NEW YORK — This time around, Edward Conlon’s day job is putting words on a computer screen, not putting handcuffs on bad actors.
So, no pseudonyms and no articles in The New Yorker. No police uniform, either. But he has a title that fits him and only him: director of executive communications in the office of the New York City police commissioner, James P. O’Neill.
Here he is in a suit, the same person who once said that he had joined the Police Department “precisely to avoid work that entailed a suit, a commute and a cubicle.” He was assigned to a cubicle when he rejoined the department last year, but now has a small office. “They reshuffled things,” he said, perhaps a bit sheepishly.
Bookworms with memories will remember Conlon, now 54, as the cop who wrote an acclaimed best-seller. In a 16-year career that ended when he retired in 2011, he was an officer in the Housing Bureau, a detective in the 44th Precinct in the Bronx and in the Police Department’s intelligence-gathering liaison bureau in Jordan.
From time to time, he wrote articles under the heading “Cop Diary” for The New Yorker, which published them under the made-up byline Marcus Laffey, the better to protect him against retaliation by bosses who might not like the frankness or the rawness of what he said about the Police Department.
The articles led to the best-seller, “Blue Blood,” written on his days off or on the margins of days when he worked the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift. The New York Times Book Review said it “runs from the episodes of a cop’s life to meditations on that life, from gun-in-hand assignments like executing search warrants to mundane calls about vicious cats.” Time magazine said “Blue Blood” just might be “the best account ever written of life behind the badge.”
Then, after seven more years of life behind the badge, he retired to live the writing life full-time.
He did, until last year. “Had a big book to write,” he said with a flat matter-of-factness. “Wrote it.”
It is “The Policewomen’s Bureau,” a novel, if only lightly fictionalized. It is the story of a pioneering detective that opens in the 1950s, when the Police Department was less than hospitable to women in its ranks. It will be out in May.
Having handed in the manuscript, he faced the what-to-do-now problem. Maybe retirement is everything those who are not yet retired dream of — even if, in his case, there should be quotation marks around “retired.”
“The first three or four years, every day was like a snow day,” he said. “I could eat candy for breakfast. I got punchy.”
He realized what he really wanted was to work for the Police Department again. He still had the world-weary look of a detective who is bemused, or maybe amused, by the absurdity of what the person across a table in an interrogation room had just said. But his days as a street cop were over.
So a deputy commissioner, William W. Andrews, who is responsible for executive communications in the department, “invented this job for me,” Conlon said.
Andrews said he was looking for “more than we can do with our standard bureaucratic writing.”
“What Ed does is breathe life into our policies and what we’re up to,” Andrews said. “I mean, he’s got a wonderful ear for dialogue; he’s great at putting people on the page and he knows policing inside out.”
For his part, Conlon said the new job allowed him “to feel like a cop sometimes, but without any emergency responsibilities.”
“I don’t have crises,” he said. What he, and the Police Department, have is an agenda. “Neighborhood policing stories,” he said. “They’re stories we want to get told.”
His job involves some “institutional writing,” as he called it — the bread and butter for speechwriters and in-house public relations people. Such writing fills official publications like the police commissioner’s annual report that was released last week.
“I did the detective section,” he said. “At least the draft of it.”
But, as Conlon put it, “other stories catch my eye.”
They are the ones that become magazine-length features that are posted on the Police Department’s website with his byline. They are distinctly different from other posts on the site, which tend to be short and forgettable.
By contrast, Conlon’s articles run to thousands of words. The one he posted in July, “The War at Home,” was about two patrol officers shot and killed in the East Village in the early 1970s in an incident a police spokesman at the time called “guerrilla warfare.” The piece begins with two sentences, a Conlonesque opening that is as wry as it is dry: “1971 was not a good year to be a cop in New York. The city was dying, everyone agreed, and not from natural causes.” Black Liberation Army claimed responsibility.
His most recent article, “Talk to Me,” posted in November, about the police hostage negotiating team. It was formed in the 1970s after events like the Brooklyn bank robbery that inspired the movie “Dog Day Afternoon.”
“The Policewomen’s Bureau” is an account of someone who was only grudgingly accepted in the Police Department. Sexism, and worse, permeate the story. He spent seven years on “The Policewomen’s Bureau.” The obvious question was: What took so long?
“Big struggle finding the story,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be a cop book. I didn’t want it to be a mystery or a thriller.” That created the problem of “what elements to tell without getting bogged down like a biopic.”
Conlon changed the main character’s name from Marie Cirile to Marie Carrara, and she had a career that gave him a lot to work with. In one chapter, the detective in the book drives the wrong way along a one-way street. Cirile did that, on a burglary case that made headlines and said afterward that her job was “a crazy way of making a living.”
Really?
“Can be, yeah,” Conlon said.
“I went from being a cop to being an ex-cop to being an ex-ex-cop,” he said. “I’m not neutral. The action is a little more removed than it used to be, but it’s still pretty close.”
So he is working Police Headquarters the way he once worked the streets, which is to say methodically. The pickings are good.
“This is the Fort Knox of content,” he said. “I’m never going to run out of stories here. I could canvass every floor and fill books and books.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.