I've long wanted to write about the work of Dorothy Uhnak, a police officer with the NYPD who wrote procedurals before Joseph Wambaugh put his stamp on cop novels in the early 1970s, but the opportunity didn't present itself until I finished reading the only one of her books still in print (nominally, since it's a UK edition distributed here in the US), LAW AND ORDER, first published in 1973 and a million-copy bestseller.
The results of these most recent labors takes shape in my newest column for the Barnes & Noble Review, which opens like this:
In 1953, the idea of a single female police recruit to the New York City Police Department, let alone a handful, was big news. And when the New York Times wrote up the-then shocking idea of these women engaged in public outdoor physical activity as part of the examinations they needed to pass, naturally they included photos of the department’s newest members -- including one young mother and engineer’s wife, born and raised on Ryer Avenue in the Bronx. A decade later, Dorothy Uhnak immortalized her beat-walking experiences -- which included knocking down a robber more than twice her size -- in her memoir Police Woman.
By the end of the 1960s, Uhnak had added to pioneering police work literary acclaim with a trio of award- winning novels following the career of Christie Opara, a detective protagonist as cool and methodical on the trail of multiple murderers (The Bait) political protesters (The Witness) and mobbed-up types (The Ledger) as she was raising a child on her own and considering a romance with her brash and sharp-tongued boss. Consciously or otherwise, Uhnak was planting the seeds for female detectives more private-minded -- like Millhone, McCone and Warshawski -- and subsequent generations of hard-boiled literary women. But until the Times reported Uhnak's death of a self-administered drug overdose in 2006, her contributions went unnoticed by a great many readers -- including me. I soon realized this void was shameful on several levels...
Read on for the rest, and see Ed Lynskey's 2004 interview with Uhnak for further background.
SA-aaarah, geesh!! "as if!" I needed to find another author to "follow" over the next year!!! But my lovely Boston Public Library has ALL her books available, so I've checked out POLICEWOMAN and THE BAIT, may as well make them the start of a new "one book a month" challenge for myself in 2010, hey? Uhnak is one of those names I've kept rattle-ing around the back of my commodiously empty brain over the years, meaning to "get to sometime..."
Posted by: Abbey | January 18, 2010 at 02:57 PM