Night Watch — Jack Olsen

Night Watch is a superb evocation of the real world of big city police today. It is a rare combination of action and a novel of character. In telling this riveting story, Jack Olsen portrays a memorable man in Watch Commander Packer Lind, along with marvelous creations of the characters of the cops under his command and their wives and the pressured lives they lead.

Jack Olsen determined in undertaking Night Watch to create his finest work yet. For over a year, Olsen studied policemen at close range: on their beats, visiting them in their homes, joining in their off-duty revelries, riding shotgun as they chased speeders and burglars and killers, walking side by side with them into the bars and back alleys and tanks and dives and sometimes onto the killing grounds of this most dangerous of occupations. After sharing their pressure-cooker lives, Olsen calls them "the most undervalued members of our society: good and decent men, for the most part, whose stresses and torments are only dimly understood by the public they serve. They live on the edge of a knife-blade, and they pay the price in broken homes, tortured lives, and uncertain futures. The wonder isn't that there are so many bad cops. The wonder is that there are so few."