|
The police procedural, or police crime drama, is a subgenre of detective fiction which attempts to convincingly depict the activities of a police force as they investigate crimes. While traditional detective novels usually concentrate on a single crime, police procedurals frequently depict investigations into several unrelated crimes in a single story. While traditional mysteries usually adhere to the convention of having the criminal's identity concealed until the climax (the so-called whodunit), in police procedurals, the perpetrator's identity is often known to the audience from the outset (the inverted detective story). Police procedurals depict a number of police-related topics such as forensics, autopsies, the gathering of evidence, the use of search warrants, and interrogation. ==Early history== The roots of the police procedural have been traced to at least the mid-1880s. Wilkie Collins's novel ''The Moonstone'' (1868), a tale of a Scotland Yard detective investigating the theft of a valuable diamond, has been described as perhaps the earliest clear example of the genre.〔Wheat, Carolyn (2003) How to Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse Of Mystery & The Roller Coaster Of Suspense. Santa Barbara, PA: Perseverence Press, ISBN 1880284626〕 However, Lawrence Treat's 1945 novel ''V as in Victim'' is often cited, by Anthony Boucher (mystery critic for the ''New York Times Book Review'') among others, as perhaps the first true police procedural. Another early example is Hillary Waugh's ''Last Seen Wearing ...'', 1952. Even earlier examples from the 20th Century, predating Treat, include the novels ''Vultures in the Dark'', 1925, and ''The Borrowed Shield'', 1925, by Richard Enright, retired New York City Police Commissioner, ''Harness Bull'', 1937, and ''Homicide'', 1937, by former Southern California police officer Leslie T. White, ''P.C. Richardson's First Case'', 1933, by Sir Basil Thomson, former Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, and the short story collection ''Policeman's Lot'', 1933, by former Buckinghamshire High Sheriff and Justice of the Peace Henry Wade. The procedural became more prominent after World War II, and, while the contributions of novelists like Treat were significant, a large part of the impetus for the post-war development of the procedural as a distinct subgenre of the mystery was due, not to prose fiction, but to the popularity of a number of American films which dramatized and fictionalized actual crimes. Dubbed "semidocumentary films" by movie critics, these motion pictures, often filmed on location, with the cooperation of the law enforcement agencies involved in the actual case, made a point of authentically depicting police work. Examples include ''The Naked City'' (1948), ''The Street with No Name'' (1948), ''T-Men'' (1947), and ''Border Incident'' (1949). Films from other countries soon began following the semidocumentary trend. In France, there was ''Quai des orfevres'' (1947), released in the United States as ''Jenny Lamour''. In Japanese cinema, there was Akira Kurosawa's 1949 film ''Stray Dog'', a serious police procedural film noir that was also a precursor to the buddy cop film genre. In the UK, there were films such as ''The Blue Lamp'' (1950) and ''The Long Arm'' (1956) set in London and depicting the Metropolitan Police. One semidocumentary, ''He Walked By Night'' (1948), released by Eagle-Lion Films, featured a young radio actor named Jack Webb in a supporting role. The success of the film, along with a suggestion from LAPD Detective Sergeant Marty Wynn, the film's technical advisor, gave Webb an idea for a radio drama that depicted police work in a similarly semidocumentary manner. The resulting series, ''Dragnet'', which debuted on radio in 1949 and made the transition to television in 1951, has been called "the most famous procedural of all time" by mystery novelists William L. DeAndrea, Katherine V. Forrest and Max Allan Collins. The same year that ''Dragnet'' debuted on radio, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sidney Kingsley's stage play ''Detective Story'' opened on Broadway. This frank, carefully researched dramatization of a typical day in an NYPD precinct detective squad became another benchmark in the development of the police procedural. Over the next few years, the number of novelists who picked up on the procedural trend grew to include writers like Ben Benson, who wrote carefully researched novels about the Massachusetts State Police, retired police officer Maurice Procter, who wrote a series about North England cop Harry Martineau, and Jonathan Craig, who wrote short stories and novels about New York City police officers. Police novels by writers who would come to virtually define the form, like Hillary Waugh, Ed McBain, and John Creasey started to appear regularly. In 1956, in his regular ''New York Times Book Review'' column, mystery critic Anthony Boucher, noting the growing popularity of crime fiction in which the main emphasis was the realistic depiction of police work, suggested that such stories constituted a distinct subgenre of the mystery, and, crediting the success of ''Dragnet'' for the rise of this new form, coined the phrase "police procedural" to describe it. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「police procedural」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|