Gun in Cheek by Bill Pronzini

established before similar operations were begun here but also highly romanticized in popular writings. The adventures of Francois Eugene Vidocq, the reformed thief and forger who became the first chief of the Sûreté and later wrote a much glamorized autobiography called, in the United States, Vidocq, The French Police Spy , were famous on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1800s and had a profound influence on early writers of crime fiction, beginning with Poe himself, who more or less modeled C. Auguste Dupin on Vidocq. This influence, as Julian Symons points out in his excellent critical history, Mortal Consequences, was not because of any deductive skill on Vidocq's part; during his tenure at the Sûreté , he began a card-index system and took impressions of footprints, and made such observations as that many criminals appeared to be bowlegged; but these were the limit of his contributions to police procedural methods. "Vidocq's importance," Symons says, "rested in his nature as the archetypal ambiguous figure of the criminal who is also a hero. The interpenetrations of police with criminals, and the doubt about whether a particular character is hero or villain, is an essential feature of the crime story."
    Nonetheless, an aura of mystery is not the chief reason the European policeman became such a popular figure here and abroad in the twentieth century. The chief reason, conversely, is the European—and in particular, British—esteem for representatives of law, order, and the preservation of existing social and moral attitudes. Beginning with the rise of the middle class and the age of Dickens, such representatives, by their very election or appointment to lofty positions, were considered to possess any number of virtues, not the least of which was an acute intelligence. This attitude persisted until the general disillusionment that followed (or preceded, depending on your point of view) the Second World War in Europe. When a detective-story writer introduced a police detective, it was automatically assumed by the reader that he was a man of intellect and keen capabilities.
    The same is not true in this country. Rampant police corruption in the cities, Western peace officers of the Wyatt Earp ilk who were little better than outlaws themselves, the pioneer spirit of self-reliance and personal rather than public code of ethics, and story weeklies and dime novels that mostly painted law-enforcement officers in unfavorable colors all combined in the late nineteenth century to create a wholly different police image in American minds. By the time the twentieth century arrived, the police were symbols of authority to be feared, scorned, or at best tolerated, but seldom to be revered. Mystery writers, naturally, reflected this attitude in their work; private investigators and gifted amateurs were much preferred to hardworking, honest cops as detective heroes. It became standard practice to depict the police as bumbling comic figures or as sadistic halfwits whose primary function was to be outsmarted and made fools of by the private individual. To some extent, the stereotypical dumb cop, with his penchant for ungrammatical sentences and the third degree, has survived in mystery fiction to the present.
    Most bad mysteries treat the police in this fashion—sometimes unconsciously, in those books in which a cop is supposed to be the hero. The authors, by their very ineptitude, imbue their police detectives with all the negative and/or chuckle-some traits of those who are treated as anti- or nonheroes in other mysteries and thus achieve the exact same effect of ridicule.
    A case in point is Cortland Fitzsimmons's 70,000 Witnesses (1931), which features a cop named Kethridge. Fitzsimmons wrote a number of sports mysteries in the thirties and forties, utilizing hockey, baseball, and football, among other sports, as background; 70,000 Witnesses is the first of these. It deals with college football as it was