They're following Winnie's advice

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, crime, police work, homicide

Winston Churchill is noted for saying (I must paraphrase), "Never give up. Never, never, give up." For New York Police Department's Cold Case Squad, just ten years old, this could be the motto. Stacy Horn, in The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad, has opened at least a keyhole into the (mostly) men whose job it is to crack the hardest cases.

Test pilots are famous for the saying, that their job is long periods of boredom spiced with brief moments of sheer terror. I suppose you could say this about detective work too, except that the terror is (fortunately) even more rare...but the boredom is, if anything, more mind-numbing.

In a typical TV show or film about police work, the ratio of "routine" detection—tracking down leads, talking to people who don't want to talk to you and mostly don't care if you drop dead, making endless phone calls, choking back your bile while negotiating with yet another even-more-bored bureaucrat—takes up no more than 40% of the screen time. The action has to be at least 60% or nobody will watch it, or recommend it to a friend.

Popular cop shows are full of lab "AHA" moments, DNA testing, forensic tricks, thrilling chases, and sensational arrests. Most of the fancy stuff isn't worth the time, most of the time. Today's sexy topic, DNA fingerprinting, is mostly too expensive.

In reality, action worth telling your grandkids is at most a percent, maybe 0.1%, of time spent. It takes a special kind of mind to survive a job like that. Stacy Horn introduces us to a big handful of such men—and no women, for good reason—and profiles four or five in some detail, while weaving into the narrative glimpses of the mini-worlds surrounding the Squad's realm: the case files and their endless stacks of DD5 forms; the evidence warehouses, where some small fraction of the evidence related to tens of thousands of murders (and maybe a couple million other crimes) is kept...and often lost; the labs they do use when they have evidence worth a professional look; and particularly, the neighborhoods they canvass over and over again, gleaning the tiniest of clues and fast-fading memories.

Why no women? Women and men think differently. I've had a couple of friends over the years who were policewomen; one was a detective. They bring different skills, and valuable ways of looking at evidence and personalities to police work. Both freely admitted they couldn't do the "street work" of homicide investigation. There are likely other reasons. If there are any women working Cold Case homicides, Horn doesn't mention any.

I got into a rant a few postings back, about crudity in public culture. While I have a few quibbles with the author's language when he is speaking for himself, I have none when he is quoting his subjects. Nor when he describes the crime scenes and mostly seedy settings where the great majority of murders take place. The subject doesn't lend itself to reading while eating, and I think the author uses no more ugliness than is warranted by the material.

For me, reading about some of the things done by the murderers mentioned in the book confirmed my support for capital 'punishment.' I use quotes, because putting a murderer to death is not really punishment. It is our only way to be totally sure he or she will not murder again.

There is little comfort in Cold Case work. It is an ugly necessity, if only to mitigate, at least a little, the proportion of evil persons. Horn makes it clear that few of these detectives are 'nice guys.' They are hard, tough, and aggressive. They have to be. If some of them are jerks, it's the price to be paid for bringing, if not quite justice, at least finality, to old crimes.