Exploring cultural criminology: The police world in fiction
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Author | Rossella Selmini |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370820939362 |
| Subject Matter | Presidential address |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370820939362
European Journal of Criminology
2020, Vol. 17(5) 501 –517
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370820939362
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Exploring cultural criminology:
The police world in fiction
Rossella Selmini
University of Bologna, Italy
Abstract
In my 2017 presidential address to the European Society of Criminology (ESC) in Cardiff, I
explored the representation of the police and police work in contemporary European novels, and
compared and contrasted how the police and policing are dealt with in popular fiction and in the
relevant scholarly literature. I selected unusually literate works that provide insights into policing
in diverse countries and cultures, in which the main characters are middle-aged male policemen
who share some characteristics: cynical but idealistic, empathetic rather than taciturn, restrained
not aggressive, resistant to authority but dedicated to their mission. My main arguments are that
contemporary fiction depicts police work with a greater verisimilitude than occurred in the past
and in ways that parallel scholarly work on police culture. Police scholars’ assumptions about
differences between real police work and fictional accounts are challenged, particularly when
we look at how the police do their work and live their lives rather than at the types of crime
they deal with. These characterizations of European police work and culture may particularly
address and appeal to a specific sector of readers, a liberal and progressive public, and interrogate
whether and how this kind of representation relates to contemporary theoretical models of
procedural justice. Distinctively European models of police and policing emerge, despite some
national peculiarities.
Keywords
Police, policing, fiction, cultural criminology
Introduction
The media flood contemporary societies with discourses and images about crime and
crime control. Narratives of crime and deviance and the responses of criminal justice
institutions are crucial elements in the construction of collective beliefs and sensibilities
Corresponding author:
Rossella Selmini, Department of Legal Sciences, University of Bologna, Via Zamboni 92, Bologna, 40126, Italy.
Email: rossella.selmini@unibo.it
939362EUC0010.1177/1477370820939362European Journal of CriminologySelmini
research-article2020
Presidential address
502 European Journal of Criminology 17(5)
and in how social order is constructed (Innes, 2003: 20; Reiner, 2003), and works in
cultural criminology have contributed vastly to a better understanding of these issues.
This article and the ESC presidential address and book (Selmini, 2017) on which it is
based present the results of a long-term project on the police and police organizations as
portrayed in novels. I contrast the fictional representations with what we know about the
police from sociological and criminological studies.
Police work is a common subject of movies, documentaries, television series, and
books and, as we have learned from sociology of police and cultural criminology studies,
how these different media represent the police influences how people think about them,
how they work, and how they behave. Opinions about these subjects are for most people
based more on media impressions and images than on personal experience. Personal
encounters with the police are, for most people, very rare. It is much more common to
read a book by Andrea Camilleri, whose series on the Italian policeman Salvo Montalbano
has been translated into many languages and become a worldwide cultural phenomenon,
or to read about George Simenon’s commissioner Jules Maigret, Ian Rankin’s detective
inspector John Rebus, or the police heroes of many successful Scandinavian novelists.
Print media, television, the Internet, and other social media also represent and create
images of police officers and police work for large audiences. The influence of the media
on public views and understanding are undoubtedly more influential than personal con-
tacts with the police, which are usually quite short and bureaucratic (Perlmutter, 2000:
28). That is why academic criminology should take account of cultural and popular rep-
resentations of crime and crime control.
Police officials worry that media coverage and exposure (particularly in newspapers)
might jeopardize the reputation of the police and ultimately their legitimacy, but actually
the representations, in most cases, are very positive (Reiner, 2003: 269). My research
confirms this belief.
In my work, I focus on novels about police detectives, particularly recent European
books whose main characters are male members of a national police force. Social science
research on this sector of media representation is scarce,1 compared with the much wider
range of work in criminology and cultural studies on the police in other media, particu-
larly movies and television and Internet dramatic and reality shows.
I focused on 57 European novels published in the last 30 years in which the main
character is a police officer in a national police force. Almost all these books and other
works by their authors have been translated into many languages and reached wide pub-
lics made up of ‘academics and plumbers’ (Hannerz, 2013: 260) in many countries.
Moreover, the images of policemen represented in these books may address and appeal
to the interests of a specific sector of readers, a liberal and progressive public, and speak
to post-modern sensibilities.
I sought out especially literate works that provide insights into policing in diverse
countries and cultures and into a particular type of character. I chose eight series of books
by seven well-known writers: Andrea Camilleri and his famous character Salvo
Montalbano, ‘commissario’ in the fictional city of Vigata (Sicily); Philippe Georget, with
his police officer Gilles Sebag based in Perpignan (France); Arnaldur Indriðason, who
created the character of Erlendur Sveinsson, a detective in Reykjavík (Iceland); Henning
Mankell and his detective Kurt Wallander in Ystad (Sweden); Petros Markaris
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