Books: Rhapsody In Blue

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The amazing thing about Blue Blood is that where a lesser writer would just have gone numb, Conlon stays alive to the humor and the sadness and the ironies of life even in the teeth of the city's everyday assault--bricks (and, once, a canned ham) thrown from rooftops, the festering bitterness of precinct-house feuds, the bizarro underworld of the midnight shift, the agony, both Dantean and Sisyphean, of sifting through the rubble of the World Trade Center that has been moved to Staten Island. Conlon has no ambitions as a whistle-blower or a hero--he's neither a Serpico nor a Supercop--and that keeps Blue Blood free of distortion and full of perspective. The result is a document with a testimonial force equal to that of Michael Herr's Dispatches.

At the end of the day Conlon heads to a culinary establishment known as Jimmy's Diner. Big Bird has a phone number for his assailant, and Conlon has traced it to a fax machine there. The kindly woman behind the counter regrets to inform us that she doesn't recognize the phone number, and anyway Jimmy's doesn't have a fax machine, and are we sure we have the right Jimmy's? There's more than one, you know. Just like that the trail goes dead. "You try to get people involved in the story," Conlon says with a shrug, on his way back to the car. "Sometimes they care, sometimes they don't." It didn't work this time. In Blue Blood, it does.