non-romance, romance, #12: Klute (1971, dir. Alan J. Pakula)

you're not going to get hung up on me, are you?

This is a non-romance, romance, which is a monthly paid subscription feature where I write about something other than strictly romance novels through the lens of romance. I’ve written one before about another Alan J. Pakula movie, All the President’s Men. This one is about Klute and sex work and police in romance.

I started law school in fall 2018, started working at a law school in winter 2022, and my younger sister, who I live with, started law school in fall 2022. I like to point this out to my students, as if to say: what you are experiencing, I’ve been experiencing, myself or by proxy, for six years. Perpetually surrounded by lawyers in the act of becoming. How grotesque.

My sister’s starting to think about her bar exam in July 2025, so we’ve been watching Law and Order. I’ve had multiple professors tell me at different points that students who went to law school because they loved Law and Order would then sometimes have trouble watching it afterwards, for all the moments that procedure collapses, or when court room antics become unrealistic. I did not go to law school because I love Law and Order,¹ but if anything, I started watching it more while in law school.

Law school is also when I starting defining most my politics around prison abolition. Dick Wolf’s universe is certainly a pervasive example of copaganda, where police officers and prosecutors are unabashed heroes and we’re supposed to be disappointed when defendants manage to get away with anything other than a trial-by-jury conviction and maximum punishment sentence. But at some point during law school, I just switched how I was watching these procedurals. Annoyingly, I spend most of each hour pointing out criminal procedure and evidentiary problems that could be used in efforts to suppress evidence or be grounds for appeal. Which is a good way to study for the bar exam. Basically when we watch, the overzealous cops, who always seem aggrieved that they might need to get a warrant or that a suspect might have civil liberties, are pretty easy to cast as the villains who need to be course corrected and the prosecutors who find a way to convict anyway are the disappointing system works as it was designed.² With a nod to civil liberties, but rest assured “bad” people are going away for a long time.

Cops are pretty frequent heroes in romance novels, though I definitely don’t seek them out. Unless I was working on a massive critique of the genre, I can’t imagine reading one where a 21st century, American cop was a romance main character, though I’ve read a dozen or so Bow-Street Runner³ novels. I enjoy very few of these for the same reason I dislike most Newgate Prison set novels: authors tends to project commentary about modern policing and prisons onto systems that don’t work as a one to one stand-in. Bow-Street Runners, historically, focused almost exclusively on property crime investigations, during a time when many property crimes were met with capital punishment. Having a BSR hero investigate a servant for stealing jewelry and then sending them to the gallows is not so far afield from some romance plots, but I imagine (and would hope) it would alienate some readers.

In the novels, Runners are must more likely to be investigating violent crime and have the subjects of their investigations be a less sympathetic noble person. Occasionally an author will acknowledge the specter of the horrors of a 19th-century prison, or reference the fact that primarily poor people will be subjected to imprisonment there. But many historical cop romances remain disinterested in this reality and even those to do directly engage with it, often have a “back then” sense, as in “back then, it was terrible,” as if modern incarceration is somehow more dignified or justifiable.⁴

So generally my rule for leisure reading is “no cops as romance heroes.” Reformed Rakes did do one episode on Jeannie Lin’s The Jade Temptress, where the hero is a constable during the Tang Dynasty in China (618 to 907 CE). Lin’s historical research into this setting not often taken up by historical romance is acute and Constable Wu Kaifeng’s role is more one of a working-class heavy, whose loyalties are stretched between who is paying him and the truth. Lin does not project modern American police righteousness or commentary onto his role and [spoilers] by the end of the book, he isn’t in law enforcement anymore.

During that episode, I think I say “everyone should watch Klute” at least three times. The heroine of The Jade Temptress is Mingyu, a courtesan, and she is inextricably linked to many of the characters involved in the murder investigation that Kaifeng is conducting, which is not a dissimilar plot to Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 film Klute, starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. I often think about Klute when I read romance, especially romances that have a sex worker heroine. I ended my review of my most disappointing read of the year, The Mistress Experience,⁵ with a suggestion to just watch Klute instead. So here’s me telling you watch Klute, a movie with a detective character and a condemnation of systems of policing, like it is a romance novel