THIS IS THE STORY of an honest cop. Lewis Valentine was just that. He had no illusions. He was not anything else and did not want to be anything else. He was a modest man. Anyone can tell that when he reads the pages of his story. He served during a period when to be honest in the Police Department of the City of New York was to have a tough time. He never compromised. He kept straight.
The commissioner's forthright account of the exploits of early 20th Century NYC police manhunts with such public enemies as Dutch Schultz, Vincent Coll and Murder, Inc. and the sheer factual horror of his description of Robert Irwin, the mad strangler, is both historically interesting and simultaneously heroic in its nature.
Fictional gangster accounts would be hard put to invent the sagas of Slick Willie (the operator who enjoyed his acting almost as much as his stick-up), Gordon Hanby, who always killed with courtesy, and Gerald Chapman, who mixed erudition with his mayhem. All this and more are set down with clinical detachment-often as unemotionally as though these battles of wits were mere entries on a precinct blotter.
The commissioner's story carries through his retirement in 1945, and closes with an absorbing chapter on his investigation of Japanese police methods, at the request of General MacArthur-an investigation completed only a short time before his death in December 1946.
From New York Times Review by C.V. Terry, September 1947
". . . This terse, hard-hitting book is truly the story of an honest cop. The late Commissioner Valentine has labeled it an autobiography; it is more the history of the Metropolitan Police Department he did so much to revitalize during his eleven-year tenure.
Its story, and his own, are told in unvarnished prose, which is all to the good; the rugged candor of the teller is evident on every page, along with an iron-jawed determination to do a hard job well."
