Blue Blood (Hardcover)

by Edward Conlon (Author) "As I took my first steps on patrol as a New York City police officer, heading out from the precinct onto East 156 Street toward..." (more)
Key Phrases: bribery collar, twisted ass, drug collars, New York, Pat Brown, South Bronx (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
As a Harvard graduate and regular writer for the New Yorker, Edward Conlon is a little different from most of his fellow New York City cops. And the stories he tells in his compelling memoir Blue Blood are miles away from the commonly told Hollywood-style police tales that are always action packed but rarely tethered to reality. While there is action here, there's also political hassle, the rich and often troubling history of a department not unfamiliar with corruption, and the day to day life of people charged with preserving order in America's largest city. Conlon's book is, in part, a memoir as he progresses from being a rookie cop working the beat at troubled housing projects to assignments in the narcotics division to eventually becoming a detective. But it's also the story of his family history within the enormous NYPD as well as the evolving role of the police force within the city. Conlon relates the controversies surrounding the somewhat familiar shoo! ting of Amadou Diallou and the abuse, at the hands of New York cops, of Abner Louima. But being a cop himself, Conlon lends insight and nuance to these issues that could not possibly be found in the newspapers. And as an outstanding writer, he draws the reader into that world. In the book's most remarkable passage, Conlon tells of the grim but necessary work done at the Fresh Kills landfill, sifting through the rubble and remains left in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 (a section originally published in The New Yorker). In many ways, Blue Blood comes to resemble the world of New York City law enforcement that Conlon describes: both are expansive, sprawling, multi-dimensional, and endlessly fascinating. And Conlon's writing is perfectly matched to his subject, always lively, keenly observant, and possessing a streetwise energy. --John Moe

From The Washington Post
With cops, it's hard to tell where the person ends and the job begins. Most off-duty officers can't shake the hard edge of watchfulness, and one gets the feeling that they go through life dividing the good guys from the bad. A cop, it seems, is always a cop, and outsiders shouldn't even try to understand.

In Blue Blood, his memoir of life in the New York Police Department, Edward Conlon would seem just the man to keep his two worlds apart. Harvard-educated and a gifted writer, Conlon has been contributing the "Cop Diary" to the New Yorker under the name of Marcus Laffey. But anyone expecting a neat separation between officer and writer will be disappointed. Conlon is a cop's cop and his book, a dazzling epic of street life and rough camaraderie, is far more rewarding than any disgruntled Serpico-style tell-all could ever be.

Conlon resisted becoming a cop, though in retrospect it seems inevitable he'd fall for the siren song of law enforcement. His father was an FBI man; numerous uncles and family friends walked the beat. Perhaps as a type of rebellion, Conlon became a low-grade hooligan who believed that "cops were firm and fair and mad at you, a lot of the time, for good reason." After straightening up and completing college, he worked in a program designed to steer "good" convicts toward the mainstream. Soon, though, he realized that this desk-bound relationship to criminals didn't offer the thrill he craved, and he entered the police academy.

In relating his life as an NYPD officer, Conlon thankfully avoids flogging broad agendas. Instead he immerses the reader in his blue world as he crashes through doors and cajoles junkies into giving up information. Although he eventually is promoted to the rarified air of the Detective Bureau, he revels in the ground-level action of "buy and bust" narcotics work. "When you hit a [drug deal], there is always a charge of adrenaline, arising from the jungle-war vagaries in your knowledge of the terrain and the determination of your adversary. . . . In brief, it could be a surrender as slow and dignified as Lee at Appomattox, or it could be bedlam, a roil of running, struggling bodies, and airborne stash." Conlon has an ear for the cadence of the projects, and his use of slang and dialogue is masterful. He laments that he must prettify his hard-won ghetto language to fill out a report on a drug deal, wishing instead that he could write "to wit, defendant did possess one mad fat rock of yayo." The verbal sparring between partners is also well rendered, and the men he works with -- guys with nicknames like Smacky, Pops and the Short-a-Rican -- are vibrant and hilarious.

A reader looking to criticize the culture of police work would find plenty here that is offensive. But the writer is a good and caring cop, as are the people he works with. So what if Conlon, an Irishman, and his partner Timpanaro, an Italian, compete to see how many of their countrymen they can arrest in a good-natured game they call, with bureaucratic perfection, "Mickstat and Wopstat." And is anyone really hurt when he describes the protracted arrest of an uncooperative prostitute as "Operation Lying Whore"? Impolitic to be sure -- but Conlon isn't trying to win any admirers on the civilian review board. He's just trying to be a regular cop, and an honest writer.

More important, Conlon recognizes the legitimately sensitive situations his profession forces him into. He regrets that a serial woman-beater, for example, goes back on the street because the man is an integral part of another ongoing investigation. When an informant offers a tip about a hidden gun, the money he's paid will probably go back into drugs, and eventually toward a new gun. The net gain isn't quite zero, but sometimes it approaches that number, and Conlon is a realist about his chances of staying ahead of the criminal element.

Conlon also feels real sympathy for the people he encounters. He sees a shadow of himself in a twitchy, drug-addled informant he has cultivated, and when he writes that their meetings have "the affectionate but awkward quality of a divorced dad picking up his kid every other weekend," the words are honest, with none of the self-conscious big-heartedness that civil servants often profess.

If there is a drawback to this fascinating ride-along, it is that the narrative hews too closely to the trajectory of Conlon's career. Long pages are devoted to settling scores with loathsome supervisors, and when he describes weeks spent doing nothing more interesting than parking-lot duty at Yankee Stadium, the book drags. Still, it is reassuring to know that the world is occasionally peaceful enough for a cop to endure maddening stretches of boredom.

The last decade must have been a confusing time to be a New York cop. The city is undoubtedly safer than it has been in years: Gone (or at least subdued) are the fare-jumpers, the panhandlers and the dreaded squeegee men. But this renaissance has been dogged by gripes about thuggish police work and suggestions that civil liberties have suffered. More poignantly, the ultimate sacrifice made by many of New York's finest on Sept. 11 sits awkwardly alongside the tragic mistake that led to the death of Amadou Diallo and the depraved abuse of Abner Louima.

Blue Blood doesn't attempt to sanitize an entirely human institution. Instead, Conlon presents the truth as he has lived it. He is no outsider casting stones, but the ultimate insider, a man so committed to his work that he takes his partner as his roommate and chooses, for his sole off-duty pastime, to write movingly about his long days on the job.

Reviewed by Zac Unger

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; 1st ed/1st printing edition (April 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573222666
• ISBN-13: 978-1573222662
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (119 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #542,751 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book about the things that cops forget every day, May 11, 2004

By	Brandon del Pozo (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

I am a New York City Police Department sergeant with a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Dartmouth College and a master's from Harvard University. I attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City prior to college. You could imagine that the release of this book was intrigued me, and I bought it to see how Ed Conlon's experiences compared to mine.

Having worked in many of Brooklyn's busiest areas since 1997 (East Flatbush, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Brownsville, etc: the 067, 070, 071 and 077 Precincts), I can say that Conlon's relation of New York City street life is both colorful and accurate. He expertly relates the boredom of endless waiting for something to happen, the general futility of most of our efforts, and a mistrust of the public that stems from its inability to feel, firsthand, what a cop feels when he has to make the most important decisions of his life, with the future of citizens in his hands.

One thing that is missing from the book is the life of the patrolman, which has yet to be adequately covered by any good, recent nonfiction work. When I wrote to The New Yorker in 1999 in response to one of Conlon's magazine pieces, I expressed that Conlon seemed to elevate his street-level drug enforcement exploits at the expense of the dignity of the officers who answer two dozen 911 unpredictable calls a day in the most dangerous parts of the city. These officers see the full range of the urban drama, and their stories are always disjunctive: they solve the problem and leave, be it a false burglar alarm or domestic homicide. The story ends for them as it gets passed off to the next group of specialists. It is one of the most frusturating things a person can do.

Now that the book is out, we see that Conlon has chosen the particular track he has because he never served in a patrol precinct and this is foreign ground to him. Before I say anything else that sounds negative, I have to clearly state that given his chosen career track, Conlon's relation of police life there and in general is largely flawless. While it is not complete, it does not have to be to be excellent nonetheless. My differences with Conlon are largely philosophical and in the end, biased: I believe that urban precinct sector and beat patrol is the most raw and meaningful story of policing from almost any perspective, and I would not trade it for a lifetime of narcotics enforcement.

These are the things that other reviewers are right about: It is certainly the best cop book written yet, but critics are still free to wonder exactly what this means in the larger context of the nonficiton memoir genre. It is indeed a bit long, but if you are patient it will reward you with its broad, historical grounding. Yes, that Colon went to Harvard is certainly the gimmick that enabled him to undertake this project, but this is more of a testament to the problems with The New Yorker than with Conlon. If a cop with a degree from CUNY showed up at the New Yorker's door with the exact same manuscript as Conlon's, they would have had their security escort him out; life in the Conde Nast building is designed to be free of the sight and scent of the common person from the outer boroughs (unless she is your secretary). Conlon used Harvard to get attention, and it worked. If there are better non-Ivy-League police writers out there, he has opened doors for them as a result.

There are moments where his choice of nonfiction memoir limits the book. By luck and fate, Conlon wasn't at Ground Zero on the morning of 9/11, so he is stuck telling an ancilliary story of working to separate out the human remains from the wreckage at a dump in Staten Island. He was never shot at, so he tells a story of bullets whizzing by him on a project rooftop. If this is getting shot at, then every cop who has worked a few years of nights in Brooklyn North has been shot at. The truth of the matter is that most cops in bad areas draw their guns often, fight it out with the bad guys regularly, and see things that for them are commonplace, but that would make a true blue blood wet his pants. But most do not fire their handguns or get shot at in the course of their career. This is because we have an excellent, safe department, but it deflates the story a bit.

In the end, I am probably not such a good reviewer for this book, except by an indirect means. Nothing in it surprised me, because when you do this job long enough, you can see a person impaled on a spiked fence from a three-story fall--writhing and dying as firefighters saw the fence out around him--and you can go home and eat dinner and tell your wife that nothing interesting happened at work that day. So, indirectly, the fact that nothing surprised me means that Conlon writes about the things that cops forget every day.

In remembering these things, Conlon has given readers enamored with urban policing a book that will not be soon forgotten. We are witnessing a transformation of policing from a vocation into a profession, and cops like Conlon are the leaders. He will not be the last well-educated cop to join the Job, and as they do, the life of the police officer will be brought into sharper public focus with, among other things, great books such as these.

If you peruse this book for a few minutes, you will know if it is for you or not. If you get the feeling that it is, then buy it; you know who you are and the cop's life fascinates you. Conlon will certainly not let you down.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A long look at a small sliver, April 13, 2004

By A Customer

Like the reviewer above, I am a NYC police officer too, and I thought this book was pretty fair. It gives you one picture of what it is like to work our job in our city, but there is so much more left to say. The world of drug enforcement is probably one of the most common topics in all of policing these days, and Detective Conlon's time in Housing was predominantly about this, so other aspects of policing are left out. But there is only so much one man can do... I think the book is at its best when it tells the reader what many cops truly feel about things that have been in the news, such as the Diallo and Louima incidents. It gives the public a new insight into the cop's mind. The book is a little long, and I think that's because it might try to cover too much. There are 47,000 cops in NYC and 8,000,000 residents, so it is impossible to ever give a full picture of the story of policing the city. Still, if I were a civilian interested in learning about one perspective of urban policing, I would read this book.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read!, April 12, 2004

By	"jtc61" (Seaford, NY) - See all my reviews

For three years I have looked forward to the release of this book (since his writings were published in The New Yorker) and am certainly not disappointed. Edward Conlon conveys a unique insight into a job that few people truly understand. The media paints one picture of the police while TV shows portray another. Neither is accurate. Conlon's writing lets the readers into a world that is much more complex than a newspaper article or television caricature can ever grasp. If you want to know what it is like to be an NYPD cop (I know b/c I am one) this is the book for you.