Since I sorta started this by questioning whether or not
Rankin's Rebus books qualified as police procedurals, I
thought I'd jump back in.
Mat wrote:
"For my own purposes, I always class this kind of book as a
"Detective Inspector Novel". . . ."
Jim responded:
"A police procedural is nothing more or less than a crime
story in which the accurate depiction of police work is the
central element."
Why must these two be mutually exclusive? Yes, Mat set DINs
up as a different animal from PPs, but couldn't they simply
be a subgenre? And although I am now convinced that Rebus,
for instance, does fit within the Doherty Dogma of Police
Procedurals, isn't it pretty obvious that there is a
difference between them and, say, the 87th Precinct
books?
I would nominate Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch books as the
US near-equivalent of Rankin's Rebus. I don't think anyone
would question that these books are definitely police
procedurals; Connelly clearly seems to know his stuff from
his years of crime reporting and other research. However,
there is a difference between these tales of a single, lone
wolf protagonist and those of the ensemble cast of
McBain's
(at least those few I've read so far).
This is not to dis McBain in any way. I am certainly not
saying one of these approaches is better than the other, just
that they are coming at the police procedural from different
angles. And I would hazard a guess that even if they read
both, most readers probably prefer one to the other, just as
most rockers of a certain age will ultimately pick sides
between the Beatles or the Stones.
Speaking of a Stones' fan, I just noticed that Rankin has
used a third Stones album title as a book title, Beggar's
Banquet, for his new anthology. (He also used a Dylan song,
Death is Not the End for a non-Rebus novel.)
Mark
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