Join us live next weekend to discuss all of her books and take your questions. That all happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. Former new York City Police officer steve osborn is next. Talks about some of the experiences he had throughout his career. Our you doing. My name is steve osborn. I used to be in new york city cop for 20 years and years, the accent is real. The funny thing is a didnt know i had an accent and a liking to savannah. I was a cop for 20 years and became a writer. People ask me how do you go from being a cop to a writer . I dont like telling this story especially at a book festival with all the writers because they want to strangle me. A happened by accident. After retiring from the Police Department my life went from the fast lane to the slow lane and all of a sudden i have all this time on my hands. When you are caught, like a real cop and living that life you have no life. Working aroundtheclock, working nights, we cans, holidays, and never home. Then all of a sudden i am retired and sitting there staring at the wall. First thing i did was move the sofa where from there to there. My wife says to me, she goes with you doing . She goes you havent been home in ten years. Put that sofa back where it was. So i did. So now i am sitting there and kind of bored and i dont know why. I guess everybody has that little voice in the back of their head that whispers in their ear what to do. The same voice that kept me say if all of those years, watch out for this guy and that guy. That seem little voice whispering in my ear to write. So i grabbed a pad and pen and rose a story. A short story. 12 pages about something that happened to me on the job. After i wrote this thing i am looking at what now . What do i do with this now . Highhanded this to family and friends. I just wrote this comedy mind reading it and tell me what you think . They read it and they were like we didnt know you could write. For we did know you were that smart. But the love that. So iowa is kind of surprised, taken aback. So i rose another one and i handed it out and everybody read it and they loved it. So i wrote another one and the first one had in crime, second one had laughing supply rose 1 3 one and had and crying again. So i had these stories and i was just doing it to kill time. I didnt know what to do now. What do i do now . And wasting my time . It felt good to write. Hard to explain the actual act of writing and putting those stories and my thoughts and feelings on paper, it stirred something in my soul. It was when a and 3 00 in the morning i would be out on patrol. This was where i was supposed to be. I was not supposed to be home in bed sleeping, watching a movie with the white. I was supposed to be out on patrol at 3 00 in the morning chasing bad guys. It stirred something in my soul. So i had these stories and everybody was telling me they liked it but being that caught your cynical, you are skeptical. I figured family and friends retelling the what i want to hear but i had a friend who was the writer, a real writer, she wrote a bestseller, television show, movie so she knew what she was talking about. I called corruption said read this and tell me if it is any good. If it is no good and will offer the computer out the window and start a garden or something, i dont know what. Says she read it and gets back to me and she goes this is pretty good. A little rough around the edges did it as the polish debt but she said this is pretty good. So i kept writing, wrote another story. And year later she calls me up and tells me she is doing this show called the loss. Ever heard of that . What a great organization. For those that dont know, the moth is a group where you get up on stage and regular people tell a real story about their life. So they had this show and in 1904 they had a cop who was scheduled to appear and he had to bailout and now they are stuck so he has my friend dean know anybody who can fill in . Maybe. Sure enough she calls me, the universe works in mysterious ways. She calls me up and tells me about this so i pitch the story over the phone next night, i met the players club, i thought this was going to be in the basement of a church, couple people sitting around the length like this for applause. I show up at the players club and our 300 people there. I was never so scared in my whole life. I was involved every year is in thousands of arrests. This was the scariest thing i ever had to do. I wanted to run out the door. I told the producer i would rather be chasing a guy with a gun down a dark alley. Didnt get up on that stage. When i got up there, not for nothing, blew the roof of the join, everyone liked it and i was alone nervous because the theme of the show was crimes and misdemeanors and the speaker before me all had the stories, one guy did 20 years for murder he didnt commit. Another guy was a defense attorney talking about how screwed up the criminal Justice System was and my friend gets up and tells how she got arrested at the Republican National convention by some less than friendly writeoffs and you could use a bologna sandwich as a pillow. I was seeing i was dead meat so i got up there, told the story and they loved it. I thought that was the end of it. Two weeks later they called me and said we are going on a nationwide tour and we want to bring you. Next thing i know i am in l. A. In front of 2400 people. That is what i said. I am not doing that. But i did, we went to seattle, san francisco, denver, giving urged me to keep writing so i wrote some more stories. Then they put me on npr radio and goes after 200 radio stations, one day i get a call from an editor who says i just saw your stuff, i think it is imperative you write a book. I think you are right. So before i got up and told the stories i would write the amount. Helped me flesh the stories out in my head so i told from maybe i have half of one of first draft stuff, so he goes and it to me. I say it is first draft stuff. It is still kind of i had never written anything before. I didnt know if it was really worrying so i sent it to him and three days later he calls me up and says you got an agent . Just so happened that i did. And agent had heard me on npr radio couple weeks before, i would like to represent you. When i told him im like writing short stories, i enjoy that. s life is a series of short stories. When you go out on patrol i mental 10, 15, 20 jobs in the night and every job is a story. It has a beginning, middle and end, a as different characters, different dialogue, different consequences so a cars life is really a series of short stories and that is what i felt comfortable writing but my agent told me shortstory is our not the way to go. People dont go for that. He wanted me to write a memoir and i thought about it and im like that feeling, that will voice wasnt working. I did not want to do that. So my agent and i didnt talk for a couple months, then all of a sudden the editor from doubleday calls me up and offered me a contract. I call the agent, check your email, we have a contract but that i had to finish the book. Which wasnt that tough. I kept reading and writing and finished a book and to wasnt as hard. I did enjoy it. Every cop out there had great stories. It is the nature of the job. Every night your involved in peoples lives during crisis. After doing that for 20 years you got a million stories. Not everybody can write it and put it on paper. So i wrote the book flitch as i was writing it, through some of the stories i was afraid, nobody is going to believe this is the are going to think i am making this stuff up. I wrote one story about a busy night i ahead, four our period, really in a four our period i had a 174yearold kid shot, two women stabbed in a family dispute that went for easy and the 24yearold kid fall out of fourth floor window at a party end right before he hit the ground could the back of his head on a fire hydrant. I was on my hands and knees and talked to him while he died. And after is that i looked at my watch and i am like all of that happened in four hours, nobody is going to believe this but it is true and that is a cops life and the next night was probably a quiet night, nothing memorable. Every night when you go to work you do not know what is going to happen from one minute to the next. As i got towards the end of the book there was one story that had to be written and i didnt want to write about it, i didnt feel in need to write about it. I felt very selfconscious writing about it but it was about 911. If i did not write about it, it would have been a big hole in the book and when i started writing about it, first couple days i dont remember much, but a blur to me. When i hooked up with guys that were with me at the time they say is the same thing, they remember something very vividly, i have no recollection. I remember something very vividly, as eckenfelder member but all of us still first couple days it is kind of a blur. And after that i was working 12 hours on, 12 hours off for the next two months and my unit was in the Detective Bureau so we got assigned to the morgue and our job was to identify the remains coming in and i couldnt write about what i saw and what we did. Those were peoples families, family members, i couldnt write about it. But i think i wrote about my feelings and how i dealt with it and you get a pretty good picture of what happened. You might find it hard to believe but there was one funny story about 9 11. You might find it hard to believe, but i was assigned to the morgue. My fringes 80yearold mother called my house, no one had seen or heard from me in weeks. I was down there every day so my friend adds 80yearold mother called my wife and said hello stephen doing, and she goes steven isnt but mortgage. Fell [laughter] she was a little hard of hearing too. But she got that much. And she is like oh i am so sorry and my wife is like no, it is okay. A lot of lives dont know where their husbands are. At least i know where he is. From there the story gets a little blurry, we dont know how it spread it spread. And there was this one bar in jersey shore i used to hang out in. I knew all the guys there and they heard that i was in the morgue. None of the new my wife so nobody felt comfortable calling my house to find out what the arrangements were going to be. They figured they would just hear about it sooner or later. So this goes on, finally after two months i get a couple days off and i am like tiny ad year. I walked into the front door of a bar and it was like they saw a ghost. Before doing this i never wrote anything. I hated writing. In the Police Department use to write reports and he did writing the. I kept writing to a minimum. A lot of guys used to dress their reports up with a lot of big words. I kept mine very basic and simple. I didnt like it is even when i was a kid, i was not a good student in school. On my best day. I dont know if anybody went to Catholic School that sister kathleen used to beat the crap out of me on a regular basis and remind me that i wasnt going to amount to nothing. I wish she could see me now. So writing was never on my radar. And when i was writing ive found it funny, i kind of enjoyed looking at some stupid things i did like the dumb things you do as a rookie like chasing a guy down the subway tunnel the just did a robbery. Why did nothing to train might be coming . At the time the adrenalin is pumping, i just i dont know, doing really think of the likely event that a train was going to come but i am still here to talk about it. When i was a kid my father was a cop and i guess i got that where learned about the job from the inside out. I thought it through him. And he worked in a precinct not far from our house and sometimes my mother would making dinner and say bring this up and i would drive up there and bring him dinner and wouldnt leave. I would state in the station house, sitting behind the desk with the desk sergeant and people are coming in telling their sad stories and heres a 12yearold kid sitting behind a sergeant listening to every word and i am thinking this is the life for me and this is what i really want to do in swing his buddies would come around the house they were the coolest guys in the world. They were real men and i wanted to be just like themselves from a kid i knew i never wanted to be a doctor, never wanted to be a lawyer or an astronaut, i wanted to be the guy standing of a dead guy in the middle of the street trying to figure out who killed himself really had no choice, so writing kind of took me by surprise. 20 years of police work, gives you plenty to write about. Sometimes writers get mad at me, this will ridings in this happen by accident but i paid my dues, 20 years out in the street in new york city you pay your dues and i didnt know it at the time, that is where i was doing my research, in the back of my head i was recording all these things that i saw and all these things that i did and it gave me plenty of stuff to write about. I guess i feel lucky. I feel lucky because when you write like that, it stirs something in your soul, it gives you once you leave the Police Department my life was in the end writing filled the void. It was good to think back because you forget all the things you did. I worked a lot of busy places and i remembered being a desk sergeant in this busy precincts. The neighborhood was insane. My first night i is looking in the desk and the building was falling down, and increasing, falling down, cracked walls, peeling paint and the front door flies open and this guy comes running through the front door covered in blood and another guy chasing him with the height. I am jumping over the task, we are wrestling, fighting, trying to get the pipe off of him as an it was two home as guys across the street to jim king for a beer and one guy to the biggest than the other guy. Two hours later i am sitting on the desk again just looking at this big piece of peeling king tweeting ford to fall down and the front doors burst open again and some guy with bagpipes comes bursting into the front door of the station house, does a couple of laps, plays some song like out of brave heart. I am looking at him and all of a sudden you hear the bagpipes fading away and im like i love this job. I really do. I love this job. This is the greatest job in the world. I am sure a lot of people have questions and if you want i can take a few questions from you. Cant you come up to the microphone . You have to come as to the microphone. Ask you a question. I am from new york so where is the ninth precinct . Lower east side. To fourteenth st. Broadway to the east river. Chief pafford and i was there during that 80s and 90s when york city was the wild west. I go there now land dont recognize the place. Keep going. How has the neighborhood changed when you were very . And if you could tell us the writing was therapeutic for you if any one of these stories was really hoping to work through one thing that happened. And the funniest one. New york change like you cant imagine like the lower east side. When i was down there it was like the wild west. Street i used to walk down in with a gun in my coat pocket because it was so dangerous, now there are a little cafes out there. People are sitting there lattes. Moms are going to parks that were a war zones, now they are pushing baby carriages. Writing was therapeutic. There are a lot of funny stories but a lot of sad stories. You would think the book would be filled with action ended venture, there are couple stories where guys full guns on me and i had a gun in my face and fighting for my life and also good stories. I enjoy them. [laughter] but it is the stories about people, about being in peoples lives, the interaction between two human beings. You would think the first story that i wrote would be some big car chase with shots fired or homicide or Something Like that but it wasnt. I dont know why, but the first story i wrote was the first time i had to tell a parent that their child was dead. And their child was in the room, she had been dead for a few days and her body was badly decomposed and mom wanted to go into that room. She was not going to leave for child was dead until she saw the body and i couldnt let that happen and i was the rookie at the time, i was 25 years old. This was not my job. Somebody else, the detective, the sergeant that there was nobody available. It was sunday morning, had to be done now and it fell upon me. In police work, especially when you are of a young cop, you are confronted with difficult situations a you got to rise to the occasion. You are in these peoples lives doing the most difficult time in their life and you have to rise to the occasion and i dont know how i did it. We were in the hallway and i sat her down on the steps and didnt know what to say. I kind of stopped thinking about what to say and started feeling and i knelt in front of her and took her hands in mind, looked like i was proposing marriage or something and i took her hands in line and convinced her is that it was best to remember her daughter the way she was and not the way she is. And it worked and when i walked into that building that morning i was 25 years old, but a couple hours later when i walked out i felt i had grown, i had matured and become more the top i wanted to be. Next question . [applause] do you miss it . Actual work . And does writing the audit give you a chance to do it again . Yes, i do miss it. We always say you miss the guys. Other cops, they become like family to you. You go through these incredible adventures with these guys. My life depends on my partner and my Partners Life depends on me and theres a bond there. I will meet guys now that i know from 30 years ago and we are still friends. We still have that bond because we went through something most people dont. My life depended on him being there when the whole world turned to crack at his life depended on mine. You develop friendships, you develop blondes the last forever. I still have one of my first partnerss, we still hang out together all the time so i miss the guys. I miss the adventure. I always say new york city cop was my life of adventure and i do miss that. You could ride the crazies rollercoaster in the world, you wont get that adrenaline rush. Is like being a Fighter Pilot and then you go work for united airlines. You still fly, but it is just not the same. So i do miss that part. And i am yankees fan. Welcome to savannah, by the way. What was your opinion on stop and frisk. Did it work and should we keep doing it . I knew somebody was going to ask me that question. I knew it. The one thing i will say is stop and frisk works. What happened was in the old days guys would be walking down the street with guns in their waistbands. Somebody would step on somebody elses shoe, someone would look at somebody the wrong way, walked down a block you are not supposed to walk down and next thing you know they are whipping out guns like it is dodds city and shooting the place up. What happened was with stop and frisk we were going out and stopping a lot of people. Furrowing that up on the wall and frisking them and right away all the bad guys in the street new you cant go