Pig Latin

I had no plans to write a police book.

Truly, it was so far from my radar that I think if you had polled me before meeting Eric Tansey, it would have been in the bottom quintile of things I expected to write about, alongside ballet, tofu recipes, and high-fashion.  Not because I don’t admire the work, or believe books should be written about cops, but because I am simply not an expert in that area.  

Then I had Eric Tansey as a guest on the Neutral Position Podcast in September of 2023.

Eric was a character.  As he told his stories of his time as a cop, I couldn’t help but get drawn in.  Multiple times during the show, I found myself leaning in to hear what he’d say next, often with tears of laughter streaming down my face.

At the end of the podcast, when the cameras shut down, I told him, “Dude, you should write a book.  Those stories are insane!”

He paused for a second, losing a little bit of his natural confidence and sheepishly said, “I kinda did.”

Eric had written a series of stories during his nine years as a cop for catharsis.  With the help of his wife, he had crafted that into a book of short stories that he was thinking about self-publishing.  

“Before you do that, let me see if my editor is looking for anything.  This feels right up his alley.”

So I reached out to Amar Deol, then of Simon and Schuster, and shared Eric’s work with him.  Like me, Amar, thought there was something meaningful there.  Neither of us had ever seen a cop book with stories like this before.  It was brutally honest in a way that showed the imperfection of every human involved.  The cops aren’t perfect.  The citizens aren’t perfect.  And holy shit, the suspects are anything but perfect.  But it wasn’t judgy.  It just shared the emotion, the challenges, and victories, and the many defeats, warts and all.  

You couldn’t help but be connected to Eric’s journey.

Amar called me a few weeks later and said, “Nick, I’ve got some great news.  I’d like to do Eric’s book!”

“That’s incredible!” I responded.  “I’ll let him know and get you guys introduced!”

“I’m not done yet,” Amar added.  “I’ll do the book…if you write it with him.”

That part came as a surprise.  At the time I was pursuing a very big book with a very big star and it was down to me and one other author for the project (I didn’t get it), but with my freshly minted New York Times Bestseller status, the advice I was getting from everyone was to only do huge books.  This was a book from a relatively unknown cop, and it would be every bit as much work as one of the “fancy” books that were being floated across my desk.  But I really thought there was something special about it, and I didn’t want to be the reason it didn’t happen.

I called my wife and let her know about the conversation.  As an English woman, she tends to be very direct.  “Do you think it can be a good book?”  she asked.

I told her it really could be.

“Is he a good man?” she asked.

I told her he was as genuine a person as I had ever met.  

“Okay, so why don’t you write it with him and then make it the huge success that no one sees coming, so you’re helping a good man tell a great story instead of helping some popular person who might end up being a dick?”

Well…when she put it that way…it kind of made a lot of sense.

“Plus, you’ve never liked to listen to people telling you what you’re supposed to do anyway,” she added.

Also true.

“Does he even want you to write it with him?” she asked.

“Actually, I don’t know,” I responded.

So I called him and laid it all out.  And Eric was so excited at Amar’s response that after a frenetic series of conversations that were ostensibly with me, but were really him talking to himself, his wife, and the heavens about the opportunity, he finally stopped and asked, “So will you?”

And if my wife’s in-your-face wisdom wasn’t enough, Eric’s energetic childlike glee at the opportunity to be a Simon and Schuster author did me in.

Eric and I were writing Pig Latin.

And a year later, the book is available on Preorder on all the major platforms and it comes out in August of 2025.  I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work with Eric.  His stories made me laugh quite a lot and cry a couple of times.  I learned that you could not pay me enough to be a cop, and that my understanding of being a police officer was incredibly misguided.

I had always thought of police work as kind of like the military but without the threat of combat, and what I learned was that even on the days when things aren’t dangerous, the stress can be relentless, the patience needed to be good at the job is limitless, and things can go from peaceful coffee and donut to firefight in the blink of an eye.

I changed as a man by working on this book, and every single person who has read the early copies is blown away by it.  When my mom finished it, she asked me to give Eric a hug.

I did. He’s a good hugger.

If you’re so inclined, I’d love for you to buy Pig Latin on Preorder.  The Preorder numbers directly contribute to whether or not Eric gets his book in bookstores everywhere or if they will be mostly available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  

It’s a special book and I think it will open a lot of eyes to what it’s like to be a cop, while showing a lot of empathy for the citizenry that the police serve.

And if you hate it, then it’s my fault and I simply didn’t do Eric’s amazing story justice.