My friend Ivan Lapshin

A police theme in literature is a dangerous theme. Not many authors come out of anything standing when working with her. She is dangerous because it is very easy to slide in a running around for criminals and forget about this about a person. In Yuri Herman, this happened, as it happened in Pavel Nilin in the “trial period” and “cruelty”, in “Mukhtar” at Israel Metter, from the Vainers brothers in the “era of mercy”.
Any topic, a police officer or not, should not be overshadowed by the writer: you are not writing about the profession, you write about a person, no matter what clothes you put on him - in a militant tire, in a military tunic, a doctor’s dressing gym or if In the jacket of the camp. And the profession is an application.
The prototype of the protagonist of the two early stories of Yuri German, who formed the basis of this collection, was the legendary Detective Ivan Vasilievich Bodunov, a thunderstorm of the criminal world of Leningrad in the 1920-1930s