stream before Wambaugh has become a flood in the years since his first novel was published. 

A flood you’ll have to compete with if you want to write police procedurals.

 William Caunitz (NYPD), Danny R. Smith (LA County Sheriff’s Office), Hugh Holton (Chicago PD), B.J. Bourg (Chief Investigator, LaFourche Parish DA’s Office), Frank Zafiro (Spokane PD), Joseph D. McNamara (San Jose PD), O’Neil DeNoux (Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office), John Robert Coffin (Portland, ME, PD), Lowen Clausen (Seattle PD), Gerald Petievich (US Secret Service), Paul Lindsay (FBI), Nevada Barr (National Park Service Law Enforcement Division), Marc Cameron (US Marshals Service), James O. Born (FL. Dept. of Law Enforcement), K.T. Mince (CA Highway Patrol), Graham Ison, Joan Locke, James Barnett, and Roger Pearce (all Scotland Yard), Karen Campbell (Strathclyde Police in Scotland),  Don Easton (RCMP), John Galvin (Irish Garda), Friedrich Neznansky (Moscow Prosecutor’s Investigator), Omar Shahid Hamid (Karachi, Pakistan, Police), are just a few of the cop-novelists who’ve appeared in Wambaugh’s wake.

There is a “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt” sense of knowing in a cop novel written by a cop that can’t quite be reproduced.  And you’re also less likely to include stuff that doesn’t really need to be included.

Hemingway once said that if you leave out something you don’t know, your story is hurt, but if you leave out something you do know, the sense of authority in your writing makes it seem as though you included it.  It’s easier to do this if you’re a cop.

Undoubtedly many of you are wondering how you can be a cop when you’ve already firmly ensconced in some other profession.  It’s one thing to be interested enough in police work to want to write stories about it.  But it’s something else altogether to make it career just for research purposes.

But many police departments and sheriff’s offices have a police reserve program.  Apply, go through the training, pass all the tests, and you could be a part-time cop, the law enforcement equivalent of a military reservist or a volunteer firefighter.  Patricia Cornwell, John Ball, Stan Washburn, and Patricia Smiley all work, or have worked, as police reservists.  I started my own police career as a reserve cop while I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley.  This is a way for you to get that convincing element that only comes from actual experience without having to make it a full-time career.

And you might just find you really enjoy it. 

Jim Doherty ©2020

A cop of some kind or another for more than 20 years, JIM DOHERTY has served American law enforcement at the Federal, state, and local levels, policing everything from inner city streets to rural dirt roads, from college campuses to military bases, from suburban parks to urban railroad yards.  He’s the author of the true crime collection Just the Facts – True Tales of Cops & Criminals, which included the WWA Spur-winning article “Blood for Oil,” Raymond Chandler – Master of American Noir, a collection of lectures about the pioneering creator of hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe used for an on-line class; and An Obscure Grave, featuring college student and part-time cop Dan Sullivan, introduced in a series of short stories, which was a finalist for both a CWA Dagger Award and a Silver Falchion given at Killer Nashville.  He was, for  several years, the police technical advisor on the venerable Dick Tracy comic strip, and was a guest writer for a short sequence that ran in April and May on 2019.   Coming in 2020 are The Adventures of Colonel Britannia, written as “Simon A. Jacobs,” an unlikely (but incredibly fun to write) mash-up of Jane Austen’s Persuasion with Captain America, and an as-yet-untitled collection of Dan Sullivan short stories.