The Police Novel

Challenging the Romance of the Techno/Metropolis: The Social Critique of the ‘City’ in Zac O’Yeah’s Crime Trilogy

“…With Bengaluru gaining in stature economically and growing population-wise, a burgeoning drug trade and illegal smuggling of both people and goods have also come to characterise the city. With this as the context, the series portrays the real and fictive connections between crime and urban space (Messent 2013; Scaggs 2005; Worthington 2011) and creates a universe of crooks, criminals and delinquents as the (by)products of the urban social space under the present cultural logic of late-capitalism. The Majestic novels depict Bengaluru as an integral part of what can be referred to as ‘the globalization of crime’.…”

Abdelilah Hamdouchi’sThe Final Bet: The Police, the Procedural and Democracy in Modern Morocco

“…The investigative narrative of the police procedural is one of the “most popularly recognizable form[s] of the genre” with “white male detectives tracking violators of the status quo” and the narrative working towards the reestablishment of order (Horsley 199). Yet, the work of critics Lee Horsley and Peter Messent identifies a diversity of police procedurals and thus the genre’s capability to introduce different types of detectives and investigative narratives: some are less suited to questioning the dominant social order while others are able to “move towards an exposure of injustice and failures of the official machinery of law and order” (Horsley 101). Even Fram acknowledges that crime fiction “can be a powerful tool for change” if writers ask themselves the right questions.…”

“…Yet, while the team is important, so is the variety of individual characters participating in the investigation. The fictional policeman acts, according to Messent, as a “mediating figure” between “the authority of the law,” on the one hand, and the emphasis on an individual sense of moral responsibility, social justice, and freedom of expression” on the other (180). We are thus drawn into a world in which the police represent “the human face of state power” (Winston and Mellerski 6).…”