An obituary

I read "Policewoman" and found it fascinating. Just learned that the autor of it died in July.

Dorothy Uhnak, 76, Novelist Inspired by Police Experience, Is Dead

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Dorothy Uhnak, once famous as a 125-pound New York City Transit Authority policewoman who knocked down and arrested an armed mugger and then better known as the author of gritty, suspenseful, best-selling crime novels, died on Saturday in Greenport, N.Y. She was 76 and lived in Shelter Island, N.Y.

Her daughter, Tracy Uhnak, said she died of a deliberate drug overdose. She added that her mother had had a variety of accidents in recent years, was often depressed and had discussed suicide matter-of-factly.

“You don’t have to kill yourself today,” she said more than once, her daughter recalled. “You can do it tomorrow.”

Ms. Uhnak (pronounced YOU-nak) combined vibrant elements of her native New York, long experience as a police officer and a hard-boiled literary style that some compared to Hammett’s or Chandler’s in nine books of fiction and one of nonfiction.

Critics often cited the authenticity of scenes and characters in reviewing her crime novels “Law and Order,” “Victims,” the “Christie Opara” series — and her first book, the semi-autobiographical “Policewoman: A Young Woman’s Initiation Into the Realities of Justice.” She preceded Joseph Wambaugh as an ex-cop writing about the netherworld of crime and was a precursor of other women who have written about tough crime-fighting protagonists, including Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and Patricia Cornwell. Her work was translated into 15 languages and was particularly popular in France.

“I write about very hard situations and in a strong way,” Ms. Uhnak said in an interview with The New York Times in 1977. Carol Cleveland, in The St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, noted her “copious, pounding style that forces the reader to be involved.”

Ms. Uhnak was born Dorothy Goldstein next door to the 46th precinct on Ryer Avenue in the Bronx on April 24, 1930. Her novel “The Ryer Avenue Story” (1993), a murder mystery with a horrifying twist, roams her old neighborhood.

She was a tomboy who liked to hang out at the precinct and help with typing. She lamented to Newsday in a 1964 interview that she was “always chased out when something interesting happened.”

She attended City College, then joined the transit police. She won two awards for bravery, but sometimes had an unusual perspective on people she arrested. She gave $125 she had won on a television quiz show to the pregnant wife of the large armed man who had attacked her.

“I wondered what it feels like, how a criminal tells his family what he’s done,” she said to Newsday. “I felt so sorry for him when I saw his family.”

After 14 years with the transit force, 12 of them as a detective, she resigned to complete her college education at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She also suggested that she left police work because of sex discrimination. “Policewoman” was published in 1964, after several editors recognized the woman who had pestered them with submissions as the name in the news.

Her first novel, “The Bait,” won the Edgar Award as the best first mystery novel of 1968 and introduced Detective Second Grade Christie Opara, who starred in Ms. Uhnak’s next two novels, “The Witness” (1969) and “The Ledger” (1970).

She jettisoned the series after the editor Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster approached her to write a big police novel, modeled on “The Godfather,” Mario Puzo’s blockbuster. The result was “Law and Order” (1973), Ms. Uhnak’s breakout book, about three generations of a police department family. It became a television movie in 1976.

Another of her big successes was “The Investigation” (1977), which was the basis for the 1987 television movie “Kojak: The Price of Justice.’’ It generated controversy because it seemed to exploit the real case of Alice Crimmins, who was convicted of murdering her two young children. Ms. Uhnak insisted that the heroine of her novel, Kitty, was entirely her own creation.

In addition to her daughter, who lives in Kew Gardens, Queens, Ms. Uhnak is survived by her husband, Anthony, and a sister, Mary Ellis of Hartsdale, N.Y.

Though it was Ms. Uhnak’s own alchemy that turned police duty into imaginative fiction, she sometimes gave part of the credit to the criminals she had met in the line of duty.

“Once I arrested a character at a subway stop for indecent exposure, and through the years I’d come home and write endless short stories about him,” she told The Times in 1981. “He finally evolved as a rapist-murderer in my first novel.”

Correction: July 26, 2006
An obituary on July 12 about Dorothy Uhnak, the policewoman turned detective novelist, gave an incorrect given name for her surviving sister. She is Mildred Ellis, not Mary.
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