Black and White

By Martha Duffy

REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER

by JAMES MILLS

284 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$6.95.

A few weeks ago New York newspapers played up what looked like a Halloween-party picture in June. It showed a shapely young woman who was wearing the headdress of a ghost costume and a revolver tucked in her belt. The lady was an undercover agent for the New York Police Department, testifying before a crime committee. She claimed that a narcotics indictment based on her work had been thrown out by the D.A. because it fingered one of his personal friends.

James Mills' first novel is about that kind of woman and that kind of world. Mills has written some remarkable articles about detective and police work. But he is best known for A Panic in Needle Park, a perfervid account of drug addicts that became an Al Pacino movie. His next book, The Prosecutor, was an example of what Mills does as well as anyone writing now: hard, dogged, angry reporting about the morally hopeless entanglements of big-city justice. The prosecutor of the title was an overworked D.A. trying to get a Mafia conviction and discovering every sinew of the law flexed against him.

When Mills, who is a plain but obsessive writer, turned to fiction, he did not swerve far. The subject of Report to the Commissioner is a pretty, blonde New York undercover narcotics agent who gets herself killed in the line of duty --which happens to involve being naked in the arms of a black heroin pusher. The problem is that the fatal shots were fired by another cop, an enterprising greenhorn detective who was not in on the girl's game.

An exciting if preposterous 22-hour standoff follows between the cop and the heroin pusher in, of all places, a Saks Fifth Avenue elevator. Outside, the television cameras roll while the police department brass squirm--and plot their own survival. It is a tribute to Mills' adroitness that he swivels through this awkward and unlikely setup with few slips. (The few mistakes he makes are surprisingly careless: Saks has hand-operated elevators, for example, which would make his big scene unplayable.)

In a brisk season for cops-and-killers thrillers, Report to the Commissioner is as good technically as the recent Friends of Eddie Coyle, though it lacks that book's wild eloquence and humor. Mills has the knack of clothing anger in fact, and he is one of the few writers today who understand police work and can make policemen both believable and human. The most interesting thing about his novel is the squaring off between the young cop, whose name is Bo Lockley, and the police establishment. Bo is an inept, unskeptical idealist, "hurt by animals he didn't know were in the jungle." Of course the foolhardy girl agent should not have been allowed to pursue her plan of seducing the pusher in order to get information. But if she had succeeded, her superiors, who greedily let her risk her life, would have actually looked like effective officers. "He wanted a division. I wanted a squad," is the way one of them explained their motives. Through the use of a series of "tapes" that make up the final report to the commissioner Mills is able to do the police in different voices: the cynic, the "book" man, the black who thinks of himself as "Negro," the Chief Inspector with a limited supply of courage.

The novel will be made into a movie next year. That should surprise no one, since it is seeded with cinematic possibilities, including a chase by a legless beggar on a skateboard. The film ought to be shot in black and white, since that is what the book is about.

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