Peter Maas

Peter Maas wrote about crooks and cops, about people's corruption and integrity. His subjects were often real people and his stories unrelentingly factual. He grew up in the Hamilton Heights area on the upper west side of New York City. His community largely comprised an ethnic melding of German, Jewish, and Irish families. He himself descended from Dutch and Irish stock and liked to tell the story that his name pronounced "mace" in Irish means "thighbone" and pronounced "moss" in Dutch means "mace" -- a club, which to his way of thinking was roughly the same thing but in two distinct languages and cultures -- a bit like himself. This affinity for the melding of types and portrayals of people permeates Maas' work. In the "Valachi Papers" and "Serpico," for instance, distinguishing between heroes and villains is at times a difficult task, at other times a dangerous gamble. He began his writing career while still a political science major at Duke University in the late '40s. It was in hi