On Galleycat today Sarah Weinman reports--
"Cop Lit" Takes Center Stage in France
The Guardian's Paris correspondent Jason Burke reports on a new publishing phenomenon, where police officers of all stripes are storming the bestseller lists with a variety of novels, graphic novels, memoirs and other types of book formats. Philippe Pichon, the 37-year-old chief superintendent and bestselling poet and novelist, offered his insight into the glut of so-called 'creative cops.' "A poet can be a policemen and a policeman can be a poet," Pichon, chief of a police station with 85 staff, told The Observer last week. "I am an exalted humanist. Every day on the streets I see the true humanity of things, and I recount them in my work."
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Ed here: Both Ed McBain's 87th and the tv show Barney Miller had cops who were writing books. Easy to envision a sit-com situation where a squad room full of detectives are all at work on novels and screenplays.
French cops don't limit themselves to novels, either. Olivier Marchal is a former police detective who wrote and directed a big hit crime drama, 36 Quai des Orfèvres, that was based on an actual case. He's also an actor, and played a detective in a TV series based on books by a novelist who's also an ex-cop.
ReplyDeleteOver the years two different cops were in my critique group. Knowing how many great stories cops have, I was eagerly anticipating their work. Alas, it was uniformly bad. One cop was later investigated for sexually harrassing a woman involved with a case--and a lot of other women chimed in that they'd had the same experience with him after that became public. I don't think he's a cop any longer.
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