JOHN WESTERMANN

Build the Cast for Your Police Procedural

JOHN WESTERMANN, a retired police officer from Long Island, is a novelist and nonfiction writer teaching at the Stony Brook–Southampton MFA program in Writing and Literature. His darkly comic second novel, Exit Wounds, was a major motion picture from Warner Brothers starring Steven Seagal in 2001. His nonfiction has been published in Newsday, Writer’s Digest, and The Long Island Pulse. Two of his short stories have appeared in Otto Penzler anthologies.

 

 

There is something reassuring in a well-written police procedural. Evil is uncovered. Perpetrators are caught and punished. Curtains are lifted on crime and the flawed human beings who fight crime for pay. The reader gets deep inside the nightly news.

What I find comforting for the procedural writer is how seamless the plotting can be if the book is started well. Raise enough questions that must be answered and your characters are free to follow those threads to their logical solutions. No one has to grow up emotionally in a cop novel or change bad behaviors. They can, if the writer so desires, but making things right for somebody else excuses a lot of personal misbehavior. And, as Hayes Jacobs always said, good fiction is people misbehaving.

So get the cops in your story right. That’s the first order of business. Since I was always more interested in precinct life than any individual crime or punishment, I set the bar low for the technical expertise of my heroes. But I wanted you to believe that they were real. They were precinct outcasts or dilettantes, stunned cogs in a larger machine that was beyond their control. As John Updike wrote accurately and ambiguously about policemen: “They were paid to care about you, but not that much.” As a former cop, I had the advantage of a precinct roster to work from; I could mix and match the real and imagined. Most writers have to build this for themselves.

EXERCISE

Your exercise is to imagine any small mixed-gender group of adults you know well—the gang at the office, regulars at your coffee shop, or fellow parents at PTA meetings. Concentrate on their faults and weaknesses and exaggerate them. Do the same with their modest strengths. What divides them? Brings them joy or sorrow? Some will be brave, but some will have hands that shake and voices that break during confrontations.

Not everyone who has the cop job should have it. Maybe you know some folks like that. Maybe your boss is well-meaning but in over his head. Maybe he is not well-meaning. Now imagine your boss and all the other folks as uniformed cops, and hand them badges and guns and the power to cause great harm to themselves and others.

You have your believable police squad. Invent quickie biographies for them to lock them in your mind as characters and send them on a noble mission.