It's difficult to track how many times an anecdote emerges about real-life law enforcement / crime fighting draws on fictional sources. Below (somewhere) is a story (from Mark Seltzer's book, I believe) about the emergence of FBI profiling and how it drew on classic detective fiction, such as Poe and Doyle. The mind-melding of the Purloined Letter is, of course, FBI profiling avant la lettre, and was later taken up by Michael Mann's Manhunter.

SO - the tag is "fictions of law enforcement," okay? Remember that.

Here's another one, recounted by Christopher Wilson in Cop Knowledge: Lincoln Steffens, author of The Shame of the Cities, a classic muckraking tale of urban corruption in a number of US cities in 1904, tells (in his memoir, and with Jakob Riis as an interloctuor no less!) of being regaled by a Chief Inspector of the true tales of his own heroism, but realizing that this detective was in fact drawing his material from popular detective fictions of the time (which Steffen's knew the detective read and enjoyed -- he surreptiously borrowed them from him from time to time). Writes Steffens "Thus I discovered that instead of detective's posing for and inspiring the writers of detective fiction, it was the authors who inspired the detectives."

(qtd in Wilson, Cop Knowledge, 26)

Read the first chapter of Mark Seltzers Serial Killers - it promises to be a useful source of information and analysis on the broader culture surrounding serial killing. He cites many films, novels, and journalistic reports, but does not necessarily attempt (so far) a thor0ugh formal analysis of the visual construction of serial murder/violent events. One of the concepts he develops is the idea of 'stranger-intimacy' - I'm not exactly sure what he means by it yet. The killer's anonymity, apparent selflessness, and desire to merge with the mass is something he discusses in the introduction and is pretty fascinating. Also, he mentions the circuit between criminological processes of profiling and crime fiction, recounting the writing of Thomas Harris's books and his research at the FBI, as well as FBI profiler John Douglas's book Mindhunter in which he admits: "Our antecedents actually go back to crime fiction more than crime fact" going on to cite Poe's detective stories as an inspiration! Amazing.

Paired with Mary Ann Lep's research in Apprehending the Criminal I can definitely make a case for criminology being largely a bogus science... Or, more seriously, a science which masquerades as a science, being in fact a product of a collective literary imagination (?)