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Jack Webb (1920-82) http://tinyurl.com/JackWebb

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Police Beat

From The Badge, 1958.

Reader: Daniel Maloney

The City of the Angels—Los Angeles—has inspired some of the most memorable mystery and crime writers, a tradition that stretches from Raymond Chandler to Michael Connelly, Walter Mosley, and James Ellroy. The tradition even includes a famous television star.

Jack Webb's deadpan, no-nonsense style made him unforgettable on screen; it also served him well as a writer portraying the complexity of police work to his readers.

The pamphlet given visitors to Los Angeles says the City Hall stands just about at the geographical center of the city. On a clear day, if you ride the elevator some 450 feet to the observation tower, you see a mass of concrete, granite, timber and just plain rock—one of the strangest, most picturesque and complicated police beats in the world. . . .

Here is a sprawling, magnetic, fantastic city whose feet rest on the sand and sea level and whose shoulders proudly rise to a mountain almost a mile high. Along the coastline, mountain pass and desert flatland, you can ride its twisting perimeter for 312 miles. North to south, there are forty-four miles in which to hide a body. East to west, twenty-five miles in which to rob, plunder, attack.

Jack Webb's The Badge appeared in 1958, a collection of stories thought too sensational for his television series, Dragnet.