If you’re a fan
of my television criticism you know what a huge fan I am of ABC’s Will
Trent. It has regularly made my top ten list in the first two seasons. It
has been on the air and very well may do so this season. You will also know that I am a huge
fan of the Karin Slaughter novels that have inspired the series as well as her
earlier works that dealt with Sara Linton – and how her life would intersect
with Will Trent’s.
I may at some
point write about her work involving either character but I thought it would be
fitting to start with what was her first stand-alone novel. Like so many other
great mystery writers such as Laura Lippman and Dennis Lehane, Slaughter is
also known for writing standalones that take place in her home town – in
Slaughter’s case, Atlanta. Some of those novels such as The Kept Woman have
been adapted to Netflix. Cop Town was her first attempt at a standalone
in 2014 as well as her first attempt at a period piece. I’d argue it should be
required reading for those who even loathe mystery novels because 1) she wrote
it when the level of activism around police shootings was started to become a
movement and 2) it stands at the biggest argument to anyone who wants to argue
that America is, when it comes to everything
on the progressive wish list it’s exactly the same as was during the
founder’s time and we haven’t changed at all. Cop Town couldn’t make this
counterargument any louder if it tried, and that Slaughter, who has been
fundamentally fair in her portrayal of policing and all of the many flaws it
has in a contemporary setting, sets her novel in November of 1974 to make it
very clear just how much worse it was even forty years ago.
And its worth
noting Slaughter’s novels are firmly focused on female protagonists even more
than males. We see it in the Will Trent novels which spend as much time from
Faith Mitchell and Angie Pulaski’s point of view in the early books and then
move on to Sara Linton’s when she joins the series. Indeed with the sole
exception of Trent, most of the critical characters in the novel are women,
including Amanda Wagner his martinet like boss at the GBI. (She’s
African-American in the series but fundamentally there are few differences
either in her personality in either portrayal.) Indeed Amanda Wagner started
out at the Atlanta PD along with Faith Mitchell’s mother roughly the same time
as Cop Town takes place and the majority of the novel is told from the
perspective of two very different female officers: Maggie Lawson, a young woman
who comes from a family of generations of cops and Kate Murphy, a widow whose
husband died in Vietnam and who is trying to find a way to make herself useful
and stop mourning.
Maggie ended up becoming
an officer over the intense objections of her father Terry Lawson, a man who
has been beating and abusing every female in the family for so long Maggie can’t
remember a time she wasn’t being battered. Her brother Jimmy is the golden boy
in the family and Maggie, like all women in Terry’s circle – which includes the
worst aspects of the Atlanta police department – is considered a disappointment
because she isn’t already married and popping out kids. Maggie clearly did so
in order to try and find an escape hatch from her horrible life where the true
horrors become clear very quickly only to find that she’s traded one hell for
another. Terry is such a bastard that it’s clear that all of them only hang out
with him these days because Jimmy is the Golden Boy, the high school athlete
who was supposed to get out before an injury sidelined him. Now he’s part of
the Atlanta PD and in the prologue we see him basically carry his partner into
the hospital, even though his head as been blown off his shoulders.
Maggie suspects
that the person behind this is The Shooter: someone who has been killing cops
for several months in Atlanta. The moment she tries to raise this to her uncle
she is both browbeaten and nearly physically attacked. Terry knows whose
responsible: it’s a black man and he and the squad are going to hunt him down.
Terry doesn’t care about who shot Don or even his nephew. He’s obsessing over
the fact that his partner was killing after hours several months ago (when he
was seeing a prostitute). They found the suspect and Terry found evidence that
implicated him. Rather than run he turned himself in and made it very clear
that he’d been framed.
During this period
Maynard Jackson has been elected the first African-American Mayor in the South.
He has made good on his promise to bring diversity to the local government. “Which
was good or bad depending on how you look at it.” In the eyes of the Atlanta PD
it’s bad because an all-black jury was empaneled and the killer walked free.
Terry has been spending all of his time trying to track the killer down and
deliver the kind of justice that used to be handled with a lynching – and its
clear just from listening to Terry and his friends talk they wish it was still
in style. As Slaughter points out when she walks into the Atlanta PD: “They
kept their Klan robes hanging in the back of their closets.” When Jimmy is
killed they make it very clear that this
won’t happen “Only walk he’s taking is to the grave.”
Maggie doesn’t
like one bit of the discussion – which is going on the moment she walks into
the PD and doesn’t quiet for a moment – but she believes in the blue wall. Of
course she also knows the brass wouldn’t listen to her anyway: “She was also a
woman. No one would listen to her.” But she knows there are roles in Jimmy’s
story from the moment it starts.
Cop Town makes it very
clear that in the 1970s the gender divides and racial divides in Atlanta are
still very blatant. When Kate Murphy shows up in the patrol room in a uniform
that barely fits no one offers to help her but they all start taking bets on
how quickly she’ll wash out. Similarly the older female officers on the job are
in a sense, just as toxic as the men are towards the younger women, using their
authority to push their burdens on the younger patrol officers, just as frequently
getting drunk on the job and openly having affairs with other officers even if
they are married as well. African-American officers have power in this unit but
they will be just as brutal on their own race when a pimp is cutting up people
in the streets. And African-American women who are undercover look down on the
white female officers with the same hostility.
Slaughter makes
it very clear that the white power structure in the Atlanta PD is clearly doing
everything in its power to make sure the attempts for diversity by Jackson
fail. The uniforms the female officers are given are male uniforms and they
have to have them tailed themselves, the locker room used to be a men’s
bathroom and is still just as filthy; genitalia is tattooed there every day,
crossed out, and put there again. Lawson has been on the job just long enough
to think that things will never change. Murphy has gotten in at the deep end
and doesn’t know any better.
There are no
secrets in the Atlanta PD and Kate finds that out quickly even though she’s
doing everything in her power to keep hers. We learn not only that she comes
from a family of immense privilege but she is Jewish in a very racist town –
and her mother and grandmother survived the Holocaust. She spends her days
since she was widowed in an upper scale Atlanta hotel – she hasn’t been able to
go to her former home since her husband died. Kate wants to leave her sheltered
world and she’s not good enough to be a secretary. She starts the job the day
both Don Wesley is killed and that not long after Jimmy Lawson is shot.
Maggie is
suffering from immense trauma from her upbring and another darker fact that I
won’t bring up here. She clings to finding out who the Shooter is to try and find
Terry’s approval, something she knows in her heart she will never get. Kate
because of her upbringing knows people at the hospital Jimmy is brought to and
she finds out very quickly the holes that are in his story. Eventually Kate and Maggie begin to
reluctantly work together in order to follow a lead that they think will lead
back to the Shooter. It ends in utter disaster with three people dying and Maggie
wounded. It’s telling that Terry’s reaction to his daughter nearly being killed
is to demand that she quit and to call her a disgrace to the family.
The clearest
point as to how these men think comes when Kate and Maggie are going through
files on the shootings of the cops and think they’ve found a pattern. They are
at the Lawson household and when Maggie takes it to them, we listen to them
trade war stories with the bigotry, sexism and utter contempt for the liberal
order that is typical of the 1970s. (To make their point the first line we hear
Terry say in the discussion: “So what happens? Kennedy gets shot and the only
thing standing between us and that commie brother of his is an Arab with a
.22.) None of them are interested in evidence or patterns. All they care about
is finding the vague description of who did it and then shooting first. They
don’t have to bother with asking questions. In their world, no one will bother
to do so.
Perhaps the most
critical part of Cop Town is how it deals with the LGBTQ+ community. For
all those who look at America today and say how horrible it is, Slaughter makes
it very clear just how much worse it was. Without revealing too much halfway
through the novel it is implied the Shooter committed his murders because he
was gay and all of the cops that were killed were gay too. None of this is true
but when several people learn about it they are more horrified by the fact that
this suspect is gay than a multiple murderer. When Terry learns of it he
determines that the suspect be killed and given a cop’s death in order to spare the department the shame.
At one point
Maggie and Kate visit a gay club that no one in Atlanta knows exists. “You didn’t
come here if you didn’t know what it was for, and if you didn’t know what it
was for, you probably never noticed it…There wasn’t even a sign on the door.”
That there was a
police cruiser parked outside the establishment seemed to have little effect on
traffic…Cars surrounded Kate on all sides. Some even smiled at her as they
walked towards the building….None of the men seemed worried that two female
cops had walked in the door.
And it’s telling
that Kate, who had almost no idea of what homosexuality was before she learned
about it at the hospital has a reaction to it:
“Kate didn’t know
what she was expecting. Lecherous glances, filthy rooms. For the most part the
men looked like couples who’d met for a drink before lunch. Hands were being
held…Glances were being stolen across the room. The atmosphere was loose and
casual. Barring the fact that everyone was of the same sex, the place felt like
every club Kate has ever visited.”
It's telling that
when two men give up their seats to Kate and Maggie, it’s the first time in the
novel either of them have been treated with politeness by anyone.
Furthermore
earlier we go into a rooming house where it is rumored a transexual (less
flattering terms are used) has been pimping for a while. Kate and Maggie visit
the place twice and its only on the second occasion that both of them realize
that it’s the person running the boarding house. Furthermore Maggie and Gail
have mistaken her as Portuguese when Kate realizes she’s Jewish. Kate has
figured both of these things out well ahead of Maggie and probably Gail and the
two are able to have a civilized conversation until the pimp reveals that he is
as contemptible as all of the heterosexual ones and just as much a criminal.
All of this is
critical because much of the novel involves leaving one’s comfort zone and seeing
a side of the city that Kate has never been aware of and that her father has truly wanted to learn about. Kate’s family
has suffered its share of anti-Semitism over the years – they almost casual
mention a bomb threat to their synagogue – but they have a far more layered
appreciation of humanity than Kate does. Kate’s Oma tells a very real story
about the multitudes of people in a relationship with a bully from her school
days who she met again during the war and who decided to show her kindness and
mercy. “Evil people can do good. Good people can do evil,” she tells Kate. “There
is no explanation.” For a world that is even more polarized now then when
Slaughter wrote her book, this comes practically a bullet point.
Just as critical
comes a speech Kate’s father gives not long after:
“For each of
them., Atlanta is a different city. Yet they all take pride in ownership. They
all feel that the city belongs to them, and that their idea of the city is what
the city should be. And further they feel the need to protect it…. Your violent
asshole, I assume he thinks Atlanta belongs to the violent assholes. Your
horrible woman – maybe she thinks it belongs to the horrible woman. They both
feel very strongly, I’m sure. But which Atlanta is the real Atlanta? Is it
ours? Is it the one Patrick (Kate’s husband) knew? Does it belong to the blacks
now? Did it ever belong to anybody?”
Kate’s father is
encapsulating the conflict that has been going on for centuries and may never
end about race, gender and social divide in America and the world. And he
argues that Kate’s decision to become a policeman – to leave her sheltered
world and venture into a world that terrifies her – makes her a far braver
person than he will ever be.
This is an argument
for sacrifice, public service and trying to see all sides of a story. And Cop
Town makes it very clear how much certain people – particularly the white
men in the Atlanta Police Department – will do anything in their power to hold
on to what they have. We eventually learn that the Shooter is someone who
basically believes in this vision and intends to carry it out.
Yet for all that
the book ends with a note of hopefulness. In the final pages of the novel Maggie
confronts Terry in a place he can no longer not listen to her:
“I don’t think
you’re racist. Or sexist. Or anti-Jew. Or anti-gay. I think you’re scared…Your
whole world’s upside down. You don’t belong any more….I think the whole world
is gonna change. For me. For Kate. For the blacks….For you. Especially for you.”
The cynical would
argue it hasn’t really but Slaughter’s contemporary writing and Will Trent as
a series would argue otherwise. Policing has changed since 1974: it’s nowhere
near perfect but it isn’t the hellscape that we see in Cop Town anymore.
The kind of policing that Terry and his colleagues could cheerfully get away
with as late as 1974 doesn’t exist at the same level it does today, certainly
not in a city like Atlanta. Slaughter knows the change will come slowly and in
different ways – there’s a scene near the end that shows how for one character
in particular his life will have to be worse for a much longer period – but it did
happen.
And maybe that’s
why I think it’s important to read novels like Cop Town for people on
both sides of the ideological spectrum. For those who are fundamentally conservative
and want to restore the past Slaughter reminds us very clear that this is what
the past they are hailing looks like and is not a pretty picture. For the
progressive Slaughter shows signs of change – incremental ones to be sure, but
the kind that need to happen for the reform they want to take place. And for
those who just want to read it crackling good mystery novel Slaughter more than
provides it every step of the way. There are places that may still call
themselves cop towns but they’re not being run by the same kind of cops who were
around in 1974 and if that isn’t progress I don’t know what you’d call it.
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