Word: lockley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Report to the Commissioner is the story of Bo Lockley, a self-doubting rookie cop who joins the New York City Police Department out of remorse over his brother's death in Vietnam, but also in deference to the wishes of his father, a tough police veteran. Bo had planned to file for C.O. status in the draft prior to his brother's death; in the confusion of becoming a sole surviving son and not having to tell his father of his reticence to enter the army. Bo is moved by conscience to gratify his father and join the force...
...bares the personal ambition and selfishness which seep into law enforcement and often bring those most responsible for the law to circumvent it. He portrays a captain and lieutenant who chance serious reprisals in order to gain a breakthrough which will lead to promotion. In the process, they use Lockley as a pawn to further their plan, and they risk the life of an audacious female undercover agent, Past Butler, whose voluntary role in the scheme is to bed down with a high-rolling black pimp who works Times Square. The irony upon which Mills builds his book is that...
...some ways. Lockley is the most unconvincing character in Report to the Commissioner. He is too lofty in his ideals, too typecast in his youthful confusions and contradictions, and ultimately, too naive to be a detective who has made it through the police academy, even if on his father's name. But he is also a rending figure, a person lost in the murky realitics of city life and unfulfillment. His only fulfillment--the successful pursuit of The Stick and finding his "search object", Det. Butler--ends in disaster. A case is brought against him by the Department for Butler...
There are other weak links in Mills's tale, most notably Det. Butler. She is a gorgeous, ambitious and tough female cop who is just too surreal in her myriad attributes. Also, Mills employs an inter-Departmental report on the Lockley case as the vehicle for his story. He includes office memos, tapes interviews by the internal security office, and other "obtained" narratives such as a magazine article on Butler that never saw print. But despite his care in sticking to the format of a report, Mills slips into a trap posed by his own tight prose: no transcripts ever...
...Mills has the knack of clothing anger in fact, and he is one of the few writers today who understand police work and can make policemen both believable and human. The most interesting thing about his novel is the squaring off between the young cop, whose name is Bo Lockley, and the police establishment. Bo is an inept, unskeptical idealist, "hurt by animals he didn't know were in the jungle." Of course the foolhardy girl agent should not have been allowed to pursue her plan of seducing the pusher in order to get information...