Former NYPD Detective Translates Writing Skills, Publishes Novel

Bob Martin had 33 years in the New York City Police Department. In many ways, it served to prepare him for a post-retirement career in writing.

The skills translate, says the 67-year-old former NYPD detective and author of the self-published book “Bronx Justice.”

“It lends itself, it really does, because when you’re a police officer, you’re doing a lot of writing,” said Mr. Martin, now a full-time resident of the South Fork. “We used to do an unusual occurrence report, and I was usually the one where the captain would say, ‘Let Martin write this report. It’s going to be concise. It’s going to have all the facts.’ It’s almost like you’re a reporter.”

And, more than anything, three decades on the police force provides story fodder.

“Bronx Justice,” which was self-published via Amazon in December 2016, is an NYPD crime novel loosely based on one of the more notorious cases that Mr. Martin worked on in 1990 while a Bronx-based detective.

In the real case, a Bronx gang member befriended an upstate felon during a stint at Rikers Island. There, the upstate inmate agreed to nab Crown Vics, police radios and badges. Guns were already plentiful.

Posing as plainclothes undercover officers, he and his crew would mock-arrest members of gangs that rivaled that of the Bronx inmate. These members were then turned over to the Bronx gang, which, in return, demanded ransom money—upward of $100,000—for their return.

“Of course, if they didn’t pay, they’d kill them,” said Mr. Martin. “That was kind of the height of the crack wars—2,665 homicides. We broke the record that year. In the Bronx, there were a couple of homicides every day.”

Mr. Martin, who recently won two Public Safety Writers Association Awards for police-based short stories, morphed that experience into his first novel, a fictional crime drama. “I didn’t want to do a nonfiction,” he said. “I didn’t want to do all that research. I could paint it any way I wanted to.”

While in his 40s, in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, Mr. Martin attended Empire State College—he would later earn his master’s degree in the same field at Long Island University. It was at Empire State College where he began honing both his writing prowess and a more objective probe into the police force.

For an assignment for a “History of the NYPD” course, Mr. Martin interviewed Lieutenant Detective Dan Kelly, a “legendary” detective based in Queens since the late-1950s.

“JFK was president, I was a freshman in high school—and this guy was doing homicides,” Mr. Martin said of his then co-worker.

It just took some cigar coaxing. Mr. Kelly opened up, and Mr. Martin got an “A” on the essay that was also published in The Badge, a magazine published by the Fraternal Order of Police.

“That kind of gave me the idea of, ‘Maybe I could do this,’” Mr. Martin said of the prospect of writing a book. “When I was telling people about that case over the last 20 years, they always went, ‘Boy, that would make a great book or a great movie.’ Always, in the back of my mind, that I would do a book.”

The venture began, albeit slowly, in 2000, the year of Mr. Martin’s retirement from the NYPD. It was the close of a career that started in the boroughwide Tactical Control Force—“kind of like a riot squad,” he said—moved to two precincts in Brooklyn for a four-year stint in a horseback mounted squad, and ended with 15 years as a detective working throughout New York City.

Now, there was time to write—that is, of course, unless the New York Giants were on.

Mr. Martin cites Sag Harbor’s Tom Clavin and Amagansett’s Vincent Lardo, two New York Times bestselling authors, as the main guiding hands in his book’s preliminary stages.

“He attended the ancestor of what became the Montauk Writers Group at the Fort Pond House in Montauk,” Mr. Clavin said. “At that time, he was working on shorter fiction and nonfiction pieces. With the latter, he was able to get a few published in the New York Post, Newsday and elsewhere. Always helps to get a foot in the door.”

He went on to say, “The biggest strength Bob brings to the writing table is authenticity. To me, he was a throwback to the ‘87th Precinct’ series of novels written by Ed McBain. Bob had many years of in-the-trenches experiences in the NYPD. His challenge, which he’s met, was to step outside of the uniform and address those experiences as a writer, not simply as a reminiscing cop.”

But it wasn’t until his entry into the Ashawagh Hall Writers Workshop in Springs, led by Marijane Meaker, who is largely credited with launching the genre of lesbian pulp fiction, that watching football took a backseat to writing. “This was the first time I was given a deadline,” Mr. Martin said.

There’s a intrinsic gravitas to Ashawagh Hall, a converted old-time schoolhouse. The writers group meets atop a series of steep steps. Lining the walls are the covers of all of the published books that were in part molded by the group’s critiques.

“I’m dealing with some heavy-hitters here,” Mr. Martin said was his first impression of the group. “They can be brutal in their critiques. I wanted to improve. It’s like if you want to be a tennis player, you play with better players.”

Mr. Martin credits Ms. Meaker with forcing the book through its final stretch. If no pages were presented, a member was kicked out of the writers group—a pressure the likes of which Mr. Martin had never felt.

“Believe me, no one was knocking on my door saying, ‘Bob, it’s time for the great American novel,’” Mr. Martin said. “That group forced me to write.”

And, after 16 years, the novel came to fruition, but not until a last second pull-quote from Bill Bratton, former New York City Police commissioner famed for implementing the “broken window” theory of policing, was secured for some front cover branding.

“I went, ‘Wow this is great!’” Mr. Martin recalled of first publishing his book. “They said, ‘You have to wait to get the paperback unless you want to pay full price.’ I said, ‘I’ll take three right now!’”