Editing Police procedural (section)

===Detective novel writers===
It is difficult to disentangle the early roots of the procedural from its forebear, the traditional detective novel, which often featured a police officer as protagonist. By and large, the better known novelists such as [[Ngaio Marsh]] produced work that falls more squarely into the province of the traditional or "cozy" detective novel. Nevertheless, some of the work of authors less well known today, like [[Freeman Wills Crofts]]'s novels about Inspector French or some of the work of the prolific team of [[G. D. H. Cole|G.D.H.]] and [[Margaret Cole]], might be considered as the antecedents of today's police procedural. British mystery novelist and critic [[Julian Symons]], in his 1972 history of crime fiction, ''Bloody Murder'', labeled these proto-procedurals "humdrums", because of their emphasis on the plodding nature of the investigators.
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