Police Proceeding in a Disorderly Direction?

By Fraser Massey
There is something strange happening in the UK. While public confidence in the nation’s police force is at one of its lowest-ever ebbs, enthusiasm for fictional police procedurals is on the increase.

A wave of anti-police feeling has swept the nation since a serving firearms officer abducted, raped, and murdered a young woman while she was walking through a London park in 2021.

These contrasting views were much in evidence at CrimeFest, the annual international crime-fiction convention held last week in Bristol, a city in the South-West of England. “Fascination with police procedurals is growing and growing,” co-host Donna Moore proclaimed. “So much so that I had to schedule panels devoted purely to them on each of the opening three days of the festival.”

Notable, too, was that the three headline stars named in that festival’s advance pre-publicity were Mark Billingham, Elly Griffiths, and Peter Guttridge, all of whom were promoting new police-based novels.

After producing 18 yarns about a middle-aged Londoner, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne (most recently seen in 2022’s The Murder Book), Billingham’s latest novel is The Last Dance, which introduces a new lead character, Detective Sergeant Declan Miller, a resident of Blackpool. That book will be released next week in Britain by Sphere, with a U.S. edition due out in early July from Atlantic Monthly Press.

In the meantime, Griffiths (aka Domenica de Rosa), who built a huge following with her series starring forensic archaeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway, is returning this year to the mid-20th-century world of Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens. Introduced in 2014’s The Zig Zag Girl, Stephens will reappear in The Great Deceiver (Quercus), scheduled for publication in October. Although these are certainly procedurals, they’re not the typical sort, as Stephens’ regular sidekick is a stage magician called Max Mephisto.

English novelist and critic Guttridge confesses that when he began composing his Brighton Mysteries (the first being 2010’s City of Dreadful Night), he intended only to make it a trilogy of police novels set on England’s south coast. Yet he’s now working on his ninth installment in the series. He has his own theory about why public dissatisfaction with Britain’s law-enforcement establishment today has not provoked a decline in enthusiasm for crime fiction: “We don’t talk much about the real world in our police procedurals.”

That’s a view endorsed by Caro Ramsay, who chaired one of CrimeFest’s police-procedural panels (and pens both the Anderson and Costello and the Detective Chief Inspector Christine Caplan series). “The police forces in our books are very efficient,” she says. “No one’s ever ill, no one ever goes to the toilet, the photocopier always works, and we’re always honest, true, and marvelous—unless there’s a fictional reason for us not to be. We’re a good advert for the police.”

Britain’s real coppers should be grateful.

All that said, Donna Moore suggests things might have been different at this year’s festival, were it not for the slow pace at which the publishing industry works. “Many of the books featured at CrimeFest,” she observes, “will have been written when things weren’t quite as bad as they are now in terms of public feeling about the police.”

Things could, indeed, be changing. There were small indications during the Bristol convention that authors new to this genre may be less inclined to add to the ranks of police procedurals. For instance, during panel talks involving only debut writers, those working the field of police-based tales were outnumbered roughly three to one by others taking different approaches to exploring fictional crime.

Among those who’d fed a police procedural into the market was real-life former London police sergeant Paul Durston. His highly imaginative and pretty much unputdownable 2022 story, If I Were Me (Diamond Crime), features a heroic constable, Charlie Quinlan, who is investigated by her colleagues following a succession of murders targeting pedophiles. Durston remains optimistic that public fascination with police-based whodunits and thrillers will continue.

“Readers are fascinated by the mysterious world of the police,” he insists. “Good writers will always be able to find new ways to make that world accessible, which will keep crime fiction fans coming back.”