Word: cop
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WELL WHAT MORE do you say about a girl from California who doesn't wear underwear? That on arrival at Logan, the cops bust her? That in order to secure her release Peter and John then set but to blackmail a cop who is dealing the confiscated dope on the sly? That complications follow--from the introduction of heroin to a mock-up of the South Station to a climactic shoot-out at Walden Pond between the cops and the Mafia? That Peter and Susan survive it all to ride off into the sunset...
...Details--like the overhead roar of a jet--are conspicuous by the absence of a fully developed mise-en-scene. Continuity is confusing (the New England snows are there one scene, gone the next); interiors look pop-art phoney (in particular, the South Station gambit). And when the crooked cop reads a short note that Peter has sent him, the words are on screen so long you've time to memorize its contents. For a young film director, Williams has surprisingly little sense of daring. The whole final third of Dealing is simple cops and robbers, the kind of material...
...dressed in somber, single-breasted suits and some wearing crimson bow ties-who were now lined up across one end of the street, and requested that the cars be moved. "You white devil," Upton shouted, "either you or I are going to die today!" Another cop moved to penetrate the line of blacks. Someone grabbed him. There was a scuffle, and then shots...
Pimps and whores, hired killers and psychosadists, news vendors and bar bums, "rape-os" and cops-all move in and out of Johnson's scene, rendered without apology or moral judgment. Unlike writers who have never been there, Johnson has no need to sensationalize the seamy edge of society. In taut, frosted gray prose that is flat but never dull, his characters are compellingly stamped with their limiting individuality, totally unable to be more or less than they are. Silver Street's Tony Lonto, for instance, cannot help being a good cop any more than he can keep...
Beyond the mystery format, his books already have a penitentiary feel to them. The plot lines turn in on themselves, like ripples bouncing off walls. The cop looking for a killer inadvertently learns that his girl is secretly a prostitute. The hired gunman finds too late that he himself has been set up to be killed by his own brother-who hired him in the first place...