Cop Shot – Mike McAlary, 1990 ★★★

A Helluva Drug

Every decade has its representative criminal activity: bootlegging in the 1920s; draft-dodging in the 1960s; dedicated disruption of service attacks in the 2020s. In the 1980s, crack cocaine was all the rage. Especially in the cities, its casualty rate had the quality of a pandemic.

Early one February morning in 1988, in the Jamaica section of Queens, crack claimed the life of rookie police officer Edward Byrne. He was in a marked squad car, guarding the home of a crack-crime witness when five bullets were fired directly at him. He was dead instantly.

As journalist Mike McAlary describes it in his account of the crime, Cop Shot, it was a murder that jolted a city, awoke a nation to the insidious nature of the crack trade, and triggered a rage-fueled hunger for justice. “This had only become the city’s biggest police investigation since Son of Sam,” he writes.

Blue Blood – Edward Conlon, 2004 ★★★★

To Serve and Protect

A life in the New York Police Department is a kaleidoscope of the crazy, the deadly, and the profound. That’s even more true when you take on a generational view of the experience. Edward Conlon details his own time as well as those he has known among New York’s Finest.

Conlon came to police work seeing it as a unique type of employment, a vocation more than a job. People he grew up knowing, on both sides of his large Irish family, inspired him to think big:

I didn’t want to hear the story as much as I wanted to tell it, and I didn’t want to tell the story as much as I wanted to live it.

Zodiac – Robert Graysmith, 1986 ★½ [2007 Paperback Edition]

Getting Away with It

It is better sometimes to be first than right.

Take Robert Graysmith and his book Zodiac, a bestseller in its first printing and basis for the 2007 film of the same name. An entire generation of readers got pulled into the true-crime genre thanks to this sprawling tale of a California murder spree which officially ran from December 1968 to October 1969.

Yet the book itself is deeply confused, full of bizarre and absurd claims its author neither substantiates nor connects. Zodiac experts frequently play piñata with Graysmith’s version of the facts. Still, it is this account which dominates popular understanding of this absorbing mystery.

Exclusive! The Inside Story Of Patricia Hearst And The SLA – Marilyn Baker with Sally Brompton, 1974 ★★½

On Tania's Trail

Cultural changes flash by too quickly and imperceptibly to pinpoint. But growing up in the 1970s, I remember knowing when everything went irrevocably insane. It was when that newspaper heiress held up a bank and denounced her parents as “pigs.”

I was wrong a lot when I was a boy, but I wasn’t wrong about that. Patty Hearst was a death knell for the America I knew.

Marilyn Baker must have felt that way, too. Even while Hearst was still on the run, calling herself Tania the urban guerilla, public-television newswoman Baker collected her thoughts around this mind-bending story. The result, Exclusive!, combines a sardonic, self-important tone with an honest attempt at deciphering the Hearst riddle.

Casualties Of War – Daniel Lang, 1969 ★★★★½

Blood Brothers

Truth was called the first casualty of war way back in 1918, but other losses also factor into this real-life account of one U.S. soldier’s experience confronting atrocity and silence during the Vietnam War.

The most immediate and devastating was that of Phan Thi Mao, a young woman raped and murdered by four U. S. soldiers on a recon mission in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in November 1966. Casualties Of War details how killers and bystanders become war’s victims, too.

Crime Wave – James Ellroy, 1999 ★½

Baby, I'm a Star

James Ellroy had graduated to the big time as a writer by the late 1990s; Crime Wave reads like a victory lap that goes a few loops too long.

The first problem with Crime Wave is summarizing it. A collection of articles originally published in GQ magazine, it includes a short story and two longer stories, but true-crime reportage and commentaries dominate. All this seems a good fit for Ellroy the crime writer.

Yet even when centering these pieces around his hometown and favorite city, Los Angeles, the results too often read like clunky self-parody:

The Teamsters – Steven Brill, 1978 ★★

Married to the Mob

When it comes to the history of the American labor movement, the biggest question for many of us is not the interests of workers or what constitutes a fair wage. It’s what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.

James Riddle Hoffa was no ideologue, but even before he became the most famous missing person in my lifetime he was the most notorious and consequential labor figure of his century. In The Teamsters, Steven Brill examines the union and its Hoffa imprint in the immediate aftermath of his 1975 disappearance.

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote, 1966 ★★★★½

Tru Grit

Famous for mainstreaming two genres, true crime and New Journalism, In Cold Blood is perhaps even more remarkable for how it turned a squalid, non-mysterious quadruple murder into a rare book-driven sensation that remains as powerful over fifty years on.

Truman Capote called his best-known work a “non-fiction novel,” which sets off all sorts of warning bells but sums up its approach: an immersive mix of multiple points-of-view, shifting narratives, even verb tenses.

The more I read it, the more gutted I feel for the victims and the rest of humanity. Then I want to read it all over again.

The Murder Of Bob Crane – Robert Graysmith, 1993 ★★★

Too Much Sex Can Be Hazardous to your Health

He played the lead role in one of television’s strangest sitcoms, a farce about Allied soldiers imprisoned by the Third Reich. A few years later, Bob Crane was a prisoner himself, of a swinger’s lifestyle that was not only pathetic and ruinous, but as Robert Graysmith posits in his book The Murder Of Bob Crane, ultimately fatal.

A sleeping Crane was bludgeoned to death in a Scottsdale, Arizona apartment one June morning in 1978. This brought into sharp focus how he had lived, using the dregs of a once-flourishing career to hook up with all the women he could find. Suspicion quickly centered on John Henry Carpenter, Crane’s wingman during his sexcapades, yet the case was circumstantial and the horizon of others with motives too vast.

The Professor And The Madman – Simon Winchester, 1998 ★

Notes from an Asylum

There are good and bad kinds of crazy. This book features both.

The notion of capturing every word of the world’s dominant language from “aa” (an obsolete term used in the 1400s meaning “stream” or “watercourse”) to “zyxt” (Old Kentish for “to see”) with little more than a nib pen and foolscap paper has a germ of madness at its core. But there was more than sober, willful monomania in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. There was a certified lunatic at work as well.

Hoover's FBI: The Inside Story By Hoover's Trusted Lieutenant – Cartha D. "Deke" DeLoach, 1995 ★★

Sympathy for J. Edgar

J. Edgar Hoover, civil libertarian? According to one of his top aides, yes.

For a time in the 1960s, Cartha DeLoach was the third-ranking executive in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Bureau’s point man with the White House. Watching his boss dicker with President Lyndon B. Johnson on what the FBI could and couldn’t do under the Constitution was for DeLoach both instructive and edifying:

Killing Reagan – Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard, 2015 ★★

He Did It for Jodie

How does one write about a murdering a person where the victim, a U. S. President, lives on for a quarter-century?

If you are producing a lucrative series of books with a running title like Killing So-and-so, you find a way of tying that person’s eventual demise to the murder attempt. That is what Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard did in the case of Ronald Reagan, who went down in history not as a victim of an assassin’s bullet but instead Alzheimer’s disease.

The Presidential Transcripts – The Washington Post, et. al., 1974 ★★½

Watergate in Real Time

The Watergate scandal reshaped American politics, destroyed one of the 20^th century’s most dynamic leaders, and defined an era of cynicism and paranoia. What was it like going down?

Unlike most scandals, people can hear and read this one for themselves, thanks to President Richard Nixon’s hidden tape machines. After a Senate investigating committee subpoenaed the tapes, The Washington Post, which had been covering Watergate since it was just a third-rate burglary, wasted no time printing a 693-page paperback that contained key Nixon meetings when Watergate was under discussion.

The Ninth Juror – Giraud Chester, 1970 ★★★

Secrets of a Jury Room

If you have seen 12 Angry Men, you may remember the line: “No jury can declare a man guilty unless it’s sure.” But how practical an approach is that, really? How sure is sure?

Going by that play/movie, “sure” is well-nigh impossible if you can’t be sure a witness isn’t lying for attention or a defense lawyer is up to snuff. If we all followed that pious Henry Fonda formula, prisons would be full of bankers and not much else. The real world offers better examples of justice in action, like this long-forgotten book by a TV executive.

The Diamond Smugglers – Ian Fleming, 1957 ★½

A Bond Story that Never Was

You know their names, no introductions necessary: Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Goldfinger. Dr. No. Rosa Klebb. Classic villains brought to you by the same man who created their common foil, James Bond 007: Ian Fleming.

But none got the build-up of a villain from another Fleming book: Monsieur Diamant, a. k. a. Mr. Diamond.

High Treason – Robert J. Groden & Harrison Edward Livingstone, 1989 ★

Who Shot John

Many books posit the idea of a high-level conspiracy in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, books with titles like Six Seconds In Dallas, Best Evidence, and Crossfire. High Treason is different in a way signaled by its title.

Secrecy And Power: The Life Of J. Edgar Hoover – Richard Gid Powers, 1987 ★★★★

The Making of a Swamp Thing

Sometimes without trying, I pick up a book with present-day relevance. What better way to delve into that mysterious monstrosity of the moment, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, than with this old biography of its legendary founder?

Kill The Dutchman! – Paul Sann, 1971 ★★★½

Who Was Dutch Schultz?

The book sat in my father’s den cabinet for years; I knew its title back when Richard Scarry and Crayola were my reading companions. Forty-six years later I finally got around to reading Kill The Dutchman!, wondering after just one thing: What took me so long?

Target Blue: An Insider's View Of The NYPD – Robert Daley, 1973 ★★★½

Walking the Thin Blue Line

You are the new liberal police commissioner of the biggest, toughest city in America, and want a fresh look for your scandal-ridden department. So you give a local reporter a gun and a badge and tell him he’s now your deputy commissioner. What do you think happens next?

The Interpreter – Alice Kaplan, 2005 ★★½

Separate and Unequal

Two different American armies marched through France in World War II, united only in name. One was all-white, the other black troops led by mostly white officers. An injustice in itself, the practice led to other kinds of injustice that is the subject of this book.

The Interpreter presents two cases in which a Frenchman was shot to death by an American soldier. One killer was African-American, the other white. The black killer was hung for his crime. The white killer went free.