http://www.usatoday.com
April 6, 2011
NYPD detective Edward Conlon wrote a memoir in 2004 and now tackles fiction in "Red on Red"
NEW YORK — Before becoming a New York police detective, Edward Conlon was an English major at Harvard with a senior thesis about Samuel Beckett, the existential Irish writer.
Beckett isn't mentioned in Conlon's debut novel, Red on Red (Spiegel & Grau, $26), about two New York detectives investigating murders, rapes and a suicide.
On a visit to the gritty Bronx precinct where he did just that, Conlon, 46, is asked about his novel's hardboiled lines: "Good people wonder who it is at the door; bad people know." Did he learn to write like that at Harvard?
He shrugs. "You do what you do and you listen."
"Red on Red" is a military term for the enemy killing the enemy. The police term for cases in which murder suspects end up murdered is "Exceptional Clearances."
That was Conlon's original title, but he feared it "sounded like a Steven Seagal movie."
He has just finished a 19-month intelligence stint in Jordan, part of an international police presence begun after 9/11. In his old squad room, he's greeted warmly. One cop asks, "Still writing?"
Conlon's first book, Blue Blood (2004), a memoir of police work, was widely praised. He found fiction tougher: "Some of the things that happen to you on the job aren't always persuasive or believable in fiction."
He wrote of a stabbing where two guys jump in a cab whose driver is the victim's brother. That happened, but his editor didn't find it plausible.
His author's note warns readers: "Facts end where this story begins. None of this is true."
"My characters don't correspond to people I know. I take incidents and bend or twist them to fit dramatic needs," he says.
Unlike his novel's trigger-itchy detective, Conlon hasn't shot anyone. He's been shot at, "or at least, the bullets got close enough."
One of his characters left his wife and moved in with his dad. Conlon, who's single, once lived with his mother while his apartment was renovated: "So I know what it's like to be a guest and not a guest."
Blue Blood avoided his colleagues' personal lives as "none of my business." His fictional detectives have messy personal lives that overlap with work.
He's a fan of police novels by Joseph Wambaugh, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane but detests "lazy plots" about cops on the take. "Police work has lots of grays — when to shoot, when not to — but taking money isn't one of them. It's a crime. Period. I've made thousands of arrests and was offered a bribe once."
Conlon grew up in Yonkers, north of the city. His father was an FBI agent, his uncle a cop, but he wanted to be a writer. His favorite part of Harvard was writing for The Lampoon, the humor magazine.
After college, he freelanced, writing about slices of New York history — once for The New Yorker. But he grew weary of not having a "real job."
Friends who were cops "loved the job — when they could stand it at all." He laughs. He sees police work as "public service, somewhere between the Peace Corps and the Marines."
He joined the NYPD in 1995, but "not to write about it. I wanted a job that let me write about what I wanted to write about."
Instead, an editor suggested he write a non-fiction series, Cop Diary, for The New Yorker. That led to his memoir. Now, he says, he earns more as a writer than as a detective.
Conlon's new assignment is the NYPD's intelligence division, which, he apologetically explains, "means I can't talk about it. Not even to my mother."
In the fall of 1997, The New Yorker published the first in a series of remarkable personal narratives that came to be known as the “Cop Diary” columns. Penned by (a surely pseudonymous) “Marcus Laffey,” they detailed in bold and clear-eyed prose the day-to-day life of a cop working in and amongst the sprawling housing projects of the South Bronx. These were the Giuliani years, where the NYPD’s falling crime statistics were drowned out by sensational cases of brutality (Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo) and a tin-eared public face that made the world’s largest police department seem both unaccountable and out of touch. Laffey’s “Diaries” helped change all that. Here were tales of all-night stakeouts and door-busting drug raids, but also smaller, heartfelt human dramas—well-meaning snitches, broken families fighting the odds, and at the center of it, a charming, if anonymous, police officer, battling crime, bureaucracy, and, occasionally even himself, as he walked his dangerous nightly beat. Laffey had succeeded where his superiors had so often failed; he’d given his profession a voice, and a lyrical one at that.
The mystery was solved four years later, when Edward Conlon’s memoir Blue Blood was released to critical acclaim. The writer behind the badge had finally emerged, and not only was he still a police officer (the only thing he’d retired was his pen name), but he’d worked his way up through the narcotics squad to become a detective. Blue Blood documents this rise through the ranks in intimate and often gripping detail, but also departs from sordid tales of crime and punishment to ruminate more peaceably on the history of New York City and the nature of police work itself. Yet, for all of Blue Blood’s 560 pages, the writer, out of uniform, remained an enigma.
Born into an Irish-Catholic law-enforcement family just north of Manhattan, Conlon was raised on four-generations of cop stories. But books were his first love. “As soon as cowboy and astronaut were out of the picture, I knew I wanted to write,” he says. “My father was an FBI agent, his brother was a cop, my great-grandfather was a cop, but I also grew up in a house full of books. My father was a great patron of The Strand, and my mother would always watch with dread as the bags of books arrived. So I know I’m not adopted.”
Conlon is sitting on the second floor of the classic Old Town Bar in Manhattan, having ostensibly agreed to discuss his newly released second book, the dark and intensely brilliant novel Red on Red. Framed on a nearby wall (purely coincidentally: I chose the place) is a large signed photograph of Conlon alongside a smaller matted cover of Blue Blood. He grins, resignedly, when he notices it, as if acknowledging the obvious: that his books, no matter how successful, may always be overshadowed by their author. But they shouldn’t be.
Red on Red defies genres. To call it a buddy cop book—which, on a basic level, it is—ignores not just its literary merit, but its complex and penetrating psychological impact. If most police procedurals lead with plot, Conlon has led with character—two to be exact. Detectives Meehan and Esposito are newly assigned partners in the Washington Heights neighborhood on the northern tip of Manhattan. Meehan is pensive and troubled, his marriage and career in crisis. Esposito is a loose canon, brash, foolhardy, and possibly crooked. He’s also the best cop Meehan has ever worked with, which would be great if only Meehan hadn’t agreed to spy on him for Internal Affairs.
The book opens with a woman’s body hanging from a tree in Inwood Hill Park, a seemingly random death that ends up uncovering an entire world of vice. But the crimes committed (on both sides of the law) in Red on Red are not glamorous. There are no art thieves or calculating serial killers, few pure villains or moral absolutes. Conlon’s colorful world exists under a gray and pressing sky of authenticity that not even the most research-addicted crime novelists could recreate (eat your heart out, Richard Price). Consider Meehan’s thoughts as he examines the body in the tree:
He reached over to the woman’s head, flashlight in one hand, clasping a branch with the other…She looked Mexican. Immigrants didn’t kill themselves. Not often, Nick had found, which he assumed had to do with them being accustomed to struggle. A note would be helpful, but only one in four suicides left them, that was the statistic. Who knows if she had been able to write? There were Mexicans here who didn’t even speak Spanish, Indians from the In-country hills who picked up how to hablar en espanol on Amsterdam Avenue.
At the same time, Red on Red offers Conlon his first opportunity to move past the factual restrictions of non-fiction, and he doesn’t disappoint. Whereas Blue Blood drifts in and out of scenes like an Ian Frazier travelogue, the tense partnership at the heart of Red on Red provides Conlon with a cogent underlying structure from which to weave his increasingly fast-paced plot. Still, as in his earlier work, Conlon’s gifted wordplay is always in evidence:
[Meehan’s] father spoke his mind without restraint or thought of consequence. Not loudly, not often—but when you asked his opinion, it was like picking his pocket. What was there came out, and if you didn’t like it, you shouldn’t have reached.
Call it a thriller. Call it literature. In the end, Red on Red is a book about two men, sometimes friends, sometimes adversaries—always partners. It’s this relationship, fundamental to police work, that interests Conlon far more than the usual good versus evil scheming.
“Partnerships are legendarily intense,” Conlon says. “They’re marriages. The fact that your spending eight to 12 hours a day with somebody, how you get along is obviously important, but you’re not friends as such. You’re there to do something.”
This from a man who does everything. After finishing Red on Red, in 2009, Conlon left his Bronx apartment for a stint in Amman, Jordan, as part of the NYPD’s overseas liaison program (conceived in the months after 9/11). He’s been talking openly for the better part of an hour, but when I ask about his overseas adventures, the wry grin returns, and he reverts to the precinct parlance of one of his characters: “To the extent that I can talk about it…we were there to build relationships, exchange best practices, and respond to major events. So that’s what I did over there, for almost two years.”
I wait for him to continue but he doesn’t. So now? I ask.
Conlon sighs. “It might be time to go back up to the Bronx. I really like the work. ”
Only later, listening to the tape, do I realize I’m not sure which career he’s talking about. Probably both.
David Goodwillie is the author of the novel American Subversive, a New York Times Notable Book of 2010, and the acclaimed memoir Seemed Like a Good idea at the Time. He has also played professional baseball, worked as a private investigator, and been an expert at Sotheby's auction house. A graduate of Kenyon College, he lives and works in New York City.
New in crime fiction: A guide to the latest releases
by Margaret Cannon
The Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/
May. 19, 2011
By Edward Conlon, Spiegel & Grau, 442 pages, $30
There are few debut novels as good as this one. Edward Conlon is a veteran New York City cop whose memoir, Blue Blood, was a New York Times Notable Book. It detailed not only his own career as a beat cop, but his place in his family of cops, including his father and grandfather. Few writers bring this kind of experience to crime fiction, but Red On Red is a story by a masterful writer who knows how to build great characters and keep the narrative moving.
“Nick Meehan knew there was more to every story, but he usually didn’t want to hear it.” Thus we meet Meehan and his partner, Esposito (we never know his first name) at a suicide in the park. A woman has climbed a tree and hanged herself with yarn from her knitting. As a suicide, it’s Nick’s case; Esposito is the murder specialist. He’s also controversial, a magnet for women and complaints, and the real reason Nick Meehan is partnered with him is to keep him under secret surveillance for Internal Affairs. Right off the bat, we know this is no garden-variety novel about loyalty among the cops on the street.
Still, Meehan finds himself warming to Esposito. They have little in common but they mesh well. As they move from suicide to a revenge murder to an accidental murder, Meehan is impressed with Esposito’s abilities as an actor while Esposito appreciates his partner’s quiet sense and intelligent reflection.
Like most classic cop-shop mysteries, this one is rooted in the routine of gathering evidence, finding witnesses, following clues. Conlon’s experience shows in the grit and slowness of the hunt. There are no CSI miracles, and it’s brainpower and determination, along with a very small amount of luck, that lead to the sad and unexpected finale.
Conlon is a demanding author. You can’t skim his prose. He makes us wonder about just how Meehan got where he is and what will happen next. Esposito is easier, a big ego with a bigger ambition. The talent shows when we keep reading, wanting to know what happens next, where these two go. I don’t know if Conlon will bring them back, but readers will certainly want him to do so.
http://edwardconlon.com/
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