Jimmy the Wags: Street Stories of a Private Eye - Softcover

A tough former New York City cop turned private eye now turns himself into an author in this gritty (but often humorous) account of the armed and dangerous life. James Wagner ("Wags" to just about everybody, it appears) spent 22 years at the NYPD, but apparently felt like he hadn't had enough adventure in his life. After putting out word that "Wags is for hire," he gets his first job shepherding some jet-setting Arab princes around New York for a few days, and finds himself hooked as the money and perks start to roll in. The rest of the book details Wags's rise and fall as a big-time "security consultant," from voyaging to Denmark to return a kidnapped child to his father to his entanglement with the Mob at a fancy strip club. Not all of Wags's adventures are a matter of life or death: in one memorable passage, he plays bodyguard-valet to an eccentric woman ("heir to a computer software fortune") who travels everywhere with her pet parrot perched on her shoulder and has a penchant for disengaging her prosthetic hand at inopportune moments during meals.

It's easy to fret over Wags's well-being as he whisks readers from one seriocomic adventure to the next, often with his erstwhile associate "Hondo," a former Army Ranger who favors Armani suits and, of course, prefers action to talk. And there's a sense that Wags was often confused about the particular direction in which his life was careening at any given moment. But Jimmy the Wags is a rollicking memoir, and Wagner and coauthor Patrick Picciarelli make a real-life tough guy come off just like you'd want him to be: straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel, equal parts Joe Pesci and James Bond. --Tjames Madison

James Wagner retired from the New York Police Department in 1990 with the rank of sergeant.