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

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 the fifth and final part of the series that began last Saturday.

4) THE COLLIN WILCOX METHOD – HUM A FEW BARS AND FAKE IT

Most of your readers aren’t going to be cops, so most of them won’t really know whether or not you’ve made an error.  Why not just fake it?

Collin Wilcox, who wrote twenty novels featuring SFPD Homicide Lt. Frank Hastings, once claimed that he researched his subject by watching TV shows like The Streets of San Francisco and Barney Miller.  He admitted that he once spent two hours hanging around SFPD’s Homicide Detail, but found it was a waste of time.

“Research,” he said, “is endlessly beguiling but writing is hard work.”

His books have a great sense of place, and he’s a fine stylist and craftsman.  The novels are well-paced, and highly readable. 

But they are replete with errors about SFPD.

Still, he managed to get twenty novels published.  So maybe he had a point.  The idea, after all, is to get published.

So, if you can get away with faking it, what’s the drawback?

Well, aside from the obvious point that your books will have an element of superficiality, I think you’re breaking a covenant with your audience. 

Readers who read police procedurals expect technical accuracy.  If that’s the sub-genre you’ve chosen to specialize in, I really think it’s your job to provide it.

But Wilcox proves that success, both critical and financial, doesn’t hinge on this. 

CONCLUSION

I said at the beginning that the things I’d talk about could be applied to any kind of research you do for your fiction.  And, reviewing what I’ve written, I’ve found that to be even truer than I realized.  Research, when all is said and done, can be broken down to four types:

1)  Find out as much as you can about the subject before writing.

2)  Use what you know and get an expert to correct your mistakes.

3)  Work in the field yourself so that you’re speaking from experience.

4)  Fake it.  How many people will even know the difference?  Don’t worry about getting it right.  Worry about getting it written.

In the police procedural sub-genre, they’ve all worked, and worked well.  And they can all work with whatever kind of mystery, indeed whatever kind of fiction, you choose to write.

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.