My Theory on Suspension of Disbelief

Feb 2, 2014 by Wayne Zurl

It’s simple. Get the little details right and you can stretch the big issues.

Most readers of police mysteries are pretty savvy when it comes to technicalities. Run into an active-duty or retired cop and you have a real critic on your hands.

So, on what must we focus our attention? I used the word above: Technicalities—physical and procedural technicalities. And there can be many. Here are a few possibilities to open up the thought process.

If you’re writing about an established police department, know a lot about them. When you describe an officer, be accurate. Don’t say, “The New York state trooper took off his service cap and ran a hand through his sandy hair,” when New York troopers wear wide brim Stetsons.

Find out what the badges look like in the department your story revolves around. Then you can accurately say, “[New York] Detective Sam Jenkins showed the witness his gold shield.” In San Francisco they use gold stars. LAPD have large two-tone ovals.

Many mystery fans know their firearms. If you don’t, find a technical advisor to help you. Many years ago, I read all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. A glaring mistake Fleming made remains with me today. In one story, he gave Bond a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Centennial revolver with a five inch barrel. Ian’s problem: The gun was never made with a five inch barrel.

In UP COUNTRY, Nelson DeMille’s second novel featuring Army Criminal Investigator, Paul Brenner, DeMille mentions the South Vietnamese flag being yellow, red, and green. The flag was actually yellow with four red stripes. He confused the flag colors with the Vietnamese campaign ribbon issued to all US troops serving there during the war.
He also spoke of a local beer he called Ba-Ba-Ba. Vietnam vets howled over that one. A French beer brewed in the Republic of Vietnam, 33, was called Bamiba by American GIs—a corruption of ba mui ba, Vietnamese for thirty-three, certainly not Ba-Ba-Ba, as in black sheep. Shame on Nelson’s fact checker.

I know you get the idea relative to physical technicalities. Now we have procedural standards. Here are a few examples:

Contrary to popular belief on TV and in Hollywood, crime scene investigators or evidence technicians do not assume responsibility for investigating the felony scenes they process. They assist the squad detectives—provide them with the scientific forensic information they find. It would be logistically impossible for CSIs to deal with the highly technical services available today and do the gumshoe work. It’s been decades since detectives have had to do their own photography and dust for prints much less all the other scientific work.

Regardless of what we see on most of the Law & Order reruns, cops don’t arrest felons, drop them into a district attorney’s lap, and then get sent out to establish a concrete reason to justify the arrest and seek an indictment. Good cops MUST have the proper level of proof BEFORE saying, “You’re under arrest, humpo.”

My favorite television ADA, Jack McCoy, often possessed only “Reasonable Suspicion” when he told Ed Green and Lenny Briscoe, “Pick him up.” In the real world they were often one bottle short of a six pack. The Laws of Arrest say you must have “Probable Cause to Believe” prior to snapping the cuffs on a defendant.

The same applies to search warrants. Cops can’t blithely send their comrade to a judge looking for a warrant to toss a thug’s apartment. Just as in the Laws of Arrest, we’re encumbered by that pesky US Constitution. In this case, the 4th Amendment, which states: Only upon probable cause shall a warrant be granted to search a person or premises [for the item(s) thought to be on the person or in the place to be searched.] Practically speaking, that probable cause business (sometimes called reasonable cause to believe) can put a crimp in a detective’s forward motion. But the talent needed to establish the necessary PCTB is what separates Andy Sipowitz from Barney Fife.

I look at this issue just as I looked at the things the police officers I supervised had to consider back in the 1970s. I told them, “Keep your hair cut, and your leather gear shiny. That stuff will keep the boss happy so when you do something questionable, he won’t remember you as the non-conformist with the sloppy appearance.”

If we, as writers, get the little things correct, and our readers don’t lose focus on the story while bitching about messed up technicalities, they’ll cut us some slack with the big issues that fall under the usual purview of suspension of disbelief.