‘… a deceptive coolness’— Ed McBain’s Police Novels

Abstract

Since the Second World War a new pattern has emerged in crime fiction, indicating by its wide success and many versions that it ratifies new attitudes to crime-control. The detective has become a policeman, acting with institutional support, conducting more or less accurately reported police business. Earlier police heroes merely professionalised the romantic pattern of a surpassing individual, and even relatively realistic writers like Crofts and Simenon gave special qualities of patience and insight to individualistic heroes. A democratic and factual pattern did exist in the thirties, but British novelists like Maurice Procter and ‘Henry Wade’ hardly claimed a large audience and the relative realism of Hammett and the Hollywood police films of the late thirties are still highly melodramatic and hero-centred. The ‘police story’ only emerged as a specific element in a new ‘structure of feeling’ after the war, when successful professional authors exploited the pattern and especially when it was given authoritative shape in radio and television.