PROFILES IN MYSTERY:
Hugh Holton

Hugh Holton died of cancer in the spring of 2001, only months after I interviewed him for Partners, the quarterly publication I edit. His death was all the more tragic because he only recently had been promoted to Chicago police captain, because he had many more novels in his arsenal, and because he was a nice guy -- the kind of cop we'd all like to have watching our backs. 

Mad scientists, socialite thrill-killers, globe-trotting assassins, and flame-thrower wielding sociopaths? Not on Capt. Hugh Holton's watch.

But for Larry Cole, the 31-year Chicago Police Department veteran's badge-wearing detective creation, the supernormal and supervillainous are part of the beat. Holton, who recently was promoted from lieutenant, has set out in his series of Cole novels to write "essentially the book I would like to read."

Imagine a little NYPD Blue, an occasional smattering of the X-Files -- except Holton knows the policeman lot firsthand and Cole's debut novel, 1994's Presumed Dead, was in development well before the macabre files of Agents Mulder and Scully hit the airwaves.

"I didn't join the force to be a writer; I joined the force to be a cop," he related. "I worked as a patrol officer for about three years, then I was promoted to detective. I was assigned to work crimes on the West Side, mostly felonies, in the Violent Crimes Unit.

"I was a big reader, also, and as I began to encounter things, I was saying, 'This, in conjunction with maybe two or three other cases, would make a good novel.' I was reading a book after I'd solved a homicide, a very good police procedural called The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders, and I remember when I said, 'You know, I could do something like this, if I could put enough elements together.' It took me about 16 years to do it."

Holton's new Larry Cole novel, The Devil's Shadow, dealing with the death of a mystery author, an international thief, the Mob, and Cole's first undercover assignment is due in bookstores in May. He is editing a nonfiction work, The Thin Black Line, a three-year "work-in-progress" collecting anecdotes from African-American police officers from across the nation, and is fine-tuning new Cole novels to be published tentatively in 2003 and 2004.

Unlike cops-turned-author such as Joseph Wambaugh, who have incorporated their police experiences into their fiction, Holton is quick to admit Cole's cases transpire largely in his imagination. Presumed Dead dabbles in weird science against an eerie museum backdrop; Holton's follow-up, Windy City, pits Cole and a crew of mystery authors against a wealthy Chicago couple involved in a monstrous crime spree. Red Lightning (1998) finds Cole battling Jonathan Gault, a disenfranchised scientist with an arsenal Batman might envy, while 1999's The Left Hand of God features skullduggery at the 2004 Olympics and a shape-shifting African folk monster.

Further, Cole has enjoyed what in law enforcement circles would be considered a meteoric rise in the ranks: In 1996' Violent Crimes, readers follow both Patrolman Larry Cole in 1976 and Commander Larry Cole in 1991, and by The Left Hand of God, Cole has been elevated to chief of detectives. "That was a bit of a leap, but I wanted Cole to be able to do certain things and to have a certain amount of freedom," Holton said.

Fact occasionally intrudes into Holton's fictional universe. Presumed Dead fictionalized a true incident -- the disappearance of the daughter of Chicago Museum of Science and Industry founder Julius Rosenwald -- and Violent Crimes' initial crime, as well as a key scene involving Patrolman Cole's arrest of a rapist, were based on one of his actual cases back in the early '70s.

"I caught the guy," then-patrolman Holton recalled. "I was writing up a parking violation and the guy came off a side street. He looked at me, gave me a double-take, and he put his head down and started walking. I said, 'Come here," he took off on me, and I caught him after a really short chase.

"I had nothing on this guy, and he started saying he hadn't done something to 'her.' Eventually, it led back to the (victim), but she was like, 'He didn't do anything to me.' He's just about confessed to me at this point, but I've got no complainant. I had to let me go, and he went back and raped her again."

A few of Cole's colorful police colleagues are based in part on real-life officers. Cole's friend and partner, Lt. Blackie Silvestri is in fact an amalgam of J.T. "Tom" Ford, the "no-nonsense" late partner of Holton's policeman father, Hubert Holton; highly decorated Chicago cop Jimmy Ahern; and the borrowed eccentricities of other police acquaintances.

Sean Connery or Anthony Quinn are Holton's dream picks for any cinematic portrayal of the tough but good-hearted Silvestri; Cole is more of a casting challenge for the author. Holton has discussed the notion of a Cole film with at least one Hollywood studio, but although "I would never say no to Denzel Washington or Laurence Fishburne, they're not him and he's not them."

Holton's books, which have won the policeman inclusion on the Chicago Tribune's bestseller list, join a growing list of mysteries by popular African-American authors, including fellow Chicagoland writer Eleanor Taylor Bland and Walter Mosley, whose period private eye tale Devil in a Blue Dress was brought to the big screen starring Washington. But where Mosley's Easy Rawlins books depict the changing environment for African-Americans in Southern California following World War II, Holton stressed his primary objective is entertainment.

The captain noted the initial Chicago Sun-Times review of Presumed Dead dubbed the work "Presume Nothing , because it's not the kind of book you'd expect a black cop to write."

"I'm not writing the traditional mystery, as far as it goes -- I'm writing an adventure story, No. 1," Holton explained. "If you look at Gar Anthony Haywood and Gary Phillips out on the West Coast, their private detectives are integral parts of a black community, where Larry Cole is not. Larry Cole is the chief of the Chicago Police Department, who happens to be black."