Police procedurals, stories in which official detectives and their methods are featured, are not a new addition to crime fiction. Detectives star in some of the very earliest works of the nineteenth century, beginning with the memoirs of Vidocq, Emile Gaboriau’s novels about the police detective Monsieur Lecoq, and the plethora of semifictional books appearing in America as the “experiences” or “recollections” of various detectives.1 The first modern American police procedural is Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim (1945). In nine novels, Treat used actual law enforcement routines and extensive scientific evidence in showing police at work, usually interpreted by Jub Freeman, a police scientist.
The idea of focusing on the police in this way was taken up by Hillary Waugh, who wrote two series of procedurals, and in 1956, by the prolific Ed McBain, whose fifty-six novels and dozens of short stories about the fictional “87th Precinct” in a thinly disguised New York City continued until his death in 2005. The first woman to tackle the form, however, was Elizabeth Linington, who penned four different series (three under pen names) and produced more than eighty titles of crime fiction. Linington’s success paved the way for other women, such as Dorothy Uhnak and Lillian O’Donnell. More importantly, her blending of the personal lives of the police officers with their jobs and her unflinching portrayals of the victims and villains led to greater development of characters and the political and social issues of the day in crime writing. Later writers of cop-oriented crime fiction like Joseph Wambaugh or Michael Connelly, whose books give us rich pictures of the families of the police officers, clearly owe a debt to Linington’s work.
Case Pending, first published in 1960, is remarkable in several respects. First, Linington develops detailed portraits of the police in the story, including Detective-Sergeant Arthur Hackett, the critically important investigator Dick Morgan, and, of course, her lead character, Lieutenant Luis Mendoza. In particular, Mendoza’s relationship with Alison Weir, which has its flirtatious beginnings here, as well as Mendoza’s friendship with Hackett, are developed fully in later novels. Second, we also get clear pictures of the victims and their families. Although Linington’s portraits of the Ramirez family, the witness Agnes Browne, and the family of Carol Brooks suffer from racial stereotypes, she devotes more time and care to writing about their lives than was generally thought necessary for popular crime fiction. Third, Linington was among the first to weave together multiple story lines into a tapestry of police activities. Linington shrewdly recognized that unlike the amateur detective, the police deal with a multiplicity of crimes and victims and must juggle their investigations along with paperwork, rivalries among agencies, shortages of manpower, and other common features of modern government agencies.
Linington was well aware that the writer of police procedurals was under even greater scrutiny than the average mystery writer with regard to realism. To ensure reasonable accuracy, she not only researched the rules and regulations of the Los Angeles Police Department, she also cultivated friendships with police officers, including one in Atlanta who often provided her with the true facts of unusual cases. Linington often based her fictional crimes on accounts from “true crime” magazines and newspapers and relied on friends and maps to provide her with geographical details after she moved away from Los Angeles.
It does not appear, however, that Luis Mendoza sprang from any sort of personal experience. In an interview, she addressed the subject directly:
[Interviewer]: “How did you pick up on the idea of Luis Mendoza? Did the Spanish theme come from living in this area [Southern California]?”
[Linington]: “Well, it didn’t. I had this little idea for the plot of Case Pending, and introduced the detective on the scene—just in carrying out the plot. And he rose off the page and captured me alive, and I couldn’t stop writing about him.”
[Interviewer]: “Do you happen to know why he happened to be Mexican American?”
[Linington]: “I couldn’t tell you—it just came.”2
Linington certainly recognized that she was creating an artificial character. She admitted that her Spanish was poor, and no one would regularly say something in Spanish and then repeat the same phrase in English—a common occurrence in her Mendoza novels. More importantly, Linington seems to go out of her way to emphasize that Mendoza is a cut above the “regular” Mexican Americans who appear in Case Pending. Not only is he wealthy, well-dressed, and eccentric in his choice of cars, people with whom he interacts make a point to observe that he is of “true” Spanish blood and therefore a gentleman and aristocratic in bearing. Certainly many of the police—and many of the other minor characters—look down on the “Mexes” with whom they interact in Los Angeles and are careful to distinguish Mendoza from that lot. Linington seems to have little sympathy for the families struggling in the neighborhood she depicts, whether they are Mexicans, black, Irish, or Scandinavian. Her real sympathy seems reserved for Dick Morgan and his wife and child.
Although Linington has Mendoza express disdain for psychological theories of sexuality and crime, it is very apparent that she understood those theories well and she uses them to great advantage in Case Pending. Her depiction of the dynamics of the Lindstrom family rings true, down to the details of the killer’s obsession with dolls and the peer pressure felt by Marty. While Linington may have unkindly intended her story of Agnes Browne, who is convinced of her own culpability, as a sort of comic relief, it sadly also seems genuine.
Linington deftly captures the “melting pot” that was Los Angeles of the late 1950s, with masses of immigrant populations of all ethnicities crowded into the neighborhoods east of downtown, many of whom would soon be displaced by the development of Elysian Park and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ new baseball stadium. Though the “zoot suit riots” of 1943—violent clashes between American servicemen and Mexican American youths in Los Angeles—were more than 15 years in the past, the city, with a population of almost 2.5 million people of widely diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, had yet to have a mayor who was not white, and racial tensions still simmered throughout the region.
In a 1967 essay about her craft, Linington characterized the mystery-detective novel as exciting and the most challenging type of writing. She saw the detective story in political and philosophical terms, as “the morality play of our time,” with the police procedural its purest expression. In this, she helped develop a new school of crime writing, in which the plots took backseat to the development of the characters. Linington wanted to show the police not just as instruments of detection or punishment but as individuals, with jealousies, failures, and personal struggles. Writers like Joseph Wambaugh and Michael Connelly embraced this approach, expressed by Wambaugh like this: “The best crime stories are not about how cops work on cases but about how cases work on cops.”3
Although Linington was not the first to write police procedurals in America, the volume and popularity of her multiple series justify her coronation as the “Queen of Police Procedurals.” Case Pending is not only her first effort in the field, it is one of her finest.
Leslie S. Klinger
1 The earliest were “dime” novels, which began to appear in America in the 1870s. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the eponymous detective agency, jumped on this bandwagon with his own (probably ghostwritten) memoirs in 1876, with the first book to bear his name being The Expressman and the Detective, and more than a dozen additional titles before 1900.
2 Margaret J. King, “An Interview with Elizabeth Linington,” Armchair Detective 13, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 301.
3 Elina Shatkin, “Cop on Crime Writing: Joseph Wambaugh,” Jacket Copy (blog), Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2008, https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2008/04/how-do-you-like.html.