Where the Bodies Lie: Sense of Place and Police Procedurals

Abstract

The sense of place found in a great many police procedurals is more than simply backdrop for the plot, and an author's use of place is more than simply a setting for a dastardly deed. Rather, place is an essential ingredient in the commission, discovery, and resolution of the crime. In these mysteries, much of the intrigue is a function of locale. Place becomes an essential—maybe the essential—plot element. Nowhere else could these kinds of murders have occurred; they are culturally and contextually specific. Without the author's sense of a given place, without our sense of a given society, the commission, discovery, and resolution of a murder is hopelessly cryptic. Scores of police procedurals can be classified as place-based. By focusing on four literary devices of the novels—narrative description, dialogue, iconography, and attention to detail—this essay examines how place is critical to the development of the plot, at the same time that the plot is providing the reader with a basic appreciation for the place or places where the novel is set. A necessarily select number of series are used to exemplify the intense relationship between place and the police procedural.

Morning was always the best time to walk in the Quarter. The streets were still in deep shadow, and the water from the previous night's rain leaked from the wood shutters down the pastel sides of the buildings, and you could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the small grocery stores and the dank, cool odor of wild spearmint and old bricks in the passageways . . .

But it wasn't all a poem. There was another reality there, too: the smell of urine in doorways, left nightly by the homeless and the psychotic, and the broken fragments of tiny ten-dollar cocaine vials that glinted in the gutters like rats' teeth.

James Lee Burke, Dixie City Jam (19)