A while back, I wrote about Quantum Criminals, a book describing the recurring characters, or rather archetypes, in the music of Steely Dan. Hmm... I think we're overdue for a new pair of anthologies built around the Dan. Crimson Gate, take a memo...
Lately, I'm reading The Nightfly by Peter Jones, his biography of Donald Fagen. And once again, the "character" of Steely Dan emerges. Only he's directly identified this time as both Fagen and partner, the late Walter Becker. "Mr. Steely Dan" is a frequent name for the unnamed narrator in Fagen and Becker's tunes. He's the survivor of an apocalypse in "King of the World" and a ghost in "Deacon Blues" and a man with a midlife crisis trying to pick up a a couple of young women in "Babylon Sisters."
Who is Mr. Steely Dan? Like all Steely Dan characters, he's a loser, one of the ramblers and gamblers that inhabit the band's catalog. Sometimes, he's in a bad relationship with a woman, sometimes an other woman, sometimes a woman whose betraying him. Mr. Steely Dan is looking for the next score. Perhaps most disturbing, yet usually unsuccessfully, Mr. Steely Dan likes young girls. Not Lolita young, though Becker and Fagen were fans of Nabakov.
But when it appears in their lyrics, Mr. Steely Dan becomes that most noir of all characters, one who has almost no self-awareness. One might say what about the duo behind Steely Dan? Having just read Fagen's biography, Fagen and Becker had long-term relationships with either someone they knew from Bard College (despite never going back to their old school) or fellow musicians or artists. Post #metoo, they likely would have toned down that aspect a bit, but even with so many of the lyrics being autobiographical ("Ricki Don't Lose My Number" anyone?), they were still works of fiction. I seriously doubt George Lucas considered choking an underling or wanted to slice Francis Ford Coppola with a sword, laser or otherwise. Neither do I believe Donald Fagen was showing films in the den like Mr. LaPage.
We read and we write mysteries here at SleuthSayers (as well as other genres) for a variety of reasons, for the skill, the plots, the dialog, the puzzle, but sometimes what we're really interested in is the atmosphere. That fits our mood. Some of my favorites:
Maigret (Georges Simenon) - Paris; places like the Gai Moulon or the Liberty Bar, where no one who isn't a criminal or a policeman should dream of going; Mme. Maigret with her excellent cuisine; the team, detectives Lucas, Janvier, Lapointe, and Torrence; Maigret's pipe, his taste for beer and cognac, his intuition, and his occasional mercy to criminals... Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful...
NOTE: The 1960s British series Maigret, starring Rupert Davies, is available on YouTube. "Davies' portrayal won two of the highest accolades: his versions were dubbed into French and played across the Channel; and Simenon himself said of Davies "At last, I have found the perfect Maigret!" (LINK)
Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout) - The household, of course. The voice of Archie Goodwin, the strict schedule, the orchids upstairs, the gourmet meals of Fritz (although I must confess I have the Nero Wolfe Cookbook, and I didn't like most of the recipes. I fear they're better on the page than off it. I for one do not want apricot preserves in my omelet.). Also the supporting team, especially Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin. Orrie Cather can stuff himself.
Bernie Gunther (Philip Kerr) - Dark, atmospheric, scary, but... depending on the day and the mood...
Mma Ramotswe (Andrew McCall Smith) - It's the rhythm of the voice, the feel of the heat of the day, the smell of cows, the preciousness of rain, the customs, the courtesies, the myths, the secrets, the witchcraft, the traditions. And the supporting team, her secretary and later assistant Mma Makutsi, her husband Mr JLB Matekoni, Mma Silvia Potokwani of the orphan farm, her stepchildren Motholeli and Puso, and Gabarone, Botswana itself. As it says at the end of the first book,
Africa Africa Africa Africa Africa
Africa Africa Africa Africa
Africa Africa Africa
Africa Africa
Africa
Spenser (Robert Parker) - To be honest, mostly for Hawk and the banter between the two of them. What drives me crazy is Susan and her perpetual wonder at the Hawk/Spenser friendship and total trust. Honey, I have girlfriends who if one of us called the other in the middle of the night, would drop everything to help, no matter what, and bring anything / everything needed, whether it's money, a bottle, a shovel or all three and more... Why Parker wrote a woman who apparently has no women friends I don't know.
Dame Frevisse (Margaret Frazer) - First of all, it's the real Middle Ages. Second, I really like Dame Frevisse, who is prickly, dedicated, and knows her stuff. She also sometimes gets fed up with her fellow sisters, and who wouldn't get fed up with Dame Alys? Related to Chaucer, her cousin is Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk, which gives Dame Frevisse her access to the nobility, and often gets her mixed up in their problems, mysteries, and murders. And, as I've said many a time, the motive in The Servant's Tale - well, I only wish I'd thought of it first.
Cadfael (Ellis Peters) - My second favorite medieval religious. My favorite of the books is An Excellent Mystery.
Brunetti (Donna Leon) - Venice. Venice. Venice. Venice. Venice. I went to Venice and I fell in love with it the way a teenager falls in love with that sexy guy who is the LAST person she should ever be with and yes, she knows it, but she can't stop, can't stop, she's in madly, deeply, hopelessly, recklessly... Brunetti gives me access from afar, full of its scents and sounds, especially the water lapping everywhere...
Venice, by Eve Fisher:
Miss Marple (Agatha Christie) – I love her. Period. I hope to be her in my increasing old age, only with more profanity and sarcasm.
Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle) – Straight back to my childhood.
And thank you, Janice Law, for the amazing Francis Bacon series!
Fires of London (2012)
The Prisoner of the Riviera (2013)
Moon Over Tangier (2014)
Nights in Berlin (2016)
Afternoons in Paris (2017)
Mornings in London (2017)
Somedays, there's just nothing like a seedy, louche adventurer with a nanny and a lot of bad habits to get you through the day...
Other notes:
Marion Halcome (Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White), who is the real sleuth, the real heroine. And she's up against Count Fosco, an Italian of uncertain past, huge girth, strong personality, and incredibly dangerous. "This in two words: He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress. If he had married me, I should have made his cigarettes, as his wife does—I should have held my tongue when he looked at me, as she holds hers." (Don't worry, he never manages to tame Marion. In fact, he falls in love with her, but that doesn't stop him from being excessively dangerous.) Plus I love the different voices that Collins uses to tell the tale, such as the most useless person ever to take fictional breath, Frederick Fairlie:
"It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone. Why—I ask everybody—why worryme? Nobody answers that question, and nobody lets me alone. Relatives, friends, and strangers all combine to annoy me. What have I done? I ask myself, I ask my servant, Louis, fifty times a day—what have I done? Neither of us can tell. Most extraordinary!"
I consider this the best of Collins, and I have reread it many times, with great pleasure.
Also, thank you, Elizabeth Zelvin for clueing me in to Abbi Waxman's One Death at a Time! The most truly Hollywood novel I've ever read. (Let's face facts, Chandler romanticized L.A. even if it was a dark romanticism.)
Which reminds me, I also want to see Lodge 49 again.
Phil
Caputo died this week past. The
obituaries all led with A Rumor of War,
which is fine, it’s a very good book, but he
wrote a dozen more.My personal favorite
of his novels is the first, Horn of Africa, and of his combat journalism, Means of Escape.He was, of course, a Marine veteran of Viet Nam, and he went back ten years later to
cover the fall of Saigon.I think it was Bogdanovich who said John Ford
was the laureate of lost causes and last stands, but Phil Caputo knew the vanities
of command and the fatigue of the battlefield as well as anybody, and over the
years, he went to war in our place many times.
There
are, at last count, something like thirty thousand
books written about the U.S.
war in Viet Nam.If you study it with any attention, you’re
going to read Bernard Fall, and Frances Fitzgerald, and Neil Sheehan, for strategy
and the political stakes, but I was thinking, when I learned Phil Caputo was
dead, that there are in fact an essential few books that were written by guys
who were there.A Rumor
of War is one; Ron Kovic, Born on the
Fourth of July; and the indispensable Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato, If I
Die in a Combat Zone, The Things They
Carried.Michael Herr’s Dispatches – although he was a reporter,
not a combat soldier - and Frank Snepp’s Decent
Interval, Snepp not uniformed military either, but CIA counterintelligence,
stationed in Saigon.
We
might call them the Class of Viet Nam.They were roughly of an age, and roughly my age, Caputo a couple of years older, Tim O’Brien a year
younger.They were shaped by the common
experience.If you read their stories,
you catch a glimpse of something seen at right angles, not just the loss of
innocence, or adrenaline and endorphins, their immediate
reaction to the threat environment, but something inward and unspoken.These are kids, or not far removed, trying to
understand their own natures, but they’re not at football practice, or working
a summer job at the DQ, or trying to get bare tit in the back of a ‘60 Chevy.This is a different ordering of the world.And what they found there, what they weren’t equipped to reason with, was
the random
math, the arbitrary cost-benefit ratio, the fact that it didn’t make any
difference to the plot who lived or who died, because it wasn’t their storyline.
The
other thing being, that each of these people – every one of whom wrote about it
later, whether or not they recognized at the time that it would later become necessary to write about it - were
engaged emotionally, and perhaps not entirely consciously, with the
consequences of how they each individually managed their own lived
experience.I’m not going to pretend to
their self-knowledge; they can speak perfectly well for themselves.The point of Caputo’s book, or any of the
others, though, is that they’re trying to articulate that experience to themselves.The reader is bearing witness.
Caputo
suggests some men are drawn to war.Not all, of course, and not all of them men, either.Martha Gellhorn comes to mind, Christiane Amanpour.But for himself, Caputo admits to a
fascination with the mechanics of
war, the
psychological disconnect, the cautious formalities, the price of a man’s
ears.He’s in a place of heightened
awareness, but he seems at the same time detached.We suspect he’s come too close, that he needs
to regard war as theater, that if he invests his feelings, he’ll weaken.
I may
be full of baloney.We can’t truly imagine
ourselves into another man’s Furies, but perhaps he can try and tell us.Caputo and those other guys who wrote about Viet Nam came
back from the dead, and they did their best to tell us how it was on the far
side of the curtain.
This year's Malice Domestic mystery convention was held a few weeks ago, and it was a good time, as always. I usually jot down interesting quotes I hear during panels, then share them here. This year is no exception.
Thanks to Rob Lopresti for first putting this idea in my head years ago when he shared quotes from, I think, Bouchercon. And thanks to this year's Malice panelists for their words of wisdom.
And away we go!
"When I read suspense and thrillers, I think: At least my life isn't that messed up." - Jennifer van der Kleut
"It's not necessarily the terrible thing happening--it's the threat of the terrible thing happening that propels the story forward." - LynDee Walker
"Good things can come out of rejection." - Kate Hohl
"The most important thing you can do to be asked to submit again to an editor is be willing to be edited." - Josh Pachter
"Learn to use Microsoft Word and learn to use track changes. Your editor will love you." - Carla Coupe
"Work with your editor. Your editor is trying to make your work the best it can be." - Michael Bracken
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a eunuch." - Smita Harish Jain
"After you castrate a few people, you get a reputation." - also Smita Harish Jain
"I don't want to kill people in a real small town because I thought people might take offense to that." - Annie McEwen
"When reading suspense, I think most people like to be
mostly right but a little bit wrong. The thrill of not knowing what's
going to happen is what pulls us along to keep turning the pages." -
LynDee Walker
"You don't wait for your muse. You say: Muse, c'mon, sit down." - Korina Moss
"I do not like unreliable narrators. I just want to punch them." - Jule Selbo
"A short story is not a novel. It's not a love note. It's not a poem. They have their own rhythm." - Smita Harish Jain
Recently I have been thinking about immortality, not the human and aspirational kind, typified by one of our billionaires who apparently wants to sleep his way to eternity, but the curious immortality of certain literary creations. What mysterious secret ingredients has kept folks like Oedipus and Antigone, David and his rival Goliath, Medea, and Orpheus, and the notables of the Hindu epics evergreen and ever present?
New Young Holmes series
Sure, a strong connection to an historic religion is a big help, but not essential, considering the continuing presence of our genre's Sherlock Holmes. Not content with retelling his adventures in every medium except dance and opera, we have retired him, married him, gifted him with a daughter and saddled him with multiple bee hives.
He's been treated for addiction – by Sigmund Freud, no less; brought into the 21st century with Sherlock, and just recently restored to callow youth by Young Sherlock, wherein he works as domestic help in Oxford, crashes parties with a louche undergrad named Moriarty, and gets acquainted with a Chinese princess who is a master of both armed and unarmed combat.
Is anything new possible? Well, yes. In The Final Problem, Arturo Perez-Reverte has come up with an angle that I confess I exploited nearly a decade ago: a mystery employing not the great man himself, but one of his impersonating actors. Together, The Final Problem and my own Holmes Impersonator stories provide two more ways to exploit the great detective.
I did not have ambitions to enlarge Sherlock's already expansive realm when I ventured into Holmes territory. I had hopes of breaking into a lucrative weekly supermarket tabloid, and I had come up with what I thought was a clever plot. In the service of this idea, I needed a detective and for reasons unknown, the Holmes Impersonator arrived.
A journeyman actor, employed by regional theaters and the dinner circuit with occasional voice- over or advertising work, my detective makes some extra cash with a regular gig at The Sherlock Holmes Museum, a small private Connecticut outfit with a slim budget and a constant need for donors. I thought he was ideal; the tabloid editors thought differently.
But the Impersonator was resilient. He found a home at Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine where he proved to be a clever guy, a useful narrator for six outings, and surprisingly observant. His flaw is his appearance. As child visitors to The Sherlock Holmes Museum invariably observe, he doesn't look like Sherlock. Indeed, tapped for a PBS revival of Sherlock Holmes, the famous play that made star William Gillette rich enough to build Connecticut's one and only castle, he gets cast as Watson.
The Profile
No such troubles for Perez- Reverte's Basil Osmond, who has the hawk nose and elegant physique of the famous Sidney Paget illustrations. Basil has instant credibility, because he not only looks the part but has played it in over a dozen immensely popular films.
Clearly based on Basil Rathbone, the famous 20th century Sherlock, Perez- Reverte's detective comes with an encyclopedic knowledge of Conan Doyle stories, an almost instant recall of Holmes' famous lines, and the savoir faire of having temporarily been rich and famous and on intimate terms with both London's West End and Hollywood royalty.
Such a character clearly deserves a mystery, and The Final Problem soon sets one for him. Basil has been sailing with a producer who may cast him in an upcoming television series. A storm strands them on a Greek island, one conveniently equipped with a luxury hotel inhabited by other temporarily stranded visitors.
Long time mystery fans will recognize that this setup is far from the atmospheric fogs of Baker Street. We are, in fact, in Agatha Christie territory with nine visitors, the hotel proprietor and three in staff, and very soon we have a corpse, a lot of questions, and no way to get help from the police.
Granted the authority to conduct an investigation, Basil, at first reluctantly and then with considerable flair and enthusiasm, sets to work, assisted by a fawning Spanish mystery writer and fellow Holmes buff.
The plotting, more clever than plausible, gives Basil scope, even if the somewhat awkward epilogue makes clear why Agatha Christie favored dramatic revelations before the assembled suspects.
So, here are our two alternative performers. The low- budget Holmes Impersonator, modest but effective in the compass of short fiction and a small locale, and a famous Sherlock in a luxury setting and the Christie- type plot suitable for a full length novel. Are there room for more such characters? I suspect so.
And what of the secret ingredient, the source of such characters' longevity? I am still far from a solution, but part must be the presence of what the great Scottish philosopher David Hume declared essential to knowledge: a clear and distinct idea.
Sherlock provides that in spades: the pithy phrases, the investigative dictums, and, of course, the instantly identifiable costume. Put a dog or a cat in a deer stalker and an Ulster, hand them a meerschaum pipe and either is instantly recognizable as a detective of this very special type. With a brand like this, no wonder other writers are tempted to enlist him in their literary ventures.
AI is being promoted as a tool to reduce human error in criminal investigations and healthcare but, I assert AI creates a serious harm by its very nature; AI cannot be held accountable and accountability is how we mere humans fix mistakes for fear that we will be humiliated, be disciplined, lose our jobs - none of this applies to AI who merrily trots along even when people are harmed. Further, the real benefit of accountability is not punishment but, rather, preventing the same mistakes in the future and how do we do that with AI?
Angela Lipps, a grandmother from Tennessee, was falsely identified by the facial recognition software (FRT) Clearview AI, as part of a bank fraud scheme in Fargo, North Dakota. Angela was living a quiet life, caring for her family when she was arrested, jailed first in Tennessee and then in Fargo for almost six months until she was released. By then she was traumatized and had lost her home. The Fargo police chief Zibolski said, “We’re happy to acknowledge when we make errors, and we’ve made a few in this case, for sure.” His happiness is unlikely to be shared by Angela, and the promise of an an 'overhaul' of its AI policy shouldn't hide the fact that no one was held responsible for the harm to Angela - a vague wave at AI is not the same as true accountability.
Angela's false arrest is not unique; there have been many documented false arrests. Harm from errors of false positive FRT, like in the case of Angela are one problem, but what about false negatives when a true criminal is let go - who knows how many times that has happened unless the are finally apprehended and an analysis is done showing FRT was inaccurate. Research also shows that AI is "more prone to false positive errors when applied to people of color."
Police officers are trusting algorithms that they did not create and, quite frankly, don't understand. When reasons for false positives come to light, such as low image resolution, officers can use this as a warning but, how low is too low and what about people who aren't white, when is FRT reliable? I obviously have no answers, only questions and a discomfort with people being harmed only to have people in power vaguely wave at an algorithm rather than holding someone responsible but, who can they hold responsible?
The use of facial recognition is growing not just because it *may* help correct errors (while certainly engaging in errors) but because it's a big money maker, so the answers of accountability matter:
"The global face recognition market was almost nine billion dollars in 2025, with projected growth to over 30 billion by 2034. Over a third of this market is in the U.S., but there is wide adoption of FRT around the world... Ten percent of U.S. police departments use FRT. The NYPD made 2,878 arrests resulting from FRT in the first five years of its use. The Metropolitan Police in London report 100 arrests using FRT in conjunction with mounted security cameras, including a suspect accused of kidnapping. Police in New Delhi used FRT to identify almost 3,000 missing children, and FRT has been used to identify refugee children who have been separated from their family. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has used a tool called Spotlight, which makes use of FRT, to identify children who are victims of sex trafficking. In 2023, the FBI worked with NCMEC to identify or arrest 68 suspects of trafficking."
AI in healthcare is also big business, according to a 2025 report by Research Insights: "The global AI In Healthcare Market size is projected to be valued at USD 26.6 Billion in 2024 and reach USD 187.7 billion by 2030."
AI is used in many clinical tools and embedded in medical devices - it's the latter situation that gives rise to this story:
"In June 2022, a surgeon inserted a small balloon into Erin Ralph’s sinus cavity at a hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. According to a lawsuit filed by Ralph, Dr. Marc Dean was employing the TruDi Navigation System, which uses AI, to confirm the position of his instruments inside her head.
The procedure, known as a sinuplasty, is a minimally invasive technique to treat chronic sinusitis. A balloon is inflated to enlarge the sinus cavity opening, to allow better drainage and relieve inflammation.
But the TruDi system “misled and misdirected” Dean,.. A carotid artery – which supplies blood to the brain, face and neck – allegedly was injured, leading to a blood clot...After Ralph left the hospital, it became apparent that she had suffered a stroke. The mother of four returned and spent five days in intensive care [and] a section of her skull was removed “to allow her brain room to swell.” She finds it, "hard to walk without a brace and to get my left arm back working, again.”
Who is to blame?
Matt Baxter, Director, Professional Liability, states, “From an insurance standpoint, AI is not really changing the exposure, because the liability still stands with the healthcare professional,” Baxter said. “They still have the same responsibility, whether they are using AI or not, to make sure the information is correct.”
One group of researchers cited the concern that puts who is responsible in question, because AI is a “black box”, "with no way to understand the AI's algorithm. This is problematic because patients, physicians, and even designers, do not understand why or how a treatment recommendation is produced by AI technologies. … Due to the black box feature, medical AI systems might make incomprehensible mistakes."
So, the doctor who does not understand the algorithm is held responsible for AI mistakes and, worse, holding him/her liable does nothing to protect the next patient from this algorithm.
Mistakes are common so the question of responsibility is crucial: "A new study from researchers at Stanford and Harvard found that even today’s best artificial intelligence (AI) models make serious errors in a significant portion of medical cases … with the top-performing AI models producing 12 to 15 errors per 100 cases and the worst-performing models making mistakes in 40 out of 100 cases."
Would suing the AI company responsible make things safer? Maybe the loss of money would make them revisit their tech and pull those that aren't safe.
Whatever the answer, the question must be asked: when, not if, AI makes a mistake, how are the right people held accountable and what is being done to ensure the mistake doesn't happen again?
There is a reason that AI in law enforcement and healthcare are big business: they are two of the largest institutions we have because civil society, in the Aristotelian sense, has been organized around collective survival where individuals can fulfill their potential. Derived from our empathy and ethics, our laws are designed to protect us as a society and healthcare is designed to protect us as individuals, so no wonder they are fodder for making big bucks. Do we want AI - that's devoid of empathy and ethics, causing harm without an ounce of remorse - seeping into the two institutions that we created to keep us safe or do we want a way to use our ethics, our humanity, to keep AI in check?
If sentence construction is a story's tactics, then grammar is the rules of engagement. I'm no grammarian, mind you. I just want my words to count. That brings me to this particular sound-off and sometimes my almighty struggle: the prepositional phrase.
For the grammatical record, a prepositional phrase is:
The preposition (about, before, down, except, for, in, near, on, off, under, with, etc.);
Its object -- a noun, pronoun, or something functioning as such;
Any modifiers to the object.
No prepositional phrase exists in a vacuum. They modify something higher up the grammatical food chain, either a noun or a verb. Preferably, an important one. This is nerdy but essential. Too often, no small amount of my editing dwells on fixing my prepositional phrases--including whether I needed them at all.
But I'm also talking about more than grammar. When I'm moving those prepositions around, I'm calculating punch, timing, mood, and sentence variety. I'm fine-tuning the action and thus the characters. Not surprisingly, I've developed a few guidelines to help minimize editing blood pressure spikes.
Guideline: Stay Active
"The sound of laughter" is a complete grammatical phrase. "Sound" is the subject, "laughter" the modifying prepositional object. A complete thought, but indirect enough to invite the passive voice. "Was heard by all" feels almost inevitable to follow.
What's more important here? The "sound" or the "laughter?" It could be either. "Laughter" is more specific and more powerful than "sound." If laughter is the key action and heaviest hitter, then it should be the sentence subject with an equally powerful verb. "Sound of" seems unnecessary.
Guideline: Drunk and Disorderly
If you read a fair few legal documents, it's not uncommon to encounter mass pile-ups of prepositional phrases. A lawyer on a roll can chain four, five, eight prepositional phrases together in a single, sprawling clause. Boring, but it's doing its job. Those prepositions stack needed qualifiers to the core provision.
Well, we're not writing legal documents here. A traffic jam of prepositions makes things blocky and turns reading comprehension into a slog. An example:
Conversation ground to a halt when McGillicuddy shot me the stink-eye that he usually did before breaking tough news in his office on the penthouse floor with the full view of the city behind him.
To avoid things getting out of hand, I self-imposed a cap of two in a row max. Two keeps me focused on key actors and actions. Any further details can be worked into a later sentence.
Conversation ground to a halt. McGillicuddy shot me the stink-eye that he usually did before breaking tough news. We were drinking Old Sasquatch in his penthouse office, the city below spreading to the horizon.
Not great, but at least these sentences behave. Once I cap the pile-up, the next problem is ordering the survivors.
Guideline: First Things First
The English language has developed many ordering rules for modifiers--except for prepositional phrases. We writers are largely left to our wits. But there are two north stars to guide us.
A phrase functioning as an adjective follows the noun (sentence subject). Think: Her photo on the wall stood watch over the parlor.
A phrase functioning as an adverb follows the verb. Same sentence: Her photo on the wall stood watch over the parlor.
Easy enough. My headache comes with ordering my chains of two or (shudder) three. Flipping them--and maybe flipping them back--bites me more often than I care to admit.
WRONG: Dave shoved the evidence in the drawer ahead of the cops under his socks.
RIGHT: Dave shoved the evidence in his sock drawer ahead of the cops.
The first example fails its adverbial duty. The cops are not under the socks. Also, shoving is the important action, so the modifier belongs where the socks were shoved. The second example lands the sentence on that small matter of the cops.
Let's get more complicated.
WRONG: The pirates debated their heading in the galley for raiding Port Arghh with the captain.
RIGHT: The pirates debated the Port Arghh raid over rum with the captain.
The first example is all over the place. Is the captain connected to Port Arghh or the pirate crew? The second example won't win any awards, but it keeps the thought line straight. The construction immediately cuts to the central rum-soaked debate and Port Arghh, giving both more primacy. Ending on "with the captain" sets the blackguard up to decide the next move.
Guideline: Proper Introductions
In fiction, some sentences just work better with an opening preposition. Take that last sentence. The opening "In fiction" grounds the reader, and there isn't a better fit later on. This is a flow thing, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence. I know it when it works--and I pick up on it when reading a manuscript aloud.
I default to opening sentences with the subject. English is designed that way, and I'm not going to fight that. But guidelines are just that.. Inverting prepositional phrases to open things can change the feel in critical ways:
Traditional: "The truth looked a lot different under the streetlamps." That's effective in showing the narrator shifting as they have time to think, with "streetlamps" as a stark and atmospheric closer.
Inverted: "Under the streetlamps, the truth looked a lot different." This time, we get the mood before we get the truth. Ending on "different" sets up an emotional or revealing next sentence.
Done judiciously and well, the humble prepositional phrase is powerful, flexible--or ruinous fluff leading to blood pressure checks.
