Biker undercover

The com­bi­na­tion seemed per­fect for me: a true-crime sto­ry about an agent infil­trat­ing a motor­cy­cle gang. This kept my atten­tion well, and for good rea­son. Queen has a lot of sto­ries to tell and the ten­sion in the telling is pal­pa­ble. Some­times I won­dered if he were exag­ger­rat­ing for effect, but I nev­er doubt­ed that he told the sto­ry as it hap­pened from his perspective.

Some­times Queen tend­ed to get upon a high horse and approach from a place of moral indig­na­tion that I thought fit fic­tion­al stereo­types all too well. Just like on TV, the inves­ti­ga­tion did­n’t real­ly take off, and he could­n’t real­ly be effec­tive until the idiots who super­vised him shut the case down and ordered him not to con­tin­ue on. He often expressed moral­is­tic dis­gust at the prac­tices of the crim­i­nals he brought down, and some­times it seemed as though he defen­sive­ly jus­ti­fied things to project a cer­tain image. When he describes the gang bring­ing in strip­pers to a par­ty and how he went along with it even though he hat­ed the exploita­tion of women, it rang a bit hollow.

And do I find a lit­tle shame in crit­i­ciz­ing the work of a man who risked his life to get gun traf­fick­ers and drug deal­ers and mur­der­ers off of the streets? Yeah, I do. I read this book pure­ly for enter­tain­ment and this guy had to live the sto­ry, which for all its expos­i­to­ry faults is grip­ping and dramatic.

Hey, the guy’s not a pro­fes­sion­al writer, and the rest of us get a lit­tle win­dow into a world we’d rather not see except in fiction.