This will be the first of (hopefully) several short
observations on cops who write police procedurals that I'll
be sending along during this month.
Way back when I first got joined RARA-AVIS, a discussion
developed over whether women writers were capable of writing
hard-boiled. During the course of that thread, I weighed in
with the opinion that any writer (male or female) whose work
is tough and colloquial could and should be considered
hard-boiled.
The comment "tough and colloquial" was
entirely off-hand, and I had no idea at the time that I was
suggesting a definitive answer to the question,
"What does 'hard-boiled' mean?"
Anyway, inasmuch as one of my first RARA-AVIS posts was about
the relative toughness of women writers, it now seems
appropriate to profile Detective Dorothy Uhnak, who spent ten
years as an officer in the New York City Transit Police,
winning their highest decoration for valor along the way,
before becoming a best-selling novelist.
Ms. Uhnak's first book, POLICEWOMAN, a non-fiction
autobiography describing her law enforcement career, came out
in the mid-60s. To the best of my knowledge, this is the
first "cop memoir" to be written by a woman
cop.
Her first novel, THE BAIT, appeared in 1968, after she left
the Force. Introducing her only series character, NYPD
Detective Christie Opara, of the Manhattan DA's Squad, it won
the Edgar for Best First Novel (ironically it tied in that
category with another procedural, SILVER STREET, which, like
THE BAIT, dealt with the police search for a serial killer;
where Ms. Uhnak had been a cop, SILVER STREET's author, E.
Richard Johnson, was a convict doing time for homicide). The
other two books in the Opara trilogy are THE WITNESS, about
racial tensions and late 60s protests, and THE LEDGER, about
organized crime in NYC.
Later on Ms. Uhnak, who's not especially prolific, started
breaking (successfully as it happens) for the best-seller
money that Joseph Wambaugh had proved it was possible for
cop-writers to get. LAW & ORDER, combined the
procedural with the multi-generational family saga, examining
three generations of Irish cops in NYC. THE INVESTIGATION
fictionalized a famous case involving a mother accused of
murdering her two children (this book was adapted into a
KOJAK movie). VICTIMS, like the Opara books featuring a
female cop-protagonist, fictionalized the Kitty Genovese
case. Occasionally she's even written non-cop books.
Aside from being a great admirer of Dorothy Uhnak, I think
she doesn't get nearly the credit she deserves for starting
several different waves in crime fiction.
THE BAIT appeared several years before Wambaugh's THE
NEW CENTURIONS, yet it's Wambaugh who's generally credited
with starting the wave of
"cops-turned-writers" that began in the '70s
and '80s and is still continuing. Further, it was the first
in a series of novels featuring a tough, professional, woman
detective, yet the credit for starting that particular trend
goes to either Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, or Sara Paretsky,
all of whom appeared years after Ms. Uhnak (probably because
Ms. Uhnak wrote about cops rather than the archetypal
hard-boiled hero, the private eye).
I highly recommend Ms. Uhnak's work, and my main criticism of
the Christie Opara series is that there were only three of
them.
JIM DOHERTY
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