New York (AP) – Gary Phillips, a prize-winning crime novelist from Los Angeles, grew up on TV shows that showed a world nothing like the one he lived in.

The May 25 killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police ofﬁcer pressed a knee to his neck, has set off protests worldwide and transmitted images of law enforcement that long remained far outside the narratives of crime stories – beatings and lethal chokeholds of handcuffed suspects, ﬁring mace and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters, harassing and cursing at journalists.

But the idealized crime ﬁghter remains a cultural touchstone even when countered by such recent narratives as Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series “When They See Us,” about the wrongfully convicted Central Park Five, and Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give,” a best-selling novel about a black teen murdered by police that was adapted into a feature ﬁlm of the same name.

Otherwise, police and other ofﬁcials were portrayed as jaded and self-contained in the ﬁction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, comical and bumbling like the Keystone Kops or the misﬁts of “Police Academy,” rumpled and savvy like Peter Falk’s Columbo, or witty and indomitable like Bruce Willis’ New York City detective John McClane in the “Die Hard” movies.

As an adult, she was drawn to African American crime writers such as Mosley and Chester Himes, and now admires Rachel Howzel Hall’s novels about the African American LAPD homicide detective Elouise “Lou” Norton, books “revealing the complexity of a black woman in a system that has traditionally disempowered minorities.”

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