Yes, I have cop friends. Yes, I will spend <em>some</em> time researching police procedure, usually in Italy. And yes, I have ways of finding out how cop things are done in 'the real world', whatever that is. But I don't hang around cops seeking inspiration or some mythical kind of accuracy for my books. I don't think I need to. I don't think it would make them any better. It doubtless works for some people but for me hanging round cops could prove to be very bad news indeed.

Here are some of the reasons why.

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<strong>One</strong>... you start to like them. A writer I know once spent six months shadowing a real police force and then wrote a book in which every cop character was so damned nice the editor threw it out of the window. Writers should not get too close to their subjects. It warps your perspective, it stops you doing nasty things to them and them doing nasty things to other people. Fiction, of all kinds, is often about cruelty, our bafflement at why it happens, our struggle to stop it, our tendency to reach for the cruel button ourselves when things go wrong. Take a look at children's literature and see how much there is there.

Anything that is an obstacle to your portrayal of one human being's wickedness to another, a portrayal which must be accomplished with the distant, aloof nonchalance of the little deity you are when writing, must be avoided. Readers need to feel sympathy for your characters. When an author gets too close to them it's usually not long before some smells the whiff of cheap perfume.

<strong>Two</strong>... as inspiration for books the real world sucks, particularly the world behind the doors of a police station. It's either too boring -- actual investigations are tedious, bureaucratic and riddled with jargon and impenetrable technology -- or so bizarre that anyone seeing it in a book will say, 'That could never really happen'. Read a few real-life crime stories and ask yourself honestly if you could really get away with some of the tales there. Same goes for the front pages too. Imagine three or four years ago pitching a story in which America had an African American president and the Republican before him had effectively nationalised swathes of the US financial sector and car industry. With me?

<strong>Three</strong>... no one really cares how law enforcement agencies work, or wishes to. My stories are usually set in Italy. The law enforcement system there is so complicated that the average Italian has no idea how it functions. Two national police forces, one civilian, one military, local forces, specialist forces, an anti-mafia unit that's not quite police depending on which way you look at it... Italy seems to invent a new police force every time I go back there. If I reflected 'how things really are' a third of the book would be spent explaining the structure of the Italian law enforcement system. Who the hell wants to read that? Would it make the books any better if Costa's arrest procedures mirrored the official state police rulebook down to the last letter? Would anyone really notice? No.

<strong>Four</strong>... real policing happens very slowly, and that sluggish pace seems to be getting slower all the time. In the UK, for example, some DNA samples can take weeks or months to come back from the lab. Statements have to go through a variety of internal procedures then placed in front of Crown Prosecution lawyers. In fiction we tend to be obsessed with justice, nailing the culprit, finding some resolution to a tear in the fabric of society. You'd be naive if you thought that's what police officers do every day. If in doubt find a few and ask. The guilty walk free daily for a variety of reasons, insufficient evidence, an unwillingness on the part of prosecutors to bring the case to court for some reason, a procedural error, some local political difficulty.

It's possible to write fictional stories that take these factors into account, but if you do <em>they</em> have to become the story. This is what I do in <em>The Garden of Evil.</em> We know very early on who the bad guy is. The book is about both the battle to bring him to justice and a broader, hazier struggle to define what, in these circumstances, justice actually is. And I tell some big lies about the speed in which forensic science can take place in that story by the way, alongside some real and accurate bits of science too.

You can't have the average mystery, crime novel or thriller enter the confusing, jargon-ridden and highly frustrating of the real life justice system as a matter of course, running alongside the rest of the story on equal terms. If you do the time frame of your narrative is likely to become insupportable as your characters sit around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the reports to come in (as real life cops do all the time).

<strong>Five</strong>... you're in grave danger of forgetting what this whole business is really about. Remember what the word 'fiction' means? We make it up. It's a fable, a damned lie, a warped mirror to the real world. Readers understand this implicitly (though you'll always get a few pedants pointing out so-called 'inaccuracies' -- that goes with the job). It's a writer's imagination that makes a novel work, not his or her strict adherence to that dull old thing called reality.

There's a wonderful saying in Italian: <em>Meglio una bella bugia che una brutta verità.</em> Better a beautiful lie than an ugly truth. Storytellers are in the business of beautiful lies. If you want the ugly truth go buy a newspaper (you may just hit lucky -- who knows?)