Another sort of mystery is the "police procedural" (or romans policiers, as they are known in France). These mysteries with a police-detective hero are an enduring favorite. Fans of the subgenre can find good series set in Scotland Yard and the French Sûreté, as well as in the police forces of cities large and small around the world, including Los Angeles, Oxford, Amsterdam, New York, and Hong Kong.

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The best part about the best police procedurals series is that readers come to know a diverse cast of characters who grow and develop from book to book. Two grand masters of the procedural are Georges Simenon and Ed McBain. I find that readers either love or hate the Maigret novels by Simenon. If you’re interested in a classic psychological mystery, Maigret and the Madwoman is a good one to begin with. The Maigret novels are much less action-oriented than most of the other police procedurals; you spend a lot of time inside Maigret’s head as he thinks about his aches and pains, boredom and hunger, even as he’s working at his job.

Cop Hater, Ed McBain’s first mystery set in the Eighty-seventh Precinct of the New York City Police Department (a locale, I’d wager, that’s become more familiar to most people than their own local police station), was published in 1956, and McBain hasn’t looked back since, continuing to write high-quality mysteries like The Big Bad City and Fuzz. (Incidentally, McBain was the first writer to feature a deaf person as a recurring character in his books—Teddy, the wife of featured policeman Steve Carella.)

Nicolas Freeling’s psychological mysteries featuring Dutch police inspector Peter Van der Valk remain classics of the genre. His first book was Love in Amsterdam, published in 1962, but I think the best one is Because of the Cats. (Many years after first reading this novel I still remember how creeped-out I felt when I finished it.)

Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö continued the tradition of Simenon’s psychological mysteries with their Martin Beck novels. Try The Laughing Policeman, a particularly fine story.

Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg is my favorite in H. R. F. Keating’s series featuring an East Indian policeman, Inspector Ganesh Ghote, who works for the Bombay police department.

I recommend that only those readers with strong stomachs take on ex-cop Joseph Wambaugh’s crackling page-turners. The Choirboys (the title is ironic), like Wambaugh’s other novels, is gritty and realistic, filled with dark and dirty humor and not a little pain. Although it was written more than thirty years ago, it remains one of the best depictions of the lives of policemen.

Two good recent series are those by Elizabeth Gunn, set in a small Minnesota police department in a town not far from the Twin Cities, featuring chief of detectives Jake Hines and his fellow cops (a particularly good one is Seventh-Inning Stretch), and Peter Turnbull’s stark and dark procedurals set in Glasgow, Scotland; try Long Day Monday for a taste of this author’s potent brews.


Some other good police procedurals include:

Catherine Aird’s Henrietta Who?

Robert Barnard’s Bodies

K. C. Constantine’s Always a Body to Trade

Colin Dexter’s The Daughters of Cain

Elizabeth George’s A Great Deliverance (the first book in a series that needs to be read in order)

Martha Grimes’s The Anodyne Necklace

Jamie Harrison’s The Edge of the Crazies

Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way

P. D. James’s Devices and Desires (or any of the Adam Dalgliesh books)

J. A. Jance’s Until Proven Guilty

Henning Mankell’s One Step Behind

Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses

Ruth Rendell’s Some Lie and Some Die

Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park

Arthur Upfield’s Death of a Swagman (the series, which is set in Australia, features a half- Aboriginal detective)