Police novel

In police novels, as a rule, there is no multi-level deduction , unlike the classic detective, whose hero (regardless of profession) is a loner, whose weapon is observation, analytical skills and life experience ( Hercule Poirot's “little gray cells”), a detective from “police detective "- part of the law enforcement system ^{[2] [3]} .

The hero of the police novel is usually rather ordinary, he is an ordinary employee of the search and does not pretend to genius. Unlike the classic detective , his personal life is often depicted here (often - not its best sides, such as alcoholism, betrayal of a spouse and divorce, etc.), while some of its episodes may intersect with one’s criminal the plot of the book ^[4] .

A separate type of police novel is the forensic thriller ( eng. Forensic pathologist procedural ). In this subgenre work, in particular, Patricia Cornwell and Katie Reich . Preserving the realism of the police procedure, characteristic of the production novel , due to the shift of focus on the work of forensic experts (and, in a broader interpretation of the genre - experts - criminologists in general), the works of this genre largely revive the traditions of the classic detective story : solving a crime performed by scientists, rather than police officers , it becomes again primarily a solution to an intellectual problem ^[5] .

Among the predecessors of the police novel can also be called " Moonstone " (1868) - the famous novel by Wilkie Collins , in which a detective from Scotland Yard investigates the loss of a valuable diamond ^[6] . The prototype of the detective Kaffa served as a real police officer - Sergeant ^{[7] [8]} .

In France , in parallel with Collins, Emil Gaborio writes his novels about the agent of the detective police . The prototype of Lecock was Eugene Francois Widoc , the creator of the French criminal police and criminal investigation department as such, who left autobiographical “ Notes ” behind him. It was Gaborio, and after him, Georges Simenon , the author of a series of novels about Commissioner Maigret , begun at the turn of 1920-1930, critics consider the authors who laid the foundations of the genre of the policeman of the novel ^[9] .

The term "police novel" itself came in English and Russian from French . Although the French term Roman policier (Fr.) in modern French literature is understood quite widely, being, in fact, a synonym for a crime novel in general, the Megret novels for the most part fit perfectly into the modern framework of the "police" genre established outside France ^{[10] [3 ]} , though, in comparison with the modern “procedure”, Simenon often concentrates more on Maigret’s personality than on collective police work ^[9] .

As for the Anglo-American crime genre, in contrast to France, in the novels written before the Second World War , the police play a secondary role. Occasionally, the main characters of pre-war detectives served in the police, but at the same time they remained not too shackled by the letter of the law alone and almost did not differ from private detectives ^[11] .

According to critics, the first truly police novel in the United States was the 1945 book v in V as in Victim ^[12] . Quite often quoted the lead book review of The New York Times Anthony Boucher , who defined this work in this way.

The heroes of this novel are two New York police officers Mitch Taylor and Jub Freeman. Jub “inherited” his surname from the British detective-writer who died in 1943 and behaves like intellectual detectives from classic detectives , but his partner Mitch presents another, much more realistic type of police officer ^[12] .

Although Mitch Taylor for the author was more of an experiment in the tradition of the pre-war detective story, the Second World War ended, changing the attitude of American society towards violence and the police ^[13] . Beginning in the 1950s, a police detective in the United States began to force out a cool detective story (which, in turn, moved the classic detective story from the 1920s ). So in 1952, wrote the novel " " (from English - "The last time she wore"), which he consciously positioned as a realistic work on a police investigation ^[14] . The transition from a classic detective to a steep one, and from a steep one to a policeman are the milestones of the evolution of the criminal-detective genre from romanticism to realism ^[15] .

One of the most popular authors of the police novel was Ed McBein (1926–2005), who created a series of novels about the 87th police station . The first novel of this series, entitled “ Hating the Police ” (Cop Hater), appeared in 1956. ^[15] It was this series that made the police novel really popular in the United States genre ^[14] .

The “Soviet detective story” is always more likely to a production policeman (more precisely, a “policeman”) novel than to the actual detective ^[16] , inheriting many of the features of the French police novel ^[17] . This genre includes such classic works for the Soviet detective story as The Motley Case by Arkady Adamov (1956), Petrovka, 38 by Juliana Semenova (1963) (and his screen version ), The Village Detective by Wil Lipatova (1968) and the films about Aniskin put on it, “ The Era of Mercy ” by the Weiner brothers (1975) ^[16] , the film “The Golden Mine ” (1977), the television series “ Investigations are conducted by ZnOTOKi ” (1971–1989) and others. ^[3]

The production novel about the militia in its pure form is also the work of Andrei Kivinov , which initiated the television series "Menty" ^[18] . The same genre for the most part includes the cycle of Alexandra Marinina about investigator Kamenskaya and many other works of the detective genre written in post-Soviet Russia. ^{[3] [17]} .

If a detective novel often focuses more on the identity of the criminal , and the detective detective appears to be a fully formed, statically ideal person, the detective from the police novel is a living person working in a team of colleagues. In the best examples of the Soviet militia novel, the young investigator in the course of his work often passed tests both for professionalism and for his human qualities, they showed not only his professional, but also personal growth ^[16] .

The Scandinavian police novel gained world fame thanks to a series of ten books about Martin Beck , which were written between the years 1965-1975 by the spouses May Schövalle and Per Valiou ^[10] . Professional journalists who had left-wing convictions, inspired by Ed Macbain’s example, viewed the police novels not just as entertaining reading, but also as an excuse to start a conversation about urgent problems of society, considering the crime primarily as a result of social tension. Their books have become not only a brilliant example of a police detective, but also a kind of portrait of Sweden of the 1960s .

Traditions Schövall and Valyo continued, in particular, Henning Mankel with his series of novels about inspector Kurt Wallander ^[19] . A modern Swedish detective who has received worldwide recognition since the second half of the 20th century has an interest in social problems, often shows the work of the police from the inside, and, as noted in 2016, Elena Topilskaya , as in Russia, the detective genre in Sweden novel , telling about the everyday investigation ^[20] .

All the signs of a police novel often have a “criminal” component of a fantastic detective story . A vivid example of such a work is Isaac Asimov’s novel Steel Caves . However, as this example shows, fiction can introduce an epic component uncharacteristic of a crime novel to the detective story: questions far beyond the limits characteristic of detective fiction . A similar departure from the genre of the police novel, while retaining most of its external signs, is deliberately beaten up by the Strugatsky brothers in his “ Hotel“ At the Dead Alpinist ” ” ^[4] .

• Detective
• Production romance
• Police drama
• Legal thriller

Sources

• Leroy L. Panek. Post-war American police fiction / Martin Priestman. - Cambridge University Press , 2003. - p. 155-172. - 316 s. - ISBN 978-0-521-00871-6 .
• Peter Messent. The Police Novel // A Companion to Crime Fiction / Charles J. Rzepka, Lee Horsley. - Wiley, 2010. - p. 175-186. - 648 s. - ISBN 978-1-4051-6765-9 .
• John Scaggs. The Police Procedural // Crime Fiction . - Routledge , 2005. - p. 85-104. - 192 s. - (The New Critical Idiom). - ISBN 978-0-415-31825-9 .
• Robert Paul Winston, Nancy C. Mellerski. The Public Eye: Ideology and the Police Procedural . - Macmillan, 1992. - 266 p. - ISBN 9780333531075 .

• Police Detective (Neopr.) . Detective method . detectivemethod.ru. The appeal date is November 15, 2016.