The Street 2 : Confessions of an Undercover cop

Lachlan McCulloch

Lachlan McCulloch was an officer with the Victorian (A state in Australia) For all those crime thrillers and detective serial addicts, this is a book that you have been waiting for. The author Lachlan McCulloch is a copper. The Good guy fighting and bad guys on the relatively peaceful streets of Melbourne. Frankly speaking I am amazed at the peace and absence of crime in this city. Perhaps the credit goes to officers like Mr McCulloch.

This is a fairly small book less than 250 pages, and is very fast paced, with every chapter denoting one particular case in his life as a police officer. These are real accounts of his experiences, each different and captivating. Sometimes you can have the best of experiences but that does not necessarily translate into excellent writing. Bad writing can convert even the best of experiences / subjects in to clumsy, dull & bland monotones. For example Indian writers writing about sex. For an example of how good writing can convert simple and mundane into really interesting, have a look here where Waiter writes about a simple bus trip and moves you.

In these terms I would say the book is very well written since the author writes about a live experience and gets life into the words so well that we can see what's happening. Also each story/case is normally only a few pages long so you can start and end a story relatively in a short time, very useful when you read the book in bits and parts.

Googling around you can see that the Author has had his fair share of accolades for the work done, and the book has some very good examples of the creative strategies used by the author to combat crime.

He used to roam on the streets as a vagabond homeless hanging around typical street corners, staying close to where the real action was. And this according to him was the most effective way to get information on what was happening on the crime scene, and do some real time espionage.

Another example of his creative skills was when a few areas are troubled by a spate of break-ins and burglaries. On investigation they found that the method used by the burglar/s was to climb on to vacant apartments on the 2nd and 3rd floors through the drainage pipes on the outside and enter the houses breaking windows. Most Melbournian houses generally do not have grilled windows / rods to prevent burglaries.

The complete police department is pissed off at this, but is unable to identify or catch the culprit. When Lalan's boss offers every one 1 week to vacation to catch this criminal. Lallan gets serious about this particular guy and starts working on this case, instead of other officers who work at night scrounging the streets looking for him. Lallan gets a ladder and works only at day time. 2 days later he leaves a message for the ambulance service to alert him whenever there are any emergency calls in a particular area.

True to his prediction there is an emergency call 2 nights later and the man admitted to the hospital is arrested by Lallan as the criminal, and all the stolen stuff so far is later recovered from his house. If you are wondering what was all this about, here is the clincher, When Lallan starts working on this case he is sure that it would be fairly impossible to catch this guy dressed in black in action in the darkness of the night. So he does what only someone like him could think of .

He buys 2 big can's of Vaseline and takes a big ladder, working in day time, single handedly goes around applying Vaseline to all the drainage pipes in the area. Then he waits for the thief to slip from one of his Vaseline'd pipes and call the ambulance, which is just what happened.

I hope you are convinced about the quality of the experiences he has mentioned about in this book by this example. I'm convinced it’s a good read.