Word: conlon
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...isn’t the subject matter of Blue Blood, first novel of Edward Conlon ’87, that has won the cop drama extensive media coverage and a spot atop bestseller lists. It’s the author himself, a literally blue-collared detective for the NYPD who happens to have a Harvard diploma. FM tracked Conlon down for a phone interview while he was on tour in California, and the author was happy to talk about hiding his Harvard degree from his fellow cops, his first break into security work as a receptionist for HUPD...
...Today Conlon is cruising the neighborhood for the junkie who brained Big Bird, steering with one hand and juggling multicolored case files with the other, head swiveling constantly to scan the sidewalks. He drops by a project tower to do a "vertical patrol," which means taking the elevator to the roof and trotting down 16 condom-and-crack-vial-strewn flights to the ground. A crowd of teenagers loiters in front of the entrance. "Let's see how many of these guys break when they see us," Conlon says as he gets out of the car. None do, though...
...slow day, but the lulls between the action sequences are when most police work gets done, and they're also where the real riches of Blue Blood lie. Conlon has a mook's job, but he does it with a mandarin's eye. He analyzes the subtle semiotics of "jerkology," the interrogator's art of cajoling a prisoner into confessing--"of convincing a perp to trust you more than he trusts himself, and then betraying that trust." Empty hours of patrol time fill up with banter, and Conlon transcribes it with a verve reminiscent of Mamet...
...amazing thing about Blue Blood is that where a lesser writer would just have gone numb, Conlon stays alive to the humor and the sadness and the ironies of life even in the teeth of the city's everyday assault--bricks (and, once, a canned ham) thrown from rooftops, the festering bitterness of precinct-house feuds, the bizarro underworld of the midnight shift, the agony, both Dantean and Sisyphean, of sifting through the rubble of the World Trade Center that has been moved to Staten Island. Conlon has no ambitions as a whistle-blower or a hero--he's neither...
...Conlon heads to a culinary establishment known as Jimmy's Diner. Big Bird has a phone number for his assailant, and Conlon has traced it to a fax machine there. The kindly woman behind the counter regrets to inform us that she doesn't recognize the phone number, and anyway Jimmy's doesn't have a fax machine, and are we sure we have the right Jimmy's? There's more than one, you know. Just like that the trail goes dead. "You try to get people involved in the story," Conlon says with a shrug, on his way back...