Men in Blue has a rich heritage of police writing and detective novels. It retains elements of the classic police procedural novel. Indeed, as implied above, perhaps the procedure in the novel and series is the single most important structural element. In particular, Michael Malone's Time's Witness, although set in a small North Carolina city, also offers Griffin's type of detail and the attention to the interactions between the different elements of the city. Ultimately, though, Griffin's police novels are most like Griffin's military novels than any other related novels of the police or detective genre; the similarities between character types, the treatment of detail and dialogue, and the strong eventual moral focus — that the police, like the Army and Corps, are good and filled with upright, decent people, for the most part — is too evident to overlook.