Dorothy Uhnak was a policewoman with the New York Transit Police in the 1950s and 1960s. This was her first book, and she became better known for her fiction work after that.
Knowing Uhnak was also a fiction author, I wasn't overly surprised by the writing style in this book. What did surprise me was the fact that this was published before her fiction. It reads like fiction. Entire conversations are not something I am used to seeing in a memoir. Scenery and people aren't normally explained in this kind of detail.
Uhnak took some liberties with her own memoir, and I think it's important to know these things before reading. She chose to set the memoir within the Police Department since she was still active with the Transit Police at the time of writing the book. Not a big deal to me. What was a bigger deal to me (and bothered me somewhat), was the answers to a few of the questions put forth in the prologue: Did the events really happen? Was she personally involved? And her answer? Yes and no.
The way she addresses the first question is that all things have really happened. In her words, "In that sense, the stories are true, but they are fashioned by the writer's imagination, combined with the acquired knowledge of the policewoman." She goes on to say that she's had to be selective and maneuver facts for dramatic interest. The other issue (was she personally involved?), she answers by saying, "In almost every instance, to some degree, I would have to say yes." She goes on to say, "To some degree, I say yes, I was involved-as any police officer, active in the field of law enforcement, and encountering like experiences, gains an emotional understanding of events in which he does not actively participate."
With caveats like that, I wasn't sure what was true and what she was "maneuvering." In that way, I didn't feel like I was reading about her life. It was a well written story, but it felt like fiction.
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