Dave Case, a Retired Chicago Police Lieutenant, Says Authors Soften Police Fiction Beyond Recognition by Actual Cops, While Real Police Experiences Are Often Too Absurd for Civilian Readers to Believe. He Has Spent 20 Years Learning to Ride Both Rails at Once.

His answer is not “write what you know.”

The lesson for authors, and the value for readers, is: use the reality you know, research the reality you don’t know, then invent only enough to connect the pieces.

Case’s crime fiction draws directly from the challenging, difficult, absurd, and sometimes patently ridiculous experiences he had on the Chicago Police Department.

But firsthand experience does not arrive with plot structure.

Actual police work contains paperwork, dead time, disconnected incidents, people who matter once and disappear, consequences that surface much later, and events so improbable that a novelist might be accused of making them up.

Therefore, Case does make things up.

The important question is what he allows himself to invent.

Case spent several years on a Chicago Police Department tactical team assigned to Cabrini-Green, experience that became part of the foundation for Out of Cabrini.

One scene begins with officers making a final pass through the projects before returning to the station when they are sent to an explosion and car fire.

The explosion happened.
The car fire happened.
The person Case put inside the burning vehicle did not.

“That actually happened,” Case said, “but in the book, it was my imagination that put Macbeth’s informant inside.”

But a real explosion and a burning car are just events. By themselves, they do not necessarily advance a novel.

Therefore, Case invented the person inside the car.

The invention created consequence, connected the event to the characters, and made the real incident function as part of a larger story.

That is the line Case keeps walking: preserve the reality that matters, then invent only enough to make it carry narrative weight.

Case says the robbery-decoy scenes in Out of Cabrini are based on real experiences and were every bit as comical as they appear on the page.

The opening of Chicago Justice grew from another real call.

Case and his partner responded to an armed robbery at an adult bookstore. They were looking for a man with a weapon and had to clear the store’s viewing booths.

Case remembers patting down roughly half a dozen men who emerged in what he describes as an “aroused state.”

He later used the incident as the foundation for the novel’s opening, taking what he calls “a great deal of artistic license.”

The irony is that the fictional version had to be engineered around an event that already sounded invented.

That is one of the recurring problems in Case’s work: the more ridiculous the real experience, the more carefully it sometimes has to be shaped before a civilian reader will accept it as believable fiction.

“As I’ve said on more than one occasion, police work can be ugly,” Case said.

While attending Northwestern University’s creative-writing program, Case brought a workshop scene based on a real conversation he and his partner had with a sex worker one summer morning.

He expected his classmates to find it funny.

They didn’t.

Case says the same story reliably brings other police officers to tears from laughing.

The problem was not accuracy. The conversation had actually happened.

The problem was translation.

Police officers brought years of shared context to the story that civilian readers did not have. What felt instantly recognizable inside police culture did not automatically survive intact on the page.

“There are some things only someone who’s walked the walk will find funny,” Case said.

That experience changed how selectively he uses real material.

A writer can preserve every factual detail and still fail to preserve the meaning of the event.

Sometimes authenticity requires more than accuracy. It requires enough context for an outsider to understand why the people inside that world reacted the way they did.

Case’s method becomes more useful when he leaves his own experience behind.

In Up North, his protagonist is a young Black female DEA agent from Oakland working in Minnesota. Case is none of those things.

So he did not pretend firsthand experience could carry him.

He researched. He asked questions. He found people who knew the territory better than he did. He asked them who else he should talk to. And he had knowledgeable readers check sections involving their areas of expertise.

That turns the old advice to “write what you know” into something far more useful:

Use what you know.
Borrow what other people know.
Research what neither of you can safely guess.
Then invent only where the story requires invention.

Case has been doing some version of that for twenty years, whether he is writing about Cabrini-Green, federal agents, the aftermath of violence, or a retired cop who discovers that leaving the department does not necessarily mean leaving the job behind.

And even after decades in law enforcement, Case still has to make things up.

That may be the most useful part.

Authenticity is not a refusal to invent.

It is knowing exactly where reality ends, where invention begins, and why you crossed the line.

John Sandford warned Case not to let realism get in the way of storytelling.

Case’s books suggest a different danger deserves equal attention:

Don’t let storytelling get in the way of reality.

Dave Case retired as a lieutenant after 31 years with the Chicago Police Department and currently serves as a commander with the Bridgeview Police Department. He attended Northwestern University’s creative-writing program and has also taught through Northwestern’s Center for Public Safety.

His police fiction includes Out of Cabrini, Chicago Justice, Up North, and the forthcoming Take Down.

Out of Cabrini and Chicago Justice draw heavily from Case’s Chicago law-enforcement experience, including tactical policing and Cabrini-Green. Up North, released June 25, 2026, moves into federal law enforcement and the psychological aftermath of violence. Take Down, scheduled for publication November 13, 2026, follows a retired Chicago officer pulled back toward the profession after his police-officer daughter is nearly killed.

Across the novels, Case uses real experience where he has it, research and knowledgeable sources where he does not, and fiction where reality needs help becoming a story.

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