Martin Preib, a longtime Chicago cop, wrote a book that’s as much a memoir of his journey from rookie to old-timer as it is an account of his attempts to find himself as a writer. Though he offers voyeuristic, first-hand accounts of high-stakes police stops in “The Wagon and Other Stories from the City,” his real concern lies in exploring his own literary possibilities. Relating his disjointed life’s history — episodic schooling, years as a doorman and a hitchhiker, an eventual life as a cop — Preib makes it clear that he considers his unstructured observations of the city to be his real education.

Prieb works, he says, in order to “to get to the city in a manner where it opens up to me and I can think about it.” Whether this makes for compelling storytelling is not immediately clear. At times the search for narrative connectivity makes a fitting lens through which to view the city’s bad behavior, but Preib’s inward-looking style can also obscure the book’s sheer entertainment value.

Preib evokes his early, aimless years, the degradations and victories of working for tips, and his parents’ troubled marriage, folding these tales into larger accounts of his days on the force.

The title tale is set during his months as a rookie, when city cops were still required to bag and transport morgue-bound bodies. It’s a dubious ode to the corpses’ tendencies, their terrible gravity and opens with this noirishly evocative line: “The dead seek the lowest places in Chicago.”

Preib’s clean, observant style serves these passages well. Though he can’t resist writing life stories for the dead from the meager scraps of evidence they leave behind, his compassion never overtakes his ability to see the situation with the ultimately indifferent eyes of a cop.

The way Preib speaks about the people he arrests is honest and impolitic. He’s scornful of the young men clustered in cars and on corners, repeat offenders who live “day by day, desire by desire, moving from hunger to sex to entertainment.” In the book and on the streets, he skates a fine line between learned contempt and a respect for the subtle balance of power that a policeman must master. This power struggle carries over into the relationship between cops and civilians, and between cops and the media; only in talking about the public’s eagerness to believe in police brutality does Preib sound truly jaded.

The book ends as it begins, in a questing hopefulness, and with the greatest expression of the ambition that haunts its pages: the possibility that his work might one day reach “beyond the endless acrimony of the city, into a common sentiment.”