“I DO not write about good cops for the same reason I do not write about unicorns,” US noir novelist Benjamin Whitmer recently declared. Neither exists and “if the police do their work correctly, that work is violence against the poor and working class for the protection of the upper class.”

The author of Cry Father and Pike criticises a genre in which “the daily violence of the police is totally ignored” and his sentiments find an echo in hard-boiled writers such as journalist Matt Taibbi, whose The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing transcribes the account of an anonymous marijuana dealer.

Whitmer claims that the police, far from being the expert sleuths of crime fiction and crime TV series such as CSI, in fact operate mainly by grabbing informers off the street and beating them until they give up names and testimony which are often inaccurate because obtained under duress.