Historical Research as Procedural ‹ CrimeReads

In a class I teach on the procedural genre, we start with Poe and Doyle and Collins and Sayers and work our way to Mosley and French. We watch the Spielberg-directed pilot episode of Columbo, which is (apologies for the fifty-year-old spoiler) about a murderous mystery novelist. We watch the crass pilot of Law & Order: SVU, studded with homophobia and transphobia, and then we read Carmen Maria Machado's hallucinatory novella "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU." We talk about the girls with bells for eyes who haunt Machado's Benson and the doppelgänger detectives Abler and Henson, whose lack of trauma renders them inhuman. We discuss the way viewers who have survived sexual violence, or those who fear it, speak of finding comfort in the show's promise of responsive law enforcement while recognizing it as brazen copaganda. We read Auden's "The Guilty Vicarage" and more recent criticism about crime fiction: the old theory of the genius detective as righter of wrongs and restorer of order, and newer interpretations that highlight the conservatism of the form. This is the darker side of the procedural's temptation: how seductively it can align us as readers or viewers with the moral cleansing the detective promises.