Theme: Police Procedurals and Detective Stories

Police Procedurals and Detective Stories are a genre unto themselves. They feature investigating detectives (be they members of a police force, private investigators, government agents such as FBI or sometimes amateurs who become involved in a mystery). They can range from the adventures of Sherlock Holmes to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie to the Film Noir P.I.s of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane to the forensic investigators of the various modern CSI shows. These are a strong and flourishing genre on their own.

Such stories usually feature a detective of some type at the centre. The story will follow the course of the investigation as various clues are deduced, suspects are encountered, red herrings and false leads are produced, before the denouement of the story reveals the guilty party and lets us into the detective’s process of deductive reasoning. All detective stores follow this structure with very few exceptions.

These films are mundanely rooted and rarely intersect with fantastic material. There are some occasions when they do, usually when the nemesis being pursued by the detective turns out to be a Psycho or Serial Killer. It should be noted that these films are primarily focused on the process of investigation and trail of clues. Films that focus on the killer and detail their trail of murders are psycho films.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is a police procedural and introduced the Serial Killer Thriller where the focus shifts to tracking killers with the use of forensics and analysis of their behavioural patterns.