Police literature was born in an environment of technical revolution that changed the everyday city life profoundly. The modification affected the relation between society and art, and it also created conditions for the development of the press - the first place the police genre was to be published. During these almost two centuries, the ideology in police literature has modified. This research examines those changes so as to demonstrate similitudes between contemporary sensibility and the cultural context that allowed the birth of the tragedy, according to Nietzsche s thesis. By comparing the poetic effect in tragedy to that in police literature, and by considering their relations with rationalism, this study proposes that there is a close proximity between the two genres. Within this perspective, the police narrative is analyzed as a supporting prop in contemporary fiction.