Thin blue line
Don Winslow dedicates his outstanding crime novel, “The Force,” to law enforcement personnel murdered in the line of duty during the time he wrote his book. The list runs 2½ pages. Wilson may intend the citations as more than a tribute. He may suggest that the tense and dangerous lives these officers led caution the reader against hasty judgment of his protagonist, Staten Island cop Denny Malone.
Malone’s tangled life and career offer a great deal to judge. He first appears after the feds have landed him in New York City’s Metropolitan Correction Center. Malone had founded the Manhattan North Special Task Force, charged with getting drugs and drug dealers out of Harlem. He and his partners succeeded — too well. When they took down a kingpin dealer in the biggest drug bust in the history of New York, they skimmed a big amount of his stash and dealt the drugs they’d confiscated. Then Malone got caught. Now he’s “[a] dirty cop.”
Malone’s descent was not sudden. It progressed “[a] step at a time.” First there were free sandwiches and coffee from deli owners happy to have about a guy from “Da Force.” Then came “a couple of grand” a fleeing dealer left on the floor. Malone and his pals scooped up the loot. Why not? At the mortgaged home await kids in diapers, who will one day need college educations, and a wife who likes to dine “someplace that had tablecloths.”
The “perks” of the job, like the uppers Malone pops, soothe deeper wounds. Malone’s brother, a firefighter, was a victim of 9/11. Malone’s marriage collapses. His mistress needs money for drug rehab. And he’s haunted by the death of his father when Malone was 8:
“He was a cop on those streets, coming home in the morning after a graveyard shift with murder in his eyes, death in his nose and an icicle in his heart that never melted and eventually killed him. Got out of the car in the driveway one morning and his heart cracked . ... Eight years old, leaving the house to walk to school, [Malone] saw the blue overcoat in the pile of dirty snow he’d helped his dad shovel off the driveway.”
The images in this haunting passage clearly enlist sympathy for Malone. He is an avenging angel whom readers may pull for in spite of themselves. When Malone comes across young Marcus Sayer in Harlem, “his face swollen and purple, his bottom lip cut open,” the detective takes the kid home to his father, Dante. Malone “twirls [his nightstick] like a baton, bringing it down on Dante’s right wrist, snapping it like a Popsicle stick.”
Winslow puts Malone through a plot that’s a cats cradle made of barbed wire. Money-stuffed envelopes pass hands, foul-smelling street snitches offer tips on a dealer’s whereabouts, and city officials look the other way until their heads spin. Then, as Malone sits in jail, the feds make Malone an offer he may not refuse: inform on your fellow officers and you and your family get new lives.
Winslow writes with invisible talent. In the way that Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart never seemed to be acting, Winslow seems just to spin a tale. Careful reading, though, reveals the author’s razor-sharp ear for the ways cops and New Yorkers talk and images and details that evoke a dark, gritty, violent New York.
Suspenseful as “The Force” is, this reader put it down with a few quibbles. At nearly 500 pages, the book is overlong, particularly in its early chapters, which contain a lot of backstory. A glossary of street and cop argot — terms like “skel,” “slinger” and “rips” — would have been useful, even if the context eventually clarifies meaning. And with scores of characters moving through the action, a list of them, and how they function in the plot, would have helped.
These matters still don’t detract from the fascination of Denny Malone. A complex Everyman, he holds the tale together and may earn our sympathy and even empathy. And with film rights to “The Force” sold prepublication, the prospect of playing this complicated central character surely has Casey Affleck working on a Staten Island accent.