10 - Bullitt and the Police Film

Summary

The conventional behavior of police heroes, from their maverick attitudinizing to their ubiquitous car chases, is so well established that it is easy to forget how dramatically it departs from the behavior of most police officers in literature or life. Police detectives had existed as early in prose fiction as Dickens (Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, 1852–3) and Wilkie Collins (Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone, 1868); Georges Simenon's indefatigable Inspector Maigret had debuted in 1931; and Sidney Kingsley's grindingly realistic play Detective Story had premiered on Broadway in 1949. But the conventions of the genre laid down by the Commander Gideon police-procedural series of J. J. Marric (aka John Creasey) beginning in 1955, and by Cop Hater, the first of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, the following year were the emphasis on the daily routines of a given group of police officers, rather than their rare dramatic breakthroughs, and on the presentation of several overlapping cases simultaneously. Together these two innovations conferred a soap-opera sense of endlessness on the routines of McBain's and Marric's fictional police departments. These cops struggle to bring each one of their assignments to a successful conclusion as if the case in hand is uniquely important, even though they know it will be followed by numberless further crimes.