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 here yesterday and will run through Wednesday of this week.
1) THE JACK WEBB/ED McBAIN METHOD – TOTAL IMMERSION
Though he wasn’t really the first to come up with the idea of
authentically depicting police work in fiction, and though he never wrote
novels or short stories, Jack Webb, more than any other person, deserves the
title Founding Father of the Police Procedural.
The success of his radio/TV series Dragnet
showed that the authentic depiction of police work was as interesting as the
crimes Joe Friday and his various partners were investigating. Anthony
Boucher, in his New York Times
mystery review column, pointed this out when he first coined the term “police
procedural” in 1956.
Webb, primarily a radio actor, had been hired to play the head of the
crime lab for a 1948 movie called He
Walked by Night, based on the recent, heavily publicized hunt for
cop-killer by the LAPD.
Between takes, he struck up a friendship with the film’s police technical
advisor, Sgt. Marty Wynn, who’d shot it out with the actual cop-killer in real
life. Wynn, discovering that Webb was
best known for playing private eyes on radio, characters who routinely made policeman
look foolish in every episode, told Webb, “It rankles every damn cop in the
country when they hear those far-fetched stories about crime. They’re all jazzed up, and the detectives are
supermen, and they do it all with mirrors.
Real cops don’t work that way.”
Warming to his subject, he continued, “I can arrange for you to have
access to cases in the police files.
Maybe you could do something with those.”
Wynn later said that he forgot about the conversation almost as soon as
it was time for the next take. So he was
quite surprised when, months later, Webb showed up at his office, anxious to
take him up on his offer.
As Webb later put it, “I shook hands with research for the first
time.” He attended police academy
classes, hung out with detectives on stakeouts, rode along with uniformed cops
on patrol, etc. And when the radio
series he envisioned finally debuted, he continued to try to make every episode
absolutely authentic.
When an episode called for Friday to make a long-distance call to Utah,
he actually sent an actor to Fountain Green, Utah, made the call while the show
was being performed (they were broadcast live at this point), and sent the
voice of the real-life operators making the connection out over the airwaves.
“There’s something about the way a real operator says, ‘
Los Angeles calling,’ that an actor just
can’t duplicate,” he later said.
When information on a report he
was reading was found on the second page of that particular form, the audience
heard Friday turn the page.
When Friday entered police headquarters in City Hall, the number of steps
he took was precisely the number of steps on the stairway from the sidewalk to
the entrance.
When a scene was set at a particular intersection in Los Angeles at midnight, he recorded that street sounds on that street
corner on a typical midnight
to get the effects right.
When the script called for a rooftop shootout, he recorded gunshots on a rooftop.
When the show moved to TV, he had a set made that duplicated an LAPD detective
squadroom in every detail. Finding that
the doorknobs used at police headquarters were no longer being manufactured, he
made molds of the actual doorknobs so that tiny detail could be accurately
displayed.
When the technical advisor for a particular episode showed up at the set,
he looked at one of the desks and said “My God, that looks exactly like my
desk. And that’s my ashtray. And
those’re my cigarette butts!”
Evan Hunter, impressed by Dragnet,
started writing short stories about the NYPD for magazines like Manhunt and Verdict, trying to replicate the sense of what he called “clinical
verity” that he so enjoyed on Dragnet. He interviewed cops extensively, got
permission to ride along, hung out at detective squadrooms, studied manuals,
rank structure, organizational structures, etc.
He reproduced police forms in his fiction. He made a point of explaining differences
between pieces of jargon (e.g. “plants” rather than “stakeouts”).
Invited to create a new series of mystery novels by Pocket Books editor
Herb Alexander, he got the notion of making the lead character an entire NYPD
police station, the 87th Precinct, and stepped up his research. Throughout the first book in the planned
series, eventually published in 1956 as Cop
Hater under the pseudonym “Ed McBain,” he was continually calling
advisors. NYPD’s a huge department. And procedures could change fairly
quickly. Hunter/McBain finally set his novel
in a thinly fictionalized version of NYC to give himself some wiggle-room.
How to you totally immerse yourself in a police department? First, pick a department. Check out the website and other publicly
available information. Many police
departments have “citizens’ police academies” specifically to inform the public
of what they do and how they do it, and if the one you’ve settled on has such a
program, you should attend. Go on
ride-alongs. Hang around and ask
questions. Conduct in-depth interviews
with cops on that department. If there
are any, read biographies or autobiographies of members of that department,
histories of the department, etc. And
when you finally think you know that department inside and out, sit down and
write. But as you write, you’ll still
find you have questions, so be prepared to do even more research.
Drawbacks? First, you’ll have
found out a lot of information and you’ll be tempted to use every single bit of
it, whether or not it enhances your story.
The stuff you don’t need was, after all, just as hard to find as the
stuff that you do need, and it’s
difficult to just leave it behind.
The president of the American Tobacco Company was once quoted as saying,
“Fifty cents of every dollar I spend on advertising is wasted. Problem is, I don’t know which fifty cents it
is, so I’ll just have to go on spending the whole dollar.”
It’s the same with research. Except
that once you’ve spent that “whole dollar” in time and effort, you’re then going
to have to figure out which 50 cents worth of info you don’t need.
Second, you might get so involved with research, you never get around to
writing. All that time you’re
researching you’re not sitting at a desk putting words on a page.
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.
