RE: RARA-AVIS: Fissures in hardboiledness

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 27 Apr 2002


Anthony,

Re your comment below:

> I didn't say he was a prosecutor.

No, but you did suggest that Marlowe's "position in the DA's office" was something that a member of the
"priveleged class" might go into as opposed to garden-variety police work. That led me to think that you might've misremembered what he did there, since a lawyer, at that time, WAS, in fact, more likely to come from the privileged class.

In fact DA's investigators were, and are, usually cops with a good deal of experience when they're hired to by the district attorney. In some jurisdictions they're actually members of another police force who are on loan to the DA's office (In NYC, for example, each of the five boroughs has a "DA's Squad" of NYPD detectives on assignment to their borough's prosecutor; in Massachusetts DA's investigators are always detectives from the state police).

In other words, Marlowe's status as a DA's investigator merely meant that he was a GOOD flatfoot, not that he was something OTHER than a flatfoot.

JIM DOHERTY

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