Editing Police procedural (section)

===1940: John Creasey/J.&nbsp;J. Marric===
Perhaps ranking just behind McBain in importance to the development of the procedural as a distinct mystery subgenre is [[John Creasey]], a prolific writer of many different kinds of crime fiction, from espionage to criminal protagonist. He was inspired to write a more realistic crime novel when his neighbor, a retired [[Scotland Yard]] detective, challenged Creasey to "write about us as we are". The result was ''Inspector West Takes Charge'', 1940, the first of more than forty novels to feature Roger West of the [[London Metropolitan Police]]. The West novels were, for the era, an unusually realistic look at Scotland Yard operations, but the plots were often wildly melodramatic, and, to get around thorny legal problems, Creasey gave West an "amateur detective" friend who was able to perform the extra-procedural acts that West, as a policeman, could not.

In the mid-1950s, inspired by the success of television's ''[[Dragnet (1951 TV series)|Dragnet]]'' and a similar British TV series, ''[[Fabian of the Yard]]'', Creasey decided to try a more down-to-earth series of cop stories. Adopting the pseudonym "J.J. Marric", he wrote ''[[Gideon's Day]]'', 1955, in which [[George Gideon]], a high-ranking detective at Scotland Yard, spends a busy day supervising his subordinates' investigations into several unrelated crimes. This novel was the first in a series of more than twenty books which brought Creasey his best critical notices. One entry, ''Gideon's Fire'', 1961, won an [[Edgar Award]] from the [[Mystery Writers of America]] for Best Mystery Novel. The Gideon series, more than any other source, helped establish the common procedural plot structure of threading several autonomous story lines through a single novel.