Mute Witness

When famed gangster kingpin Johnny Rossi comes to New York to testify against his crime syndicate associates, it falls to Lieutenant Clancy to keep the government's star witness safe. Why Rossi has come to New York from California, and what is so crucial about his testimony are questions District Attorney Chalmers seems content to keep outside the Lieutenant's purview. However, when guarding Rossi turns out to be a more difficult and perplexing task than Clancy had anticipated, he begins to uncover something much more sinister. This is the premise of Mute Witness, a novel by Edgar Award-winning author Robert L. Fish.What makes this novel so interesting is the character of Clancy. Later immortalized by Steve McQueen in Bullitt, the film version of Mute Witness, Clancy is a tough, jaded and weary detective. He is a lone wolf of sorts, but not by choice; the police officers under his command are almost unfailingly incompetent, and the District Attorney treats Clancy with a mix of skepticism and disdain. Add to this the sinister machinations of underworld bosses and hit men, and Clancy is a man beset on all sides by ineptitude, perfidy and malice. Fish doesn't put his protagonist on a