An off the cuff quote from Edward Buscombe's entry on The House on 92nd Street in the BFI Companion to Crime: "Almost any issue that Hollywood wanted to make a film about could be refracted through the generic conventions of the crime film." (175)

Paired with this quote from Will Straw on Leftist involvment in the social documentary genre: "At the heart of the semi-documentary was the tension between its restricted institutional frame and teh rich possibilities offered by narrative worlds outside the studio backlot." (in "Documentary Realism and the Postwar Left," 'Un-American Hollywood," 141.)

Important also to look at is Parker Tyler's relation of narratives of investigation to documentary in American Quarterly 1 (1949), 99-115 [See notes to Straw's essay] AND Kracauer's review of Boomerang! in an article called "Those Movies with a Message" in Harper's 196 no. 1176 (May 1948): 568.