This has been a particularly bad year for hard-boiled mystery
writers.
I just found out that Dorothy Uhnak, a cop who wrote cop
novels before Joseph Wambaugh, and a woman who wrote about
strong woman protagonists before Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton,
or Sara Paretsky, died in July, apparently of a
self-inflicted rug overdose.
According to her daughter, the 76-year-old had been depressed
after suffering a number of accidents in recent years.
She'd been a decorated detective in the New York City Transit
Police, when Transit was still a separate agency from the
NYPD, and her fame helped her get her first book, a
non-fiction memoir entitled POLICEWOMAN, published in
1964.
Her first novel, THE BAIT, which introduced her series
character, Detective Christie Opara of NYPD's Manhattan DA's
Squad, won the Edgar for Best First Mystery Novel (an award
she shared with E. Richard Johnson's SILVER STREET).
After three Opara novels, she began to write longer, more
epic cop novels like the multi-generational family saga, LAW
& ORDER, an apparent fictionalization of the Alice
Crimmins case, THE INVESTIGATION, and VICTIMS, which
apparently fictionalized the Kitty Genovese case, many of
which were NY TIMES best-sellers.
I'm sorry she's gone, and sorrier that she was so despondent
in her later life that she felt compelled to end it
herself.
JIM DOHERTY
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