This says 1971, Martin Beck was earlier. I'd argue Maigret counts as well. The author mentions Chandler but I would never have considered those "police procedurals".
Version_five is right about Martin Beck. (I wouldn’t count Maigret or Chandler as “police procedurals”.)
Also on the list and predating Wambaugh: Ed McBain’s “87th Precinct” novels. First one published in 1956, last one in 2005.
I'm on the fence about Maigret. There is definitely an element of what I consider police procedural in there, though I agree they wouldn't be exemplars for the genre.
What's the one where there is a killer, I think he ends up being some kind of "architect designer" and they get a female cop to lure him out somehow. That's almost the same story as Roseanna. On the other hand, in some of the books he just sits in a bar all day.
Doesn't exactly sound like the Sherlock Holmes I remember. Which is to say that despite both being centered around crime and mystery solving, they're really quite different.
> The criminals in classic crime novels generally have motives and make plans and think everything through in advance. The crime fighters in those books, on the other hand, generally solve every case. Wambaugh’s cops are faced with a starker reality. They are patrolmen. They don’t investigate murders.
But this dichotomy is visible in most crime literature/media until today. For example, the "Law & Order" franchise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_%26_Order_(franchise)) is mostly police procedural, but in the "Criminal Intent" spin-off they went back to classic "detective stories".
I think it's worth making more of a distinction between the different shows in the franchise.
One thing I really like about "classic" Law & Order is that it's half police procedural, and half... not just courtroom drama, but the drama behind the courtroom drama. And it follows a case all the way through from discovery to conviction/acquittal.
Whereas I'm not nearly as much of a fan of SVU, as it is mostly just another police procedural. (With the disturbing "unorthodox cops who have to bend the rules to get the job done" vibes, which really should have non-ironically gone out of fashion for good some time in the mid-'90s.)
I'd not checked out Criminal Intent, because I was figured it would just be more like SVU, but if it's more of a "detective story" than "police procedural", I might try to find time to give it a shot.
While the more abstract elements of puzzle-cracking are brilliantly elaborated within a legal mystery framing in the Sherlock universe, I would say police procedures themselves are barely to be seen except where he benevolently tolerates or accedes to them at the request of others.
Investigative rigor and procedure are common to both forms, but the police procedural itself has a considerably wider remit I think that even the classic lone wolf cop fits into in a way that types like Holmes and modern successors like Jack Reacher do not.