Putting humor in a blog, and writing about what makes a good police-procedural.

[B.R.Stateham]

Writing a blog and putting a little humor in it (or attempting to).  At the same time discussing what ingredients you need to make a standard police-procedural really work.  An experiment on my part in my blog today.  Go take a look and tell me what you think.  Find it here:

http://noirtaketurner-frank.blogspot.com/

[B.R.Stateham]

John, I'm having problems trying to respond to comments myself on my blog.  It must be Blog Gremlins. 

 

But I agree with you about the 'world weary' cop syndrome.  Done much too much these days.

[John McFetridge]

I tried to post this on your blog but Blogger wouldn't let me:

 

Well, we're talking about police procedurals so the common element is crime and
therefore criminals - I think the most important character trait for a cop in a
police procedural is how he or she relates to the criminals (otherwise it's just
literature, y'now?).

McBain is a great example. A little while ago a book
of his early short stories was published called, "Learning to Kill," and what I
found most interesting about it was seeing how he fleshed out the cop/criminal
relationships as he got better. There were no psychopaths or sociopaths in that
book and all the criminals had more going on that just the crimes. And the cops
realized that.

Police procedurals get into peoples' lives at the worst
possible time and see how messy they really are and how the cops react to that
is the key, I think. I'm not interested in "world weary" cops who've seen it all
before because for me each person, each crime, is unique so no one has ever
really seen "it all" before. As soon as someone acts as though he has it's a
clue that they see the other characters as stereotypes.