The police procedural may have originated in the hard-boiled detective tales by such masters as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Sanders is one of the reigning master of this genre: others include Evan Hunter and Joseph Wambaugh.

An interesting allusion is the romances about medieval knights errant.

Like King Arthur, Delaney assembles a group of knights of the round table (the team of detectives), and he sends them off on quests for truth. The novel even provides a parallel to the evil sorceress Morgana, in the person of a woman possessed of mystical knowledge, motivated to do evil, and equipped with the ruthlessness to carry out a devilish crime.