Los Angeles Police Department: Ellroy’s and Connelly’s Police Procedurals

Abstract

Historians of the genre date the history of the police procedural from Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim (1945) and the 1950s American television series Dragnet via Ed McBain’s immensely popular 87th Precinct series (1956 to the present day) to James Lee Burke’s, James Ellroy’s, and Michael Connelly’s highly acclaimed novels of the 1980s and 1990s. Of these last three, it is undoubtedly Ellroy who has taken this particular genre furthest in the direction of social analysis. Burke and Connelly, on the contrary, seem to use the police procedural largely as a vehicle for contemporary incarnations of what 50 years ago undoubtedly would have been private investigators: Dave Robicheaux and Harry Bosch. Indeed, whereas Ellroy potentially revitalizes the entire crime genre by his innovative, and socially explosive, treatment of the police procedural, Connelly basically regrounds the same genre in the classical private eye tradition, and he does so largely by ‘shadowing’ Ellroy’s work.