Publishers are putting out more police memoirs of an “increasingly frank” nature, according to Duncan Campbell at The Guardian.

The genre itself has a long history, Campbell writes: “[T]he genre goes back two centuries and provides an invaluable prism through which we can see how and by whom our laws are enforced.” Some of the more recent memoirs convey “tales of corruption” within the police, like Life on Mars by Graham Satchwell, or contain criticism of the “war on drugs,” like Neil Woods’s Good Cop, Bad War.

Police historian Martin Stallion explained the background of the genre and his thoughts about the recent boom in police memoirs. “The first boom in publishing was in the 1920s and 1930s, which was, of course, also the so-called golden age for detective fiction. The recent increase in output, from those who joined from about 1960 onwards, I would attribute to the success of [former inspector] Nicholas Rhea’s Constable series and the Heartbeat TV series based on that, together with the rise in self-publishing.”

Campbell reports that “writing styles can vary from the plodding to the racy,” and that these books have inspired people to join the force. John Grieve, the former head of anti-terrorism in the UK, for example, credits Josh Gosling’s Ghost Squad with motivating him to become a detective: “At the very least [the books] expressed an ideal of what many officers were trying to achieve.”

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