Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

There is a certain genre or perhaps subgenre of fiction of which I have been thinking a lot lately, mostly because it doesn't have a name, and I think it needs one. The kind of thing I have in mind is a combination of the police procedural with the caper plot. A caper or heist goes back and ends up as a stand off, with police outside of a building of some sort, a criminal gang on the inside. An early example might have been the movie DOG DAY AFTERNOON. I typically think of these things as movies, although there are novels and for all I know epic poems that fit the model I have in mind as well. The structure is police procedural. We're introduced to detectives, hostage negotiators, whomever -- we're told they have their personal stories and we get some glimpse of them, and we may be regaled with minutiae of their protocol. They may sometimes remind each other to "do this by the book." But the heart of the genre I have in mind isn't with them, it is with t...

Following up on my observation yesterday that the critical actors in the manhunt were private citizens, I should add that Daniel McAdams has made a good related point. One of the two private citizens I discussed yesterday was actually acting in violation of the police demands when he made the critical discovery. A private citizen, "happened to go out and check on his boat (i.e. violating the lockdown order of the cops)." The police, then "achieved nothing but the psychological conditioning of the population...." From the Lew Rockwell report .