Word: hoolihan
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...Mike Hoolihan, as her name and the conventions of the genre might suggest, is a big, blowsy, chain-smoking ex-alcoholic of a cop, a woman usually mistaken for a man, and one who has seen more than her fair share of hard knocks. She lives in an American city that could be anywhere--it has a harbor, a university and a wrong side of the tracks--and the train that runs beneath her building disrupts her dreams. She was abused by her father, and the other men in her life were a bunch of "woman-haters and woman-hitters...
Except Colonel Tom Rockwell, her boss on the force. Tom helped Hoolihan dry out, so when his daughter Jennifer is found dead, an apparent suicide, he turns to Hoolihan to help solve the mystery of why such a beautiful young thing would put three bullets in her head. Could this have been murder...
...quintessentially American myths about cops and robbers and have a little fun with American English while he's at it. Amis satisfyingly uses "badge" as a verb, as in, "I badged my way through the tunnel of uniforms around the front door," and he offers this memorable description of Hoolihan's work among the dead: "I've seen them all," she says. "Jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters...I have seen bodies left dead so long that your only shot at a t.o.d. [time of death] is to weigh the maggots." And Hoolihan as a drunk, Amis writes...
Amis takes as his premise that both the criminals and the police are trapped by stereotypes not of their own making. "No profession has been so massively fictionalized," he writes--and then just piles on. When Hoolihan interrogates Jennifer's boyfriend Trader Faulkner, for instance, he threatens to lawyer up, provoking a response from Hoolihan that will be familiar to all NYPD Blue viewers...
...literal mystery becomes a psychological one, an investigation into the whys and wherefores of suicide and envy. Soon enough, Hoolihan finds herself facing the abyss that lies between Jennifer's seemingly ideal life and her own drab existence. "Jennifer Rockwell is inside of me," the cop says, "trying to reveal what I don't want to see." And this, of course, is Amis' mode as well: to shine a flashlight on our seamy undersides and see what crawls...