The attitude of popular culture towards the police is really, really weird. There are only 700,000 police officers in this country but they are massively overrepresented in the culture. Virtually everything we know about the police comes from the movies and television and novels,.
Today, another episode from the Revisionist History Live universe. It's an old fashioned lecture, recorded at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University. Malcolm talks about a totally real thing he made up—a taxonomy of the modern mystery story—with a focus on murder mysteries and police procedurals. From Dragnet, to John Grisham, to Sherlock Holmes, it's all in there...and all connected to how we view real policing.
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