Revisionist History - Taxonomy of the Modern Mystery Story

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Today, another episode from the Revisionist History Live universe. It's an old fashioned lecture, recorded at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University. Malcolm talks about a totally real thing he made up—a taxonomy of the modern mystery story—with a focus on murder mysteries and police procedurals. From Dragnet, to John Grisham, to Sherlock Holmes, it's all in there...and all connected to how we view real policing. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. is a mini-series on guns. Six parts, beginning August 31st, which is some of my favorite work that we've ever done in Revisionist History. So please put that on your calendar. And if you want to binge listen to it early without any ads, go to pushkin.fm

slash plus and sign up for a Pushkin subscription. Anyway, to get you in the mood for that series, which I will say right now goes in some very strange directions, I thought I'd give you this. It's a speech I gave at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University. I asked the organizers if I could do an old-fashioned lecture on murder mysteries and police procedurals, which I have been obsessed with ever since my dad read Sherlock Holmes short stories to me and my brothers when we were kids.

They said, sure. And I said, oh my god. So picture a packed auditorium. Everyone has book bags, and while they're waiting, they're reading books. They're not on their phones, catching up on their proust. This is a talk to a room full of serious readers, which is to say, a room full of people who are more interested in being delighted than they are in being persuaded. My kind of people.

All right, here it is. I want to thank the New Orleans Book Festival for allowing me this time today. I wanted to start by apologizing for the title. I don't know if you saw the title in the program. Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern, an over-theorized and potentially absurd taxonomy of the modern mystery story. First, a simple warning. That title is dead serious. This whole episode is going to get a little absurd and over-theorized. So don't stand up at the end and say, Mr. Glaubel, I found

your presentation absurd and over-theorized. I already warned you. I have disclosed that risk at the outset. Secondly, I've chosen to speak about crime novels and mysteries because I'm addicted to them. I read in order spy novels, thrillers of various kinds, novels involving events that potentially threaten the safety of the entire planet, and the category that concerns us today uh police procedurals and uh crime stories and their

television and film equivalents um you know when you go into the hudson news in an airport and there's that whole wall of paperbacks i have read every one of those paperbacks except for the ones with the word girl in the title. My daughter who is 18 months old spends a lot of time in a very large playpen and the playpen immediately abuts the bookcase where I keep all of my thrillers and a couple days ago she reached up and grabbed Daniel Silva's The Kill Artist and started to turn the pages. Now The Kill Artist is the first installment in Daniel Silva's series of books on the legendary Israeli assassin Gabriel Alon involving, in this case, his pursuit of the Dastardly Palestinian Terrorist, Tariq. It's one of my favorite books ever. And I mean, I don't think any father ever has been more proud of his daughter

than I was at that moment. But as I said, it's stories about the police that concern us today, because I think that stories about the police have not been given nearly the kind of close cultural scrutiny that they deserve, which makes no sense, because the attitude of popular culture towards the police is really, really weird. So there are two million truck drivers in the United States. How many TV books and movies and novels are there about truck drivers, right? Once in a blue moon. There are 3 million nurses in the United States.

How many movies are there about nurses? Is there a genre of fiction devoted to nurses? No, there is not. There are 4 million teachers in the United States. Teachers are everywhere. There must be a ton of teachers in this room right now. How many teachers do you know personally? I'm sure all of us, the list is this long.

But has any 16-year-old ever asked his girlfriend to come with him to see the new teacher movie at the multiplex? No. The creative role was taught by teachers, nurtured by teachers, encouraged by teachers, but they don't want to tell us stories about teachers. They want to tell us stories about cops. There are only 700,000 police officers in this country, but they are massively overrepresented in the culture. My guess is

that almost everyone in this room can name way more fictional police officers than they can name real police officers. Have you ever heard a real police officer refer to a perp? Have you ever heard a real police officer talk about a cold case? Have you ever heard a real police officer say you have the right to remain silent? Have you ever heard a real police officer say of his partner, if you're going in there, I'm going in there with you too? Or hold on, Jimmy, just hold on. Remember when we were rookies together, Jimmy? No, no, no. Virtually everything we know about the police comes from the movies and television and novels, right? Martians currently circling the United States

in a hot air balloon, if, I'm sorry, if one of those Martians currently circulating the United States in a hot air balloon ever gets a Netflix subscription, they will say, my God, we appear to have stumbled on a country of people running around in tight blue uniforms and wearing aviator classes. So today I want to ask the question, what have we learned from our immersion in all these police procedurals and crime novels? And what are the social consequences of that learning? Which is an important question because I think all of those

crime books and movies have really, really screwed us up. Okay, let's begin with Ed McBain. Now, for those of you who may not be familiar with Ed McBain, he was in the post-war years one of America's most popular mystery writers. He wrote police procedurals about a fictional 87th precinct. And the officers in his precinct were all young men. They all had very pretty wives. They were all happily married. They all got along wonderfully. They worked together well.

And I want to read to you from one of the novels in that series called The Killer's Wedge. And it's about one of the officers in the 87th Precinct, Cotton Hawes, who's just been transferred in from another precinct. And the 87th is in a bad part of town. And he initially has all kinds of doubts about what it would mean to work a poor part of town. So this is Ed McBain talking about how Cotton Hawes is making sense of his experience. He had learned that the people of the slums were only people. They enjoyed the same pleasures he did, and they suffered a great many misfortunes he would never have to suffer. They wanted love and they wanted respect, and the walls of a tenement

did not necessarily become the cage of an animal. He had learned this from the men of the squad. He had seen each and every one of them in action. Then he goes on, but he was surprised to learn that the men of the 87th clung to another concept which in no way limited the effectiveness of their law enforcement. That concept was fairness. And within this concept, they knew when to get tough and when to understand. They did not automatically equate slum dwellers with criminals.

A thief was a thief, but a person was a person. Now, this is a remarkably idealized view of law enforcement, right? I mean, let me give you another example from the same era, 1950s, which is, of course, the television show Dragnet, created by Jack Webb. At its height, Dragnet is an astonishingly popular television show. At one point of the 27 million American homes with televisions, 16 million will be tuned to Dragnet on Thursday nights when it ran, which is a number that has never been approximated since. It's an insane number. And Dragnet is a show about the

LAPD. And it's the story of a group of dispassionate, unbelievably professional, highly competent police officers. One of my favorite Dragnet episodes involved Joe Friday, who is the hero of Dragnet, arresting a woman for a crime. And at the end of the episode, the woman he arrests thanks him for arresting her, which when has this ever happened in real life ever? But it happened in Dragnet. And, you know, you could make a list of the, if you make a list, it's a very fun exercise, of the top, the five most influential television shows

of all time, right? 60 Minutes, probably The Real World, which kind of invents reality TV, probably put The Cosby Show on there for its influence on race relations. But it absolutely is the case that Dragnet is one of the five most influential and important television shows of all time. And it belongs in that list because what it does is it represents the first time on television that the same idea that Ed McBain has is put forth,

and which is this notion that the police are good at what they do. I'm quoting here from a Time magazine article on Dragnet when it first became a hit. The flood of Dragnet fan mail suggests that the U.S. completely forgets that it is a nation of incipient cop haters when its eyes are glued on Webb's show, that it has gained a new appreciation of the underpaid, long-suffering, ordinary policeman, and in many cases, its first rudimentary understanding of real-life law enforcement. So this is Time magazine in the 1950s, when it was the embodiment of middle America, describing the United States as a nation of incipient cop haters. You know, today when we think of cop haters, we think of, you know, progressives, radicalized

activists, civil rights zealots, you know, blah. Back then, Time magazine is saying America, middle America, were the cop haters until people like Ed McBain and Dragnet came along and convinced Americans that their perception of law enforcement was wrong, right? Those shows represent a massive narrative innovation. They introduce Americans to an idea that had never occurred to them before, and that is the idea of the excellent police officer. More on the taxonomy of the modern mystery story in a moment. Now, back to my speech on the taxonomy of police storytelling. Now, this is, of course, not the only way that the popular culture represents law enforcement.

Before Dragnet came along, the dominant narrative mode was the Western. And what is the Western? It's the parable about the consequences of the absence of institutional authority. What do you do in your little town on the plains when there is no police department? Well, ordinary citizens, possessed of no more than their own courage and a six-shooter, have to restore order on their own.

Now, alongside that, you had the rise in fiction of the private detective, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote. And what is the prevailing view of law enforcement in the world of the private detective? It is that the police are present, but they're incompetent. They can only catch bad guys with the help of talented outsiders, right? Of amateurs. If you've read your Sherlock Holmes, you know all about Sherlock Holmes' long relationship with Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.

Lestrade is honest. He's dogged. He's hardworking. But he lacks imagination, and he can't solve a crime to save his life. And there's a moment in the adventures of the six Napoleons in 1900 when we have this passage. Lestrade is addressing Holmes after Holmes has just done one of his spectacular feats of deduction and figured out who the real criminal is. And Lestrade says, we are not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you.

And if you come down tomorrow, there's not a man from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable who wouldn't be glad to shake you by the hand. So at Scotland Yard, they are under absolutely no illusion about their own ability, right? They know Holmes is better than they are.

They know that they're useless at this task of crime solving and that the guy with the pipe and the crazy hat from Baker Street is the only way they're going to keep the criminals of London under control. Same thing in Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels, right? Hercule Poirot was solving crime after crime to the extent the police ever show up right when they show up they have no idea what's going on and he looks at them our little Belgian with the mustaches looks at the police with absolute contempt because he's the only one who can ever finger the bad guy right so we have stories about highly competent cops. And for the sake of argument, let's call those Easterns.

We have stories about absent cops. Let's call those Westerns, right? They are called Westerns. And we have stories about incompetent cops. And let's call those Northerns, which only leaves the southern. So what's the southern? Well, the southern is the narrative of the police and authority as malignant.

Think about the great Brian De Palma movie, The Untouchables, with Kevin Costner playing the role of Elliot Ness, the incorruptible Chicago district attorney, Elliot Ness, who goes on his crusade against the mob during the height of prohibition. The reason it matters that Ness is incorruptible is that all around him,

the police of Chicago are corruptible, right? They're not absent, they're not incompetent, they're not deft and professional, no. They have been seduced by the criminality that they're supposed to contain. They are indistinguishable from the bad guys. That's what a Southern is, right? So these are the four kinds of police stories.

Excellence, absence, incompetence, corruption. And this is the first, here's the first of my claims. I think that every single example of a crime novel or a police procedural falls into one of these four categories, without exception. So let's explore this. I assume some of you have read the Lee Child Jack Reacher series. And if you haven't, you need to start like right after this. The talk is over. I once did a back of the envelope calculation based on the very large sample of Jack Reacher novels that I've read, which is it follows. Reacher kills on average 12 bad guys per book.

There are 26 Reacher books, meaning that he has murdered 284 people over the course of his life. He is the most prolific serial killer in American fiction. And yet, 26 years after Jack Reacher first appeared in The Killing Floor, he remains at large. This is pretty good evidence that the police are absent in the Reacher series. The Reacher novels are Westerns. Only the Western can you get away with killing 284 people and remain at large, right? For the Northern, for the incompetent police, we have more examples than we can count, but the one that I remember from my childhood, and many of you are old enough to remember

this as well, is Hogan's Heroes, the legendary 1970s sitcom. For those of you who are too young to remember Hogan's Heroes, it was a hugely successful TV show set in a German prisoner of war camp during the Second World War, in which the comic foils of the captured German soldiers were Nazi prison guards. Don't even try pitching that show today, by the way, because, and why do we laugh at the Nazis, if memory serves Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz, right? Not because they are malicious or vicious, not because they are malicious or vicious not because they are ineffective or indifferent no we laugh at them because they're inept because clink is a self-important fool because

schultz is a clown who says i know nothing i see nothing right The literary conceit of Hogan's heroes is that the Nazis were the Three Stooges, which is a Northern. That's what it is, right? Then there's the Southern, authority as malignant and corrupt. Who is the king of the Southern? Well, I think it's obvious. If you think about it, it's John Grisham. The plot of every John Grisham novel ever, and I say this as someone who loves John Grisham like a brother, is about the subversion of institutional authority. How does the Pelican Brief end? The richest man in the country is under indictment, as are his closest aides and all of his lawyers.

The chief of staff to the President of the United States has resigned, and the President himself has wisely decided not to seek a second term. In The Firm, our hero, played in the movie version by Tom Cruise, discovers that the biggest client of his law firm is a mafia crime family. The FBI gets involved and we think the movie's gonna end

with the FBI helping Tom Cruise resolve the matter. But, no. What does our hero do? He ends up making a deal with the mafia crime family and turning his back on the FBI. Why? Because the FBI double-crosses him. Of course they do, right? This is a Grisham novel, right? The law is less trustworthy than a mafia crime family. I have argued long and hard over the years, to very deaf ears,

that Grisham is the most important literary figure of our generation. And I'm not joking. I mean, why did so many Americans think the 2022 election was stolen? That truckloads of purloined ballots were ferried around Philadelphia in the back of pickup trucks? That voting machines magically preferred Democrats to Republicans? Because these are the kinds of things that happen all the time in John Grisham novels, right? And given that John Grisham has sold 300 million books and

has had 28 consecutive number one New York Times bestsellers, it is a statistical certainty that a good majority of the people wearing MAGA hats and storming the Capitol on January 6th read a Grisham book every night before bedtime after, of course, being inoculated with their daily dose of Tucker Carlson. Let's do a more difficult example. Some of you may have seen the new Apple TV series, Slow Horses, based on the Mick Herron spy novels. The show is about an intelligence officer played by Gary Oldham who has been exiled to a decrepit outbuilding called Slow House. And along with all the other misfits,

all the other rejects, screw-ups, weirdos who can no longer make it within MI5 headquarters. So what's that? Well, that sounds like a northern, right? Authority is incompetent, right? We have a group of screw-ups. But then the Sloughhouse crew go on to solve some of the most pressing national security crises of the day, which makes it sound like an eastern, like Dragnet and Ed McBain, like uber-compet competent authority. So it doesn't fit, right? Doesn't that invalidate my theory? No, no, no. Slow horse is just a hybrid, right? Hybrids have been around

forever. If you remember, how many people read Scarlet Pimpernel novels growing up? What is the Scarlet Pimpernel? He is the nobleman who everyone thinks is stupid, but is simultaneously outwitting all of the evil French, right? Or think about Columbo, right? The magnificent 1970s television detective series, where Peter Falk pretends to be a bumbling fool, but always gets the bad guy in the end. These are Easterns masquerading as Northerns. They're Northeasterns. They're Nor'easters, right? What does Hamlet say to Horatio? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. That does not apply to my taxonomy. Okay, why am I going on and on about the four categories? Because I think

they're deeply problematic, and I think they distort our understanding of what policing is. And here I'm going to go on a digression and simultaneously get a little bit serious. The father of modern policing was a man named Sir Robert Peel, and he founds the Metropolitan Police Force in London in 1829, which is the first great urban police department. And Peel famously sets out nine principles that he thinks ought to govern modern police forces. And they are as applicable, if not more applicable today than they were in 1829. They are the Ten commandments of policing. They're what every police officer is taught on the first day of their time at Police Academy.

And to give you a flavor, I'm going to read a couple of Peale's principles. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior, and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect. Here's another one. The police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to maintain and secure public respect.

Here's another one. The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity for the use of physical force and compulsion in achieving police objectives. And here's the crucial one. The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition

that the police are the public and gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police, right? What is the word that appears in all of those principles as often as police? It's public, right? Public, public, public. The police are the public and the public are the police. I would submit to you that those two sentences are one of the most beautiful and essential lines that have ever been written about the modern democratic experiment. Now, where are we today with respect to Peel's principles in America? Are we a society that believes that the people are the police and the police are the people. I'm not so sure of that.

One of the ways, for example, that we measure the health and effectiveness of a police force is clearance rates. A clearance rate is simply the percentage of crimes that are solved by the police. And the most important of those, obviously, is the homicide clearance rate. And over the last 30 years, the homicide clearance rate in this country has been falling, and not by a small amount, by a large amount. 30 years ago, it was roughly 70%. It's now 50%.

So half of all murders committed in the United States go unsolved by the police. And by the way, that's an average. There are many, many places where the clearance rate is much lower than that. The clearance rate in Flint, Michigan is 17% for homicide. In Honolulu, it's 18%. It also varies by neighborhood. If somebody was murdered outside of this auditorium here in Tulane, the clearance rate would probably be 90%.

But in the Seventh Ward, it's probably, I don't know, 10%, 15%, right? That is a very, very big problem for modern society. In the classic formulation of deterrence, deterrence is a function of the certainty, swiftness, and severity of punishment. And of those three things, the first is the most important, right? Deterrence is really a function

of the likelihood of being caught. And if we are in a situation where the clearance rates in many high crime neighborhoods is less than 20%, then that's a description of a failed state, right? We live in a society now where there are many neighborhoods where murderers murder with impunity. Now, why are clearance rates falling? It makes no sense.

The police today are better funded. They're better trained than ever before. They have more access to technology. There's cameras everywhere. Plus, murder rates have fallen dramatically over the last 30 years. They have less to do. If you watch CSI on television or Law & Order,

you would think clearance rates would be 100%, but they're not. They're low and they're dropping. One reason for that is obvious, and that's the rise of gun violence. Guns used to be a small percentage of homicides. They're now an overwhelming percentage of homicides, and a gun crime is a lot harder to solve than a knife crime, right? Less physical evidence. The killer can be

further away. But that's not the real reason. The real reason is that the most important factor in solving a homicide is the cooperation of the public. You find out who pulled the trigger because three people come to you and said, I was there. I saw Billy pull the trigger, right? But if those three people don't come forward, if they don't trust the police anymore, if they think of the police as an occupying force, then you have a problem. Remember those principles from Peale. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior, and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect, right? That is what we don't have right now. In a most recent Gallup

poll, only 19% of black adults said they had any confidence or trust in the police. The numbers for white Americans are a little bit higher, but they are also at historic lows. How do you solve a homicide in a community where 8 out of 10 people don't trust you? What Robert Peel said 200 years ago is absolutely correct. The police cannot do their job without the support of the public. Now, you might say, well, this collapse in trust makes perfect sense. Think about the last 10 years. We had Ferguson.

We had George Floyd. We just had Tyra Nichols. On and on, right? All of these stories of kinds of things that would naturally undermine our faith in law enforcement. But that still doesn't solve the puzzle, right? Because in every way, this kind of problem was worse 50 years ago than it is today, right? Would you rather have the Police Department

of Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 or the police department of Birmingham, Alabama today? Would you rather have the police department of Los Angeles in 1963 when they wouldn't even let black officers ride in the same squad cars as white officers than the LAPD of today? No. I mean, I could go on. I mean I could go on I mean in Atlanta in 1948 they hire their first black police officers group of eight men they call them the YMCA eight why because they won't let them into the precincts they make them work out of the basement of the colored YMCA downtown right and they they get so much abuse that half of them quit within the first year, abuse from their fellow white police officers. They're not allowed to drive squad cars. They're

not allowed to arrest white people. They're not allowed to patrol white neighborhoods. White officers would gang up against them and falsely report them for drinking on the job. White officers tried to run down a couple of them in the street. One white officer in Atlanta put a bounty on the head of the black officers saying he would give $200 to anyone who killed one of those officers. Now, those are good reasons not to trust the police department, right? Really good reasons. Not today. Not today when the Atlanta Police Department is worlds better and different from that. You would have thought there was

a crisis in clearance rates back then, not now. We'll be right back. You would have thought that in every way we would be better off today than we were 50 years ago. So what's to blame for this, right? This is one of the most profound problems facing our society. I think that there are many, many important issues, but the one I want to talk about is the influence of these four narratives. The first problem with the narratives I think is obvious, and that is that it is a dangerous thing to over-narrativize a group of people. The obvious analogy is the way the popular culture treated African Americans

in the movies in the first half of the 20th century. There were only three categories of black people in the movies in that period. There was the mammy, remember Gone with the Wind, the role played by Hattie McDaniel, and that is the big, warm, sassy surrogate mother who puts her mistress's children ahead even of her own children, and who keeps her mistress in line, you know, with her straight talk, right. That's stereotype number one. Second stereotype was the Sambo. What is the Sambo? The Sambo is the childlike, passive, deeply loyal manservant, right?

The Uncle Tom. And if you were a black actor or actress in Hollywood in the first 40 years of the 20th century, those were the two roles that were available to you. And the third group is the shiftless, devious, untrustworthy, lazy, subversive, right? The screenwriters and the novelists of America put all black people into one of those three categories for a hundred years. Why? Because they couldn't be bothered to explore the idea that there was as much variety and beauty and complexity

in black people as there were in white people. A narrative is a stereotype. It's a kind of shorthand used by writers. And these stereotypes aren't harmless. There's a famous study done in the 1930s of ethnic stereotypes where a group of psychologists asked thousands of Americans to describe what they felt black people were like. And the three most popular adjectives used by white people to describe black people were superstitious,

happy-go-lucky, and lazy. And the kicker was that most of the white people they talked to for that survey didn't know any black people. So where do they get those ideas? They got them from the movies, right? So the stereotypes that are put forth in popular culture matter. They are the raw material that people use to form their attitudes and perspectives about the rest of the world. And I really worry that police narratives are doing the same thing. They are doing an injustice to our understanding of the world. And I really worry that police narratives are doing the same thing. They are doing an injustice to our understanding of the police.

You know, Derek Chauvin murders George Floyd and thousands of people take to the streets and say, let's defund the police, right? The George Floyd case activated the Southern narrative, law enforcement as impossibly corrupt and malicious. Our only choice is to shut it down, right? But there's 700,000 police officers in this country. How do you possibly label the entire group based on the behavior of a small number? You know,

after the Rodney King beating 30 years ago led to the Los Angeles riots. The Los Angeles Police Department was thrown into chaos, and they were accused of racial bias and insensitivity and turning a blind eye to misconduct. And they had once, of course, been the embodiment of the Eastern. Dragnet was a celebration of the perfection and professionalism of the LAPD, and now they were the Southern. They were cast as corrupt and malicious, and there was a massive investigation that was launched, and what the investigation found was

that of the 8,500 police officers in the LAPD, 183 had been the subject of four or more excessive force complaints over in the period between 1986 and 1990, right? So 183 out of 8,500. 44 of those 183 had six or more complaints, and 16 had eight or more complaints. The investigation found that the LAPD, in other words, had a very small core of really bad apples and did a really bad job of identifying their bad apples and getting rid of them. That is not an Eastern where everyone is perfect. There was one officer who had more than 16 excessive force complaints in the previous four years and still had his job, right?

That's not dragnet. That's something very different. That's a problem. But at the same time, that is not thegnet that's something very different that's a problem but at the same time that is not the description of a southern it's not a description of an entire department that is malicious and and malignant right you cannot call a department of 8 500 people corrupt and malignant because it has 44 really bad apples. So our police narratives have made us sloppy. They've made it really hard for us to understand the nature of the problem we're facing. They blur over the subtleties. You know, you have one side saying it's all rotten and the other watching

Dragnet and reading Ed McBain and saying these are noble, courageous men doing an impossible job against overwhelming odds. They deserve our unqualified support, right? That neither of those narratives are true. How can the people be the police and the police be the people when the people don't understand who the police are? Problem number one. We don't make this mistake with teachers.

We don't make it with truck drivers. We don't make it with nurses. When we hear that a teacher is a bad teacher whose students don't make this mistake with teachers. We don't make it with truck drivers. We don't make it with nurses. When we hear that a teacher is a bad teacher whose students don't learn anything, we don't say, oh man, teaching is broken. Let's defund teaching, right? We just say that's a bad teacher who should be replaced and let's do a better job of training

and selecting them next time. And the reason we're free to do that is that no one has come along and constructed a magical teacher genre that allows us to assign every teacher to one of four reductive narrative categories. Second, and a more important point, is that I think we need to consider

what these narratives do to those within the profession. Because how the police think of themselves is also shaped by these theories. You know, it's often been said that the godfather, I'm sure you've heard this, the godfather started out being about the mob, but before long, the mob was about being like the godfather, right? They all started pretending they were Marlon Brando or cultural narratives about groups don't just reflect those groups, they also start to define those groups.

So the police also watch Law & Order, right? They also read crime novels. And what do they learn from them? They learn that law enforcement is about them. It's the story of their own identity and skill. Are they any good? Are they honest? Are they as dogged and skilled and fundamental

as the police of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct? Or as hapless as Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz? The great crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh, who was a LAPD officer for many years, once said that the modern police novel was not about the man working the case, but the case working the man, meaning that the innovation of police fiction in the modern era was to turn the spotlight on what the job of maintaining law and order did to the psychology and peace of mind and character of the man tasked with maintaining law and order. And I think that's exactly what the four narratives are doing.

They are simply giving different answers to that question of who the police officer is. In the Western, it's just the ordinary man must summon his own courage to step into the breach. In the Northern, the officer is not up to the task. In the Southern, the officer man must summon his own courage to step into the breach. In the northern, the officer is not up to the task. In the southern, the officer is corrupted by his responsibilities. And in the eastern, our hero rises magnificently to the challenge. Police fiction in all of those forms is an exercise in narcissism. These are not novels and shows about solving crimes. They're shows about crime solvers. And where is the public in that? Right? Where?

If Robert Peel were alive today, he would look around him and he would say, we have given police officers a picture of their profession that leaves out the most important element in their success. The people whose respect and support make police work possible. Remember that Peale principle? The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent on public approval

of police existence. I defy you to find anywhere in the world of crime fiction a representation of that idea. It doesn't exist. That's not the reason people write fiction, police fiction, and it's not the reason why readers like me love police fiction. So what is the solution? Well, it breaks my heart to say this, but it is time for us to turn our backs on a spy novel, right?

No more. Enough. It's been 100 years or more, and it has left us worse off than we started. I'm sure all of you have been watching the governor of Florida on his current cultural cleansing campaign. And all I have to say is, where is Ron DeSantis when we need him? He's so busy banning Jodi Picoult novels that he's missed the real culprit, which is Lee Child, John Grisham,

Ed McBain, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Let us go to the Hudson News at the Jacksonville Airport. take all of those paperbacks off the wall, put them in a big pile in front of the Statehouse in Tallahassee, and light a match. Thank you. I have time for a few questions, I think. Anyone wants to come forward? Hi. I just wanted to ask if in this new conclusion

that it's time to move past the mystery novel, the spy novel, do you think there's a room for something more nuanced, one that has evolved maybe with our understanding and our ability to capture information? the genre was born. We did not have cell phones, we didn't have social media, and we certainly didn't have instant news, and these have all drastically changed the culture around policing, and at least in the U.S. Do you think there's a way for the genre to move on and be more incorporative of these elements and more reflective of the way policing actually is? I do think that. I mean, basically what has happened, I think, is that we have exhausted the possibilities of the form, and it's time for reinvention. And I think as well that people who write this kind of fiction need to understand what their social obligations are. What has happened, I think, is that there's a generation,

I think this is more true in Hollywood than it is in the world of fiction, that people have really dodged the question of what the impact of their writing is. And you make a movie, you make a really bad cop movie, and you just shrug and say it's entertainment, and you forget that actually, no,

what you are providing is the cultural raw material for the way we make sense of the world and if you just mail it in and just stick to some formula that is no longer relevant to the world we live in you're doing society a disservice so yes i do think it is possible to reinvent it but i think it's going to require a change of heart among the, within the creative community. Thank you. Okay, so hi, my name is Isabella. First of all, thank you so much for talking. I wanted to ask a little bit about kind of going along that same crime show narrative about how much police officers are really able to do and how that kind of changes

our public view and our public narrative. I'm a huge fan of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Knives Out, all that stuff. And we see police officers and detectives going in, asking questions, breaking into things, all without warrants and everything like that. Do you think that changes the way we view police officers and how incompetent we may see them to be? Yeah. So it's a really interesting point. The unreality of a lot of police fiction does, it contributes to our disillusionment because we have this impression from the way that police work is represented in fiction that the police officer has an awful lot more agency

than he or she actually does in real life, right? There are, for good reason, significant constraints on what they are able to do. And of course, it doesn't make for a good story. So when we compare, there's a whole line of psychology on what's called the CSI effect in juries, that juries are now more likely to acquit defendants because the level of evidence presented in the trial does not match up with the level of evidence they're used to seeing in criminal trials from CSI.

And that's a good example of how, like, that's a, there's no sure path to distrust and disillusionment if the standard of police work is described over here in fiction and in real life it's over here so i think that is um that is a very accurate observation okay thank you i think i've run out of time so thank you all very much Thank you to everyone at the New Orleans Book Festival, including Lindsay Billups and Amy Bradshaw.

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