Re: RARA-AVIS: RE: Dell Shannon

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 17 Jul 2001


Re Mario's comment below:

> I vaguely recall some negative comments here about
> Shannon's
> grasp of police procedure.

I'm the one who made those comments. Or at least I'm one of them; there might have been others.

Really anybody who's ever watched a rerun of *Dragnet* or *Police Story* has done more research on the LAPD than Ms. Linington ever did. And if I could, who've never lived or worked in LA could spot her errors so easily, imagine how much easier it was for anyone who actually lived there.

That would have been bad enough. I think that if one is writing a police procedural, than one is assuming an ethical obligation to sweat the details for the simple reason that the whole point of the police procedural is technical accuracy. Without it, the procedural's *raison* doesn't have any *d'etre*.

But on top of her casual research habits, Linington/Shannon/Egan used to make a point of bragging about the lengths she went to accurately portray the details. That really frosted me!

Humming a few bars and faking it is one thing. But humming a few bars and faking it, then bragging about how long you had to study the music is too damned much!

JIM DOHERTY

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