Featured New Books Essay

Before I answer this question I want to briefly describe a formative time in my youth, when the New York City bartender-like the New York City cab driver-was a mythic figure, not unlike the American cowboy. At this mythic time, men like John McNulty and Joseph Mitchell wrote about saloons and eccentric New Yorkers, wilderness at the far end of Brooklyn and fishing villages on Staten Island. Of these, the stories I liked best were about the Third Avenue bars and the single rooms and small apartments that housed the city's working men, guys who ate the blue plate special in the Greek's or Chinaman's greasy spoon, and stopped into Pat Murphy's, the Shamrock, or the Old Shillelagh for a couple of drinks and the good fellowship presided over by the man behind the bar, rather than go home to a furnished room and stare at blank walls.

That era was pretty much gone by the time I first stepped behind the stick in one of the city's watering holes, but the New York that included the Third Avenue El, the Giants in the Polo Ground and the Dodgers in Ebbets Field was still part of the great bartender collective unconscious, and I tried to gather that up into the character of McNulty, to make him a repository of at least some of this collective wisdom.

So, first off, McNulty is a bartender in the noble tradition. But what does this have to do with solving crimes? Well, it might be a bit of a stretch, but this is how I see it. On the one hand, you have the noble bartender, and then you have those folks you're likely to come across in bars. The patrons I'm talking about include the faint-hearted desperado needing to get juiced up before or after his dastardly deed. It includes the neighborhood bookie-an entrepreneur without an office-setting up shop at the end of the bar. And where do the hookers go to get in out of the rain or the cold, if not to the welcoming lights and warmth of a nearby bar? Not to mention the person huddled in the darkened corner booth with someone else's spouse.

Consider the old gangster movies of Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, or James Cagney. Was it a dry cleaning store that served as a base for their nefarious operations? Of course not; they wore fancy clothes, hung out with gorgeous dames, and held forth in their private office upstairs from a classy nightclub. And who got access to those offices? Only those who got the okay from-you guessed it-the bartender.

Besides the professional bad guys, there's the rest of tortured humanity, among them those crazed by unrequited love, or brought to desperation by unrealized greed. The fact is that a great deal of life finds its way into bars, and the bartender absorbs it. The same way the bartender can settle an argument because he's somehow gotten to know who was pitching when Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run to break Babe Ruth's all-time record (Al Downing of the Dodgers), the bartender gets to know about crime an criminals-the professionals and the amateurs.

From the school of hard knocks, McNulty learned that things often are not as they seem. Having had his ear bent, as he has for more nearly 20 years while serving drinks in the heart of the fastest-moving, most unforgiving city in the world, McNulty knows to keep his guard up. He knows a guy that dresses in Armani suits, likes puppies, and helps old ladies across the street might be selling the best crack cocaine in the city, and that the aloof businessman sipping his daily Dewars might be selling child pornography on the Upper East Side.

McNulty's interest in crime doesn't have to do with the how. What he wants to know is the why. Life is short as it is, thinks McNulty. No one should make someone else's any shorter. He knows a lot of people and some of them are willing to talk to him who might not talk to someone else. Of course, they don't always tell him the truth, but he's seen enough of life on the wild side and folks with their backs to the wall to be less gullible than most people.

Since the murders he's involved with often take place within the world he knows, among folks he's developed sympathy for, solving the crime doesn't often bring much satisfaction. Too often, he solves the mystery at the expense of his friends, by disbelieving the stories they swore to him were true, by uncovering secrets they thought they'd buried deeply enough to never be uncovered. In McNulty's world, once the mystery is solved, order is not restored to an otherwise sane society. For McNulty, it's just one down and too many more to go.


Death at the Old Hotel, by Con Lehane
St. Martin's Minotaur, June 2007