By Stephen Metcalf

May 2, 2004 | 8:00 p.m

Blue

Blood , by Edward Conlon. Riverhead, 562 pages, $26.95. The notable first-person genres of the past 10 years or so-spoiled-child memoir, abuse memoir, depression memoir (did I mention spoiled-child memoir?)-attest to a world in which high literacy and genuine hardship no longer go together quite as commonly as they once did. War once took care of this, at least for men: It yoked brutal experience to literate young people, prematurely and routinely. My father, who went to Princeton, barely mentions his World War II experiences along the Burma Road. If, however, like Oliver Stone or John Kerry, you left Yale to fight in Indochina, you might dine out on the decision for the rest of your life. As world wars gave way to regional police actions, and as an ethos of shared sacrifice gave way to student deferrals, everything changed. In a world of unequal sacrifice-a world that creams talent efficiently, then shelters it from misery-the gulf between the literary and the nonliterary world deepens. Here comes a stunning exception to prove the rule. Starting in the late 90's, under the pseudonym Marcus Laffey, The New Yorker ran a series of columns called "Cop Diary." Written in the first person, they told the story of a young officer's fairly run-of-the-mill career in the NYPD, in prose that was anything but run-of-the mill. At its best, "Cop Diary" recalled the old New Yorker -not the famously twee New Yorker of the Shawn era, glorious as that could be, but an older old New Yorker , a kind of laconic blarney with roots deep in Joseph Mitchell. This was rare indeed: the intersection of high literacy with lowlife culture at the level of firsthand experience, a combination that the now-elaborate talent-sorting, talent-creaming apparatus often seems devoted to making extinct. Who was Marcus Laffey, and just what sort of throwback-or impostor-was he? Laffey has since been outed as one Edward Conlon, a now 40-ish Harvard graduate who made his way, over the course of roughly a decade, from New York City beat cop to gold-shield detective. Mr. Conlon has come clean with the entire story behind Laffey and his life on "the Job," as cops refer to it with a certain rueful pride. Blue Blood , his quietly remarkable memoir, is less a shoot-'em-up or po-faced Law and Order procedural-in fact, it's not remotely either of those-than an unusually sensitive reflection on criminality, police culture and the role of social class in America. The reason for the sensitivity, and for the unbridled enthusiasm with which the memoir is being greeted, is as surprising as it is refreshing: Mr. Conlon completely bollixed the post-Vietnam, meritocratic storyline. The only blue in Mr. Conlon's blood isn't Brahmin-it's pure Irish cop. His great-grandfather, Sergeant Pat Brown, used to "carry the bag on Atlantic Avenue" (he transported the mob's ill-gottens for them), and his Uncle Eddie was an officer on the force. It was Mr. Conlon's father who, as a career F.B.I. agent, vaulted the family's fortunes forward. The father appeared to the son as "the image of a G-man: tall and prematurely silver-haired, with a trench coat and fedora, a profile in sternness and probity that masked a playful curiosity and a devious sense of humor." After growing up a normal enough miscreant in working-class Westchester, Mr. Conlon continued the family's upward mobility by attending Harvard. But after Harvard and the usual false starts, he joined the NYPD. To have lurched from teenage Yonkers rogue to Yard-trodding scholar and, finally, to Bronx flatfoot was, as Mr. Conlon himself puts it, "closer to a crime against nature than a bad career choice." Better to have told his parents he was "going back to Ballinrobe, to tend a few sheep and dig potatoes with a stick." To be equal parts street and Ivy gives you universal credibility; and to straddle class lines in a world in which they only get more rigid automatically makes you a darling. But it also makes for a life of proliferating embarrassments. When a sergeant at the Police Academy asked Mr. Conlon if he had really attended Harvard, he replied with a pettifoggery worthy of his white-shoe classmates: "Not lately, Sarge" is the literal truth camouflaged as sarcasm. So committed was he to obscuring his credentials that when NYPD forms asked for his alma mater, he hoped his scrawl would be misread as "Howard." Mr. Conlon's embarrassment makes for a curiously unstable literary voice, one that drifts back and forth from polished but vivid old school ( McSorley's Wonderful Saloon ) to a quiet but persistently defensive machismo. He seems at pains to tell us about each of his life's many fistfights-almost the only thing he tells us about his Harvard years was that, upon arriving, he brawled-but then he shuffles his feet, aw shucks , and claims to have lost most of them. In the next breath he explains, "The word 'investigate' comes from the Latin vestigium …. " There's also a little too much towel-snapping, Hollywood-ready multi-ethnic camaraderie, as when the Italian and Irish cops, making light of the Compstat system of gathering crime statistics, book criminals depending on their ethnicity by using either "Mickstat" or "Wopstat." As if to bring competing energies under control, Blue Blood 's abiding tone is almost compulsively apothegmatic. A long digression on the murder of one of his father's informants wraps up with "We all have our vocations, and we all have our mysteries." A few pages later, a fascinating discussion of how the race of a perp and the race of a cop will define their interaction cuts off with "In the end, the color of your skin doesn't matter but the thickness of it does." More disappointing is the book's failure to reflect deeply on the nature of drug busts. By far Mr. Conlon's most satisfying experience as a police officer was working on the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, and the pace and vivid grittiness of these portions of the book show it. He played his role in enforcing the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, and yet this disappointing feint is as far as he gets when the time comes to assess the policy's wider significance: "The Urban League had published a report on cities that stated that one out of every three black men in their twenties was in prison, on parole, or on probation. It is a devastating number, and a national disgrace, and I haven't got the least idea what to do about it, except for my job." But these are quibbles. Whether at the knees of his cop elders or around the seminar table, Mr. Conlon learned how to talk to old ghosts, and then to write about it gorgeously. By far the finest sections of the book-and these are truly magnificent-recount old half-forgotten histories, from Pat Brown's to Serpico's and Popeye Egan's. (Egan is best remembered as the model for Popeye Doyle in The French Connection . After the movie he floated along, a legend and a raconteur who, unlike his partner Sonny Grosso, couldn't parlay his newfound fame into a showbiz afterlife. He eventually became a departmental scapegoat and died broke and alone.) All this adds up to a gripping social history of New York policing. But almost more importantly, Blue Blood demonstrates how sharpening to the senses it is when language and reality chasten one another. "The kid on the bench is a kid on a bench," Mr. Conlon tells us, "and it takes time for his context to prove him to be anything more. You watch who he watches, who approaches him. And as you do, figures emerge from the flow of street life as coordinates on a grid, as pins on a map." Ed Conlon is one gifted writer. I bet he's an even better cop. Stephen Metcalf reviews books regularly for The Observer .