Blue
Blood , by Edward Conlon.
Riverhead, 562 pages, $26.95.
The
notable first-person genres of the past 10 years or so-spoiled-child memoir,
abuse memoir, depression memoir (did I mention spoiled-child memoir?)-attest to
a world in which high literacy and genuine hardship no longer go together quite
as commonly as they once did. War once took care of this, at least for men: It
yoked brutal experience to literate young people, prematurely and routinely. My
father, who went to Princeton, barely mentions his World War II experiences
along the Burma Road. If, however, like Oliver Stone or John Kerry, you left
Yale to fight in Indochina, you might dine out on the decision for the rest of
your life. As world wars gave way to regional police actions, and as an ethos
of shared sacrifice gave way to student deferrals, everything changed. In a
world of unequal sacrifice-a world that creams talent efficiently, then
shelters it from misery-the gulf between the literary and the nonliterary world
deepens.
Here
comes a stunning exception to prove the rule. Starting in the late 90’s, under
the pseudonym Marcus Laffey, The New Yorker ran a series of columns
called “Cop Diary.” Written in the first person, they told the story of a young
officer’s fairly run-of-the-mill career in the NYPD, in prose that was anything
but run-of-the mill. At its best, “Cop Diary” recalled the old New Yorker -not
the famously twee New Yorker of the Shawn era, glorious as that could
be, but an older old New Yorker , a kind of laconic blarney with
roots deep in Joseph Mitchell. This was rare indeed: the intersection of high
literacy with lowlife culture at the level of firsthand experience, a
combination that the now-elaborate talent-sorting, talent-creaming apparatus
often seems devoted to making extinct. Who was Marcus Laffey, and just what
sort of throwback-or impostor-was he?
Laffey
has since been outed as one Edward Conlon, a now 40-ish Harvard graduate who
made his way, over the course of roughly a decade, from New York City beat cop
to gold-shield detective. Mr. Conlon has come clean with the entire story
behind Laffey and his life on “the Job,” as cops refer to it with a certain
rueful pride. Blue Blood , his quietly remarkable memoir, is less a
shoot-’em-up or po-faced Law and Order procedural-in fact, it’s not
remotely either of those-than an unusually sensitive reflection on criminality,
police culture and the role of social class in America. The reason for the
sensitivity, and for the unbridled enthusiasm with which the memoir is being greeted,
is as surprising as it is refreshing: Mr. Conlon completely bollixed the
post-Vietnam, meritocratic storyline.
The
only blue in Mr. Conlon’s blood isn’t Brahmin-it’s pure Irish cop. His
great-grandfather, Sergeant Pat Brown, used to “carry the bag on Atlantic
Avenue” (he transported the mob’s ill-gottens for them), and his Uncle Eddie
was an officer on the force. It was Mr. Conlon’s father who, as a career F.B.I.
agent, vaulted the family’s fortunes forward. The father appeared to the son as
“the image of a G-man: tall and prematurely silver-haired, with a trench coat
and fedora, a profile in sternness and probity that masked a playful curiosity
and a devious sense of humor.” After growing up a normal enough miscreant in
working-class Westchester, Mr. Conlon continued the family’s upward mobility by
attending Harvard. But after Harvard and the usual false starts, he joined the
NYPD. To have lurched from teenage Yonkers rogue to Yard-trodding scholar and,
finally, to Bronx flatfoot was, as Mr. Conlon himself puts it, “closer to a
crime against nature than a bad career choice.” Better to have told his parents
he was “going back to Ballinrobe, to tend a few sheep and dig potatoes with a
stick.”
To
be equal parts street and Ivy gives you universal credibility; and to straddle
class lines in a world in which they only get more rigid automatically makes
you a darling. But it also makes for a life of proliferating embarrassments.
When a sergeant at the Police Academy asked Mr. Conlon if he had really attended
Harvard, he replied with a pettifoggery worthy of his white-shoe classmates:
“Not lately, Sarge” is the literal truth camouflaged as sarcasm. So committed
was he to obscuring his credentials that when NYPD forms asked for his alma
mater, he hoped his scrawl would be misread as “Howard.”
Mr.
Conlon’s embarrassment makes for a curiously unstable literary voice, one that
drifts back and forth from polished but vivid old school ( McSorley’s
Wonderful Saloon ) to a quiet but persistently defensive machismo. He seems
at pains to tell us about each of his life’s many fistfights-almost the only
thing he tells us about his Harvard years was that, upon arriving, he
brawled-but then he shuffles his feet, aw shucks , and claims to have
lost most of them. In the next breath he explains, “The word ‘investigate’
comes from the Latin vestigium …. ” There’s also a little too much
towel-snapping, Hollywood-ready multi-ethnic camaraderie, as when the Italian
and Irish cops, making light of the Compstat system of gathering crime
statistics, book criminals depending on their ethnicity by using either
“Mickstat” or “Wopstat.”
As
if to bring competing energies under control, Blue Blood ‘s abiding tone
is almost compulsively apothegmatic. A long digression on the murder of one of
his father’s informants wraps up with “We all have our vocations, and we all
have our mysteries.” A few pages later, a fascinating discussion of how the
race of a perp and the race of a cop will define their interaction cuts off
with “In the end, the color of your skin doesn’t matter but the thickness of it
does.” More disappointing is the book’s failure to reflect deeply on the nature
of drug busts. By far Mr. Conlon’s most satisfying experience as a police
officer was working on the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, and the pace and
vivid grittiness of these portions of the book show it. He played his role in
enforcing the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, and yet this disappointing feint
is as far as he gets when the time comes to assess the policy’s wider significance:
“The Urban League had published a report on cities that stated that one out of
every three black men in their twenties was in prison, on parole, or on
probation. It is a devastating number, and a national disgrace, and I haven’t
got the least idea what to do about it, except for my job.”
But
these are quibbles. Whether at the knees of his cop elders or around the
seminar table, Mr. Conlon learned how to talk to old ghosts, and then to write
about it gorgeously. By far the finest sections of the book-and these are truly
magnificent-recount old half-forgotten histories, from Pat Brown’s to Serpico’s
and Popeye Egan’s. (Egan is best remembered as the model for Popeye Doyle in The
French Connection . After the movie he floated along, a legend and a
raconteur who, unlike his partner Sonny Grosso, couldn’t parlay his newfound
fame into a showbiz afterlife. He eventually became a departmental scapegoat
and died broke and alone.) All this adds up to a gripping social history of New
York policing. But almost more importantly, Blue Blood demonstrates how
sharpening to the senses it is when language and reality chasten one another.
“The kid on the bench is a kid on a bench,” Mr. Conlon tells us, “and it takes
time for his context to prove him to be anything more. You watch who he watches,
who approaches him. And as you do, figures emerge from the flow of street life
as coordinates on a grid, as pins on a map.” Ed Conlon is one gifted writer. I
bet he’s an even better cop.
Stephen
Metcalf reviews books regularly for The
Observer .
