Signal Thirty-Two

MACKINLAY KANTORPulitzer Prize-winning author of AndersonvilleThe Twenty-Third Precinct of the New York City Police Department includes within its boundaries exalted penthouses and reeking slums. The story concerns three men in blue, their loves, their ambitions, their contentions--the cruelty they encounter, the courage they offer, the pity and aid they are able to give. It speeds through the reader's consciousness like a patrol car wailing in midnight traffic. In 1948 the Acting Commissioner of Police, the late Tom Mulligan, authorized MacKinlay Kantor to proceed on all police activities, accompanying the patrolmen in their work. Kantor learned the life of a policeman through first-hand experience. Such priv­ilege had never been granted to a civilian before. But this civilian happened to be the author of Long Re­member, The Voice of Bugle Ann, and many other famous books, as well as the original story of the great motion picture, The Best Years of Our Lives. Thunder of feet on sagging stairways; a yell from behind a locked door; tears and oaths and--worse-- the stony agony of women who stare in silence... The radio voice of CB declares flatly: Two-Three Precinct. The address...on the roof...proceed with caution... Is it rape, suicide, assault? Or merely a kitten cry­ing from its trap in a drainpipe? Or do we meet the glare of a razor, the stab of gunfire in a hall? Our fingers squeeze the siren button. This is a Signal Thirty-two...