One of the tried-and-true techniques used in police procedural mysteries -- but even more often in so-called "buddy cop" movies -- is the teaming up of two policemen with antithetical personalities or backgrounds. Take any two human ethnic or social groups, no matter how diverse, and sooner or later a scriptwriter will strap them into the seats of a patrol car and send them out to pursue villains.
The literary origins of these mismatched crime solvers probably extend back to Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson. By the mid-1930s, Dashiel Hammett's "Thin Man" husband-and-wife team gave women a role in crime solving. In 1965, American author John Ball added racial minorities to the equation with "In the Heat of the Night," in which a black detective from Philadelphia, detained as a suspect while passing through a small Mississippi town, joins forces with a hostile redneck sheriff to investigate a murder. Ball's book was made into the 1967 Academy Award-winning film starring Sydney Poitier and Rod Steiger. One year later, the "fish out of water" formula was further refined in the Clint Eastwood thriller "Coogan's Bluff," in which an Arizona deputy sheriff tracks his prey in New York City.
The ongoing evolution toward increasingly unlikely combinations shows no signs of abating. So when a radical libertine group in "The Mongolian Connection" initiates a series of gruesome politically motivated murders in Boston, it shouldn't be surprising that two of the men involved in the investigation happen to be Thomas Yoder, an aging, overweight veteran detective of Amish background and Sharaa Batbileg, a half-Russian unemployed cop from the steppes of Mongolia.