In the unlikely event that you should ever shoot a New York police officer, it might be helpful to know the lengths to which their colleagues will go to catch you. In one particularly dogged pursuit, the force bought a nightclub and populated it entirely with undercover officers posing as mafiosi. Night after night, for months, a young wannabe wiseguy called Henry Vega socialised with the mock mobsters, chasing an invitation to become a "made man". Eventually, he sought their trust by bragging about the time he shot a cop - only to discover, in a blur of badges and guns, that he was the star of his own personal Truman Show.
That might sound like the overcooked plot of a TV police series, but the source is Blue Blood, Edward Conlon's memoir of seven years as a New York policeman, which oozes a credibility that's beyond question. This ribald, unsparing description of life in the NYPD blue was a publishing sensation when it hit bookshops in America in 2004, garnering fans from Jay McInerney to James Frey.
But at that time it was considered too detailed and parochial for British tastes. Then came The Wire, a television show that proved that a fanatically accurate portrayal of American cop talk, drugs trafficking and police office politics could draw a small but manically dedicated UK audience. So now Blue Blood has crossed the pond - but this gritty, grimy epic is no cheap cash-in, more of a high-water mark of realism and insider knowledge, against which the television shows have to measure up.
Conlon comes from an Irish-American family of cops, but his Harvard degree was supposed to lead anywhere except "the Job". Then in 1995, with his writing career failing to take off, the lure of family legend became irresistible and he joined the Police Academy. The first two years of his career are the best source of tales - Conlon served as a uniformed "beat cop" in the impoverished housing projects of the South Bronx. His richly chaotic days were filled with comic idiocy and lunacy more than criminality - such as the man who broke into a hospital to steal some headed paper, to post a letter to his ex-girlfriend bearing the unconvincing medical diagnosis "You got the Aids, bitch! F**** you, you got the clapp!!", or the old woman who mistreated her cat so badly that Conlon had to use Mace spray to subdue the crazed creature before he could shove it towards a final escape from life's cruelty, out of a 19th-storey window.
But his initial affection, either "from college liberalism or Irish sentiment", for the derelicts and delinquents of the South Bronx soon cools as half-bricks and tinned food rain down on him from the rooftops and the shocking scenes mount up. He finds an elderly woman trapped in bed and being eaten by rats, kept barely alive by her family just for the welfare cheques, and has to deal with one toddler dying after eating crack cocaine from a coffee table, then another being stabbed to death with a pen by their eight-year-old neighbour. A transfer to a plainclothes narcotics unit comes just in time for both jaded cop and battered reader.
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At which point we're really in Wire territory. The bewildering vocabulary of narcotics policing is laid bare - I now know the right time to send an uncle with some bim and his ghost to get a slab from a mope at a set where there's been a kite in the Four-O (send an undercover cop with some marked notes and a back-up to buy a bag of crack from a felon at a suspected dealing venue where a complaint has been called in, in the 40th precinct. But you knew that). Also revealed is the balance of tedious, time-devouring surveillance and sporadic, terrifying violence. "You walk up dirty stairs to a dirty roof to watch a dirty street" for hours on end then, with a bark of "Hit it!" on the radio, "bedlam, a roil of running, struggling bodies and airborne stash".
The most intriguing revelation in these chapters is the reliance on informants in America's war on drugs - essentially, the cops pay addicts to stay addicts, to watch them buying. "Morally, I didn't see the problem," says the now-hardened Conlon, while explaining that he preferred to employ heroin junkies over crackheads: "Junkies were a little more human, for a little while longer. They had a longer ride to the bottom."
The junkies aren't the only mugs in this game, though. Most of the dealers Conlon arrests earn less than the minimum wage, and the sheer futility of the dangerous, poorly paid police work is un-missable. The narcs close down a drugs den in a sixth-floor apartment, it reopens on the third, they bring in a van-load of dealers, the district attorney lets them go because the system's overloaded. And the tiny number of arrests that make it to trial face the peculiar problem of the "Bronx jury": in an area where 12 good men and true can be hard to come by, guilty verdicts are a less than even bet. Conlon recalls one juror sprinting from the courtroom when he realised the undercover cop on the stand was a regular customer of his own drug ring.
This constantly losing battle creates an "assembly-line sameness" in Conlon's job, which starts to reflect in the text, a sluggishness not helped by overlong biographical and historical interludes. But the calendar drives the reader on - September 11, 2001, approaches.
Conlon was safely in the Bronx when the Twin Towers fell, but his insider status permits a painfully honest dissection of the aftermath. Beneath the heroism and solidarity, there was bickering, incompetence, and even criminality - Conlon hears of prison guards who arrived at Ground Zero to "help" and looted jewellery stores. And, for the men of the NYPD, there was the deadening task of standing in a landfill site for weeks on end, sifting through every last gram of debris for remains and coming across random body parts.
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Blue Blood ends in 2002, when our hero "makes detective". He's still on the force, and a sequel would be most welcome. Conlon's advice to anyone who's watched too many cop shows on television is strident: "You want to know what my job is like? Go to your garage, piss in the corner, and stand there for eight hours." Or, preferably, read this outstanding book.
Blue Blood by Edward Conlon
Ebury £13 pp576