Wilkie Collins's novel The Moonstone (1868), a tale of a Scotland Yard detective investigating the theft of a valuable diamond, has been described as perhaps the earliest clear example of the genre.
[4] Lawrence Treat's 1945 novel V as in Victim is often cited as the first police procedural, by Anthony Boucher (mystery critic for the New York Times Book Review) among others.
Richardson's First Case, 1933, by Sir Basil Thomson, former Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, and the short story collection Policeman's Lot, 1933, by former Buckinghamshire High Sheriff and Justice of the Peace Henry Wade.
One semidocumentary, He Walked By Night (1948), released by Eagle-Lion Films, featured a young radio actor named Jack Webb in a supporting role.
The resulting series, Dragnet, which debuted on radio in 1949 and made the transition to television in 1951, has been called "the most famous procedural of all time" by mystery novelists William L. DeAndrea, Katherine V. Forrest and Max Allan Collins.
The same year that Dragnet debuted on radio, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sidney Kingsley's stage play Detective Story opened on Broadway.
Police novels by writers who would come to virtually define the form, like Hillary Waugh, Ed McBain, and John Creasey started to appear regularly.
In 1956, in his regular New York Times Book Review column, mystery critic Anthony Boucher, noting the growing popularity of crime fiction in which the main emphasis was the realistic depiction of police work, suggested that such stories constituted a distinct subgenre of the mystery, and, crediting the success of Dragnet for the rise of this new form, coined the phrase "police procedural" to describe it.
Simenon, who had been a journalist covering police investigations before creating Maigret, gave the appearance of an accurate depiction of law enforcement in Paris.
[8] Perhaps ranking just behind McBain in importance to the development of the procedural as a distinct mystery subgenre is John Creasey, a prolific writer of many different kinds of crime fiction, from espionage to criminal protagonist.
The Gideon series, more than any other source, helped establish the common procedural plot structure of threading several autonomous story lines through a single novel.
[11] A prolific author of police procedurals, whose work has fallen out of fashion in the years since her death, is Elizabeth Linington writing under her own name, as well as "Dell Shannon" and "Lesley Egan".
These novels are sometimes considered flawed, partly due to the author's far-right political viewpoint (she was a member of the John Birch Society), but primarily because Miss Linington's books, notwithstanding the frequent comments she made about the depth of her research, were all seriously deficient in the single element most identified with the police procedural, technical accuracy.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö planned and wrote the Martin Beck police procedural series of ten books between the 1960s and 1970s, set in Sweden.
[13] The books gave rise to the Swedish noir scene, and The Laughing Policeman earned a "Best Novel" Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1971.
Though not the first police officer to write procedurals, Joseph Wambaugh's success has caused him to become the exemplar of cops who turn their professional experiences into fiction.
It was followed by such novels as The Blue Knight, 1971, The Choirboys, 1975, Hollywood Station, 2006, and acclaimed non-fiction books like The Onion Field, 1973, Lines and Shadows, 1984, and Fire Lover, 2002.
British mystery novelist and critic Julian Symons, in his 1972 history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder, labeled these proto-procedurals "humdrums", because of their emphasis on the plodding nature of the investigators.
Other members of Tracy's Rogues Gallery, like Boris Arson, Flattop Jones, and Maw Famon, were inspired, respectively, by John Dillinger, Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, and Kate "Ma" Barker.
While some, like Norman Marsh's Dan Dunn were unabashedly slavish imitations of Tracy, others, like Dashiell Hammett's and Alex Raymond's Secret Agent X-9, took a more original approach.
Later, following a personal tragedy, he leaves the DA's Office and joins his small city's police force in order to fight crime closer to the grass roots level.
With superheroes having long dominated the comic book market, there have been some recent attempts to integrate elements of the police procedural into the universe of costumed crime-fighters.
The introduction of women as protagonists is commonly attributed to either adding sexual appeal, introducing gendered issues like investigating sex crimes, or delving into the personal relationships of the characters.
[21] This prevalence implies that viewers are often facing TV series that place police officers at the center of the story, showing exclusively their vision of the world.
A report by Color of Change Hollywood and the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center revealed that police procedural shows were normalizing unjust practices such as illegal searches, surveillance, coercion, intimidation, violence, abuse, and racism.
[26] Alongside protests against police brutality in the United States and abroad, and debates on the role of entertainment in the portrayal of law enforcement in society,[26] the genre has been facing increased scrutiny.
In August 2020, it was announced that CBS writing staff would partner with 21CP Solutions, an advisory group on public safety and law enforcement, on the network's legal dramas and police procedurals.