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The police procedural is a sub-genre of the mystery story which tries to demonstrate the activities of a police force as they solve crimes. It can be difficult to distinguish between the police procedural and a detective novel in which the protagonist is a police officer. The principal distinction is that the police procedural attempts to demonstrate the activities of an entire squad or group of police officers, whereas a detective novel concentrates entirely on the activities of one police officer whose colleagues are, by and large, offstage. Another distinction that is frequently drawn is that the police procedural attempts to depict the work of police officers in solving multiple crimes simultaneously, whereas the detective novel concentrates on one crime. However, this distinction is less clear. Some novels that are quite clearly police procedurals concentrate on a single crime but show the efforts of multiple officers to solve it. By and large, in the procedural, the principal crimes are solved by the end of the story, although minor crimes may remain unsolved. One distinction that is nearly universal is that the procedural shows us the personal lives of the investigative team, whereas the detective novel generally does not. In a police procedural, as the name suggests, the process of arresting and convicting the perpetrators of the crime is often more important than the solution of a mystery. It is not uncommon for the perpetrator's identity to be known from the outset in a procedural.
1 Written Stories
1.1 Ed McBain
Perhaps the best example of the police procedural is the work of Ed McBain, the pseudonym of Evan Hunter, who has written dozens of novels in the 87th Precinct series. New novels are still being written in this series (as of 2004). Although these novels focus primarily on Detective Steve Carella, they encompass the work of many officers working alone and in teams, and Detective Carella is not always present in any individual book. The 87th Precinct novels are works of great power and depth, and emotional richness, and often contain moments of terrific (if sometimes gruesome) humour.
1.2 Detective Novel Writers
It is difficult to disentangle the early roots of the procedural from its more common cousin, the detective novel featuring a police officer as protagonist. By and large, the better known novelists such as Ngaio Marsh produced work that falls more squarely into the province of the detective novel. Nevertheless, some of the work of authors less well known today, like Freeman Wills Crofts' novels about Inspector French or some of the work of the prolific team of G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, might be considered as the antecedents of today's procedural.
1.3 Del Shannon
A prolific author of police procedurals, whose work has fallen out of fashion in the years since her death, is Elizabeth Linington writing as "Dell Shannon". Ms. Linington, who wrote under her own name as well as a number of pseudonyms, reserved her Dell Shannon pseudonym primarily for procedurals featuring Detective Luis Mendoza (1960-1986). These novels are considered severely flawed by the author's far-right political viewpoint (she was a proud member of the John Birch Society), which occasionally works its way into the novels in the form of racism, sexism and extreme homophobia. However, they have a certain naive charm in their depiction of a kinder, gentler California, where the police were always "good guys" who solved all the crimes and respected the citizenry.
1.4 Georges Simenon
It is hard to say whether the Inspector Maigret novels of Georges Simenon represent procedurals because of their strong focus on the Inspector himself, but the cast of supporting characters frequently includes repeating members of his staff and some would argue that they qualify. Similarly, some critics suggest that the comic strip, Dick Tracy, is actually an early procedural, but this seems unlikely due to the strong focus on the protagonist.
2 TV Series
In the 1990s, the police procedural was revitalized as a form by American (and sometimes British) television producers. This trend was perhaps begun by the success of an excellent and high-quality British series featuring Helen Mirren, whose half-dozen episodes in very long format are collectively known as Prime Suspect. However, the strong and lasting success of an American series called Law & OrderLaw & Order is the longest-running primetime drama currently on American television ( 2004). A police procedural and courtroom drama series, it first screened on the NBC network in 1990. Created by Dick Wolf, award-winning Law & Order is syndicated on oth contributed profoundly to the current (2004) spate of such programs. The trend has also cross-pollinated with another sub-genre of the mystery genre, the forensic pathology novel, producing large numbers of police procedurals in which forensic pathology plays a large part: principal among these is the franchise and its spin-offs.
