THE INVISIBLE FORCE OF INVESTIGATORS

In part because I've been ruminating so much on the nature of my concept of the combative mode, I've found myself meditating on its lack in the investigation-oriented quasi-genre known as the "police procedural."

Someone once opined that Chester Gould's DICK TRACY was the first true police procedural. Of course it's likely that there were a number of novels or serials of a procedural nature that predated TRACY; stories devoted to, say, Pinkerton agents or whatnot. Gould, with his strong predilection for bouts of combative violence and a larger-than-life protagonist, doesn't seem to reflect the normative aspects of the procedural-- probably defined in the public mind most by the 1951 teleseries DRAGNET, which arose rather quickly from the 1949 radio serial.

Not all procedurals are devoid of overt violence. But even those that occasionally allow for gun-battles or personal combat are not concerned with combat-scenes of personal glory. Most procedurals are dominated by the image of police officers comprising an irresistible force that can sweep over the urban city like, well, a dragnet.

Yet this force is, in an operational sense, invisible to the eye of the viewer. Even the rare outbursts of violence, precisely because they are so rare, don't remove the sense that the police are inexorable in their power to overtake criminal malcontents.

There are, to be sure, some serials that borrow from the more extravagant genres. Nine times out of ten, the original HAWAII 5-O series (1968-80) was a mundane cop show, and if it had a shootout at the end, the regular players were hardly ever injured. However, the show occasionally crossed genre-paths with the spy thriller, and in that tradition, central protagonist Steve McGarrett (Jack Lor)  encountered the Asian spy chief Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh). Wo Fat only appeared in eleven of the show's 278 episodes, but the villain's ability to slip free of the Hawaii police chief's grasp added some spice to the overall predictability of the series. To that end, the series ended with an actual combat-scene between McGarrett and Wo Fat, resulting in the wily spy being jailed at last-- although in the final scene, there was the suggestion that even prison would not end the villain's menace.

On the average, most current procedurals-- the dozens of spawn of LAW AND ORDER and CSI-- don't tend to emphasize battles of personal glory, and therefore most of the characters don't qualify in my book as combative heroes, even though they, like Steve McGarrett, may occasionally get a big kung-fu kickass scene of some sort. I may explore some examples of these subcombative cop shows at some future date, but for the time being, they show a nodding resemblance to the military drama, in which force is not "invisible" in the sense I've stated here, but is still subordinate to other factors, some examples of which I discussed in my review of Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS.