Liberals constantly face the Skokie conundrum, what to do when one’s belief in tolerance requires allowing people so intolerant to exist they would rewrite the constitution if they could. At what point is it necessary to become intolerant to preserve an environment of tolerance? Or in that 1977 case, how does one separate the right of a group to request a parade permit through a Jewish neighborhood, from their right to receive that permit?
Liberals flock to the cause of an artist like Robert Mapplethorpe who’s shows are censored by people who dislike the subjects. But what does one do with a writer like Louis-Ferdinand Céline who’s accused of supporting the Nazis in France in world war II?
Elizabeth Linington poses such a problem. At the same time she wrote mystery stories under the name Dell Shannon that glamorized the Los Angeles police force, she also supported the John Birch Society.
At the time I wondered if I bought one of her books, was I was making a contribution. My immediate solution was to buy books from used book dealers. Unfortunately, that meant enjoying her work without paying her for her effort.
Her anomalous position became more obvious when O. J. Simpson’s lawyer dramatized general incompetence and brutality of her force. She was often accused of not knowing much about police procedures, so did she deliberately romanticize the authority figures as ideology?
Since I didn’t remember a strong streak of propaganda in her books, I decided to read some to see. By now, of course, they’re only available from used book dealers and she’s been dead since 1988.
First, let me say she’s a decent story teller with an ability to pace her narrative. She usually has one major plot that alternates between a number of minor tales, some resolved, some not. Her aim is to dramatize the work flow in a large organization.
Most of the minor plots are the humdrum of daily police life, the routine accidental homicides and thefts. Some accuse her of lifting them from police blotters. It’s probably what she meant when she said she did extensive research.
She also tries to portray a functioning bureaucracy with a number of people working on multiple problems, able to still concentrate on a few, but realizing many simply must be ignored. The idea of a functioning civil service is anathema to many conservatives today, but was not necessarily a tenant of the John Birch group.
Her selection of crimes and creation of undifferentiated policemen represents the realism in her work. There’s nothing about the view criminals are either stupid or ordinary people that is characteristic of a conservative ideology.
Her weaknesses as a writer leave her more vulnerable to political criticism. She has no ear for dialogue. When she portrays confrontations between suspects and police, she has them mouth polite euphemisms, especially for black cops. When the police are looking for suspects, they call them fags.
The one represents isolation, the other homophobia. Neither are representative of the John Birch society, but may be reasons one would not read her book.
She also has no ability to develop characters. Her black, hispanic and white cops, suspects and victims are interchangeable. When she tries to characterize individuals, she falls into stereotypes. The black policeman, Jason, is the son of a doctor who is an expert at everything. Lieutenant Mendoza inherited money from his grandfather and plays poker without being a gambler.
While there’s no malice in her limited imagination and writing skills, there’s a more subtle class bias. The policemen are all working class men with families, who worry about mortgages. Luis Mendoza doesn’t need his salary, has married an artist and lives in a renovated hacienda with horses and sheep. No alcoholics, no divorces, no wild bachelors.
Mendoza falls into the tradition created by Dorothy Sayers with Peter Wimsey and Ngaio Marsh with Roderick Alleyn. Unlike many of her contemporaries who also create well-to-do, intelligent heroes, she does try to provide the more realistic background of the typical police force.
Readers of genre fiction accept a number of conventions in exchange for a realistic portrayal of problem solving. However, her uneducated portrayal of the Los Angeles police force could not survive the reality of the O. J. Simpson case, when no one showed the skills and tolerance of her most minor police inspector.
She’s also been done in by advances in technology. Her books were written before DNA testing and computerized databases. The best she can do is match blood types and fingerprints. With no ability to gather evidence, she can only solve many of her crimes with suspects willing to confess as soon as policemen ask the correct questions.
Her estate and publisher don’t mention her political interests, probably because they don’t want to alienate potential readers. Her most ideological comments in the books I recently read occur in The Motive on Record (1982) when Mendoza’s wife visits travel agencies and is upset when they offer the newly available tours of eastern Europe. She constantly frets, why would anyone want to support a communist country with tourist dollars.
I wonder what a John Birch mystery would be. Someone who wanted to use fiction to spread a message would be more likely to choose the genre of Ian Fleming and John LeCarre. Within the context of a city police department it’s impossible to have authority figures who are always right.
The kind of policing we hear about with helicopters patrolling the slums of LA would not be used by burglary-homicide, despite the example of Simpson. The closest she comes is an interrogation in Death by Inches (1965) that inadvertently shows the fine the line between questioning and torture.
If the police can’t be John Birch heroes, then the villains must be communists. Starting her career in 1962, she would have needed murders in labor unions or anti-war groups, either communist infiltrators of legitimate groups or agent provocateurs in Marxist groups. Instead of religious zealots who kill infidel children, they would kill them when they became college atheists.
Those aren’t her plots. They don’t fit her vision of the daily routine of a city police force.
Without the plots, villains, heroes, or political vision she is simply a limited writer with an interesting vision of solving murders, hampered by her gentility. One can boycott her works for economic reasons, but there’s no reason to keep them away from innocent children who might be corrupted by her propaganda. She tries to dramatize a kind of tolerance with her diverse police force, and her writing requires readers exercise the same tolerance.
Disliking or liking them for aesthetic or emotional reasons is altogether another matter.
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