NIGHT DOGS

First published by a small press in 1996, Night Dogs, thanks to the vigor of its prose and its unvarnished view of police life, aroused considerable interest but disappeared almost immediately into rare-book dealers' catalogues. Bantam is relaunching the book, and the effort seems worthwhile. Anderson, the author as well of the novel Sympathy for the Devil (1987), stands apart from the crowd of police procedural writers largely because of the clarity of his view of police life, in which loyalty and a sense of being embattled, under siege, create a special, often self-destructive kind of isolation. Anderson's protagonist, Hanson (also featured in Sympathy, a novel set in Vietnam during the war), is a profane, violent, somewhat bigoted patrolman in a violent, down-at-heels Portland, Oregon, neighborhood, drawn into an investigation that seems to lead uncomfortably close to home. The mysteries here are unsurprising—what counts is Anderson's portrait of an angry, self- destructive, yet basically decent man, increasingly at war both with society and his own identity. Strong stuff, well worth reprinting.