Harvard Cop’s Novel Captures NYC Stakeouts, Probes Corruption
"Red on Red"
Random House via Bloomberg
The cover jacket of "Red on Red" by Edward Conlon.
The cover jacket of "Red on Red" by Edward Conlon. Source: Random House via Bloomberg
Edward Conlon
Brian Scannell/Random House via Bloomberg
Edward Conlon, author of "Red on Red."
Edward Conlon, author of "Red on Red." Photographer: Brian Scannell/Random House via Bloomberg
Edward Conlon had a Harvard diploma and three generations of cops in his family when he joined the New York City Police Department in 1995.
He described the job in the well-reviewed memoir “Blue Blood” (2004), writing of the danger and bureaucracy, from walking a beat to cleaning up after 9/11. By book’s end, he had a gold detective’s shield.
The fictional shield bearers in Conlon’s first novel, “Red on Red,” are N.Y.P.D. detectives Meehan and Esposito. They’re Irish and Italian, introspective and spontaneous -- in many ways the classic yin and yang of the police procedural. As the story opens, they’ve recently become partners after Meehan agrees to work undercover for Internal Affairs, the force’s watchdog, which suspects Esposito of corruption.
The action perks along through the detectives’ caseload, quickly defined by a hanging suicide, a drug-gang killing and a serial rapist, while Meehan’s quasi-quisling role and questions about his partner fuel tension. Esposito stokes those doubts as he moves from rule-bending pragmatism to the legally and morally questionable.
“‘When you start, you picture all the great things you might do,” he tells Meehan, “and in the end, you wind up wondering what you can get away with.’”
The off-duty byplay taps the cops’ personal lives, with Meehan dwelling on the collapse of his childless marriage versus the attractions of a flower-shop owner, and Esposito, despite wife and kids happy at home, always on the prowl.
Bona Fides
From stakeouts to takedowns to squad-car banter, Conlon brings his bona fides. His cop-perp interviews are among the best I’ve read, and they come with fun inside dope.
He doesn’t overstate, and that makes the details more convincing and engaging -- though maybe less alluring for those accustomed to neon language and gore. There’s almost nothing extreme in “Red on Red,” aside from a macabre torture scene.
The final confrontation is nicely paced and staged -- and, unlike much of the novel, tightly written. Conlon brings a welcome thoughtfulness to a genre that tends to operate from the mouth down. Yet less is always more in this kind of fiction, and I hope he goes on to deploy at book length the knack for compression he displays in passages like this precis of a Catholic funeral:
“Church was a blur -- qui tolis peccata mundi -- then bagpipes and bells, a hundred handshakes, firm or frail. Incense inside, cigarettes out. All had gone as it should have, the incidental touches of beauty, ancient forms for grieving, praise, acceptance of mystery at the heart of things. Roman ritual and Irish weather.”
“Red on Red” is published by Spiegel & Grau (442 pages, $26). To order this book in North America, click here.
(Jeffrey Burke is an editor with Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on the story: Jeffrey Burke in New York at jburke21@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for the story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
Rate this Page