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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 8, No. 5 |
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Joseph Wambaugh's HOLLYWOOD STATION |
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Wambaugh comes back
to his L.A.P.D. origins
of TheColumnists.com
Two of the big publishing events of 2006 in the mystery world were "returns"--the return of Grand Master Dick Francis with his first novel since his "retirement" several years ago--and the "return" of another Grand Master, Joseph Wambaugh, to his roots in the Los Angeles Police Dept.
Wambaugh's new novel, "Hollywood Station" (Little Brown, $24.99), is his first since "Floaters" and his first in a long, long time to take place in Los Angeles, the mystery milieu where he first began his magnificent career in 1970 with "The New Centurions," written while he was still a sergeant on duty with the L.A.P.D.
Before I discuss "Hollywood Station," I want to underscore the importance of Joe Wambaugh to the mystery genre. He was the first real police officer to write candidly and powerfully about police work. His novels and "non-fiction novels," written in the style popularized by Truman Capote with his "In Cold Blood," revolutionized the mystery genre and helped push it away from its fixation on private eyes toward a new emphasis on reality-based fiction by America's true mystery-solvers, real-life uniformed police officers and plain clothes detectives.
Riding a trend toward "police procedurals"
that began with Mark Hellinger's film "Naked City,"
Jack Webb's "Dragnet" radio and television shows and
the novels about the 87th Precinct by Ed McBain, Wambaugh created
a literary sensation with a series of best-sellers and their
film and TV adaptations. He inspired scores of real-life law
enforcement people to turn their thoughts to writing mysteries
and crime stories. The result has been a significant crop of
outstanding books by real-life crimefighters.
So many Wambaugh works have been brought to the screen that it's
easy to lose count. Feature films were made from "The New
Centurions," "The Onion Field," "The Choirboys"
and "The Black Marble." TV movies were made from "The
Glitter Dome" and "Fugitive Nights." TV miniseries
were made from "The Blue Knight" (starring Oscar-winner
William Holden) and "Echoes in the Darkness" while
"The Blue Knight" also became a weekly TV series starring
Oscar-winner George Kennedy. Along with all those, Wambaugh also
created his own TV series, "Police Story," which produced
two spinoff weekly shows: "Police Woman" with Angie
Dickinson and "Joe Forrester" with Lloyd Bridges. All
in all, a very respectable showing for the famous ex-cop.
One reason why Wambaugh's career has been so successful is the realism he brings to his stories, but I think the fact that he's an exceptionally good writer is the real secret of his success. This literary skill is especially evident in "Hollywood Station," which is an immensely entertaining novel that has a subtext of genuine social criticism by Wambaugh of modern police bureaucracy in general and, more specifically, the way Los Angeles city politics has impacted what once was regarded as one of America's finest police forces.
Like many of Wambaugh's earlier works, "Hollywood Station" has an episodic structure. Rather than focus on a single character as a protagonist, Wambaugh gives us a colorful ensemble of police officers and the criminals they encounter. It reminded me most of "The Choirboys," a book I never really warmed up to because I found so many of the carousing, hard-drinking cops off-putting. In this case, you'll wind up liking almost all the cops you meet and maybe even start caring about some of the scumbags they're pursuing.
One significant difference from Wambaugh's earlier books is that he's dealing with a completely different L.A.P.D. today. There are lots of female officers now and many cops of different ethnic backgrounds, working together as partners. This is a post-O.J. Simpson trial police department, a cop shop jerked in many different directions by scandals, cover-ups, radical changes in top administration and a court-ordered period of close inspection by officials looking for signs of corruption and anti-social behavior by officers.
I found Wambaugh's tone warmer and his cops paying much more attention to business than they might have done before. That doesn't mean they're automatons like the characters in "Dragnet." Wambaugh still knows how to collect great anecdotal material from the cops he knows in both L.A. and San Diego and the richness of that material is what really makes "Hollywood Station" sizzle. You can believe most of this stuff really happened because, as a one-time police reporter, I can assure you the incidents all carry the scent of truth.
The setting is the Hollywood division of the L.A.P.D., which covers the notorious Hollywood Boulevard area, where some of the nuttiest weirdos on Earth congregate nightly, and neighboring sections, mostly old L.A. neighborhoods where most of the crime is generally on the misdemeanor level.
We follow the doings of several criminals, including a meth-addict called Farley and his emaciated girl friend he calls "Olive" because she resembles Olive Oyl from the "Popeye" comic strip. Then there's Cosmo, an immigrant from Armenia who's stepping up from credit card fraud to armed robbery with the aid of his girl Ilya, a sexy immigrant with spectacular breast development. Both sets of crooks are linked to Dmitri, another Eastern European gangster, who runs a Russian-style restaurant where lots of shady dealings go down. In between, we meet lots of street people like "Untouchable" Al, a derelict whose specialty is emptying his bowels in his pants whenever a cop claps the cuffs on him. He's the standout among a host of such creeps, including the Elvis-imitators and other celebrity "lookalikes" who exist by posing with tourists on the Hollywood Boulevard "Walk of Fame"--and trying to fleece them for whatever they can get.
But you'll mostly find yourself caught up in the lives of the cops, like "Flotsam" and "Jetsam," a pair of surfer dudes in police uniform; "Hollywood Nate," a veteran cop who's obsessed with all things Hollywood, works as an extra on his days off and is only working as a cop until his big break comes in the movies; Policewoman Andi McCrea, who's worried about her only son, who's fighting in Afghanistan; "Budgie" Polk, who has a newborn baby at home and is lactating while on duty; "B.M." Driscoll, the officer nobody wants to ride with because of his many allergies and medical woes, and Viktor Chernenko, a Ukranian who keeps having to remind everyone that he's not a Russian.
Presiding over them all is the duty sergeant nicknamed The Oracle, a calm and reasonable man who makes out all team assignments and seems capable of settling all beefs with homegrown diplomacy. He's been on the force 40 years and says he'll never retire until his ex-wife dies because he doesn't want her to grab any of his pension.
Somehow Wambaugh weaves all these people into a storyline that ends with a climactic event that seems to settle all scores tidily. There's not a single dull page in "Hollywood Station" and it leaves you feeling much more charitable toward a somewhat disgraced police department because it bothers to introduce you to the people you seldom hear about: The often resourceful and courageous individuals who stand between you and the forces of evil out there.
Wambaugh's return to his old haunts is a welcome one because it has produced one of the best police novels I've read in several years.
©2007 by Ron Miller. The book cover illustration is courtesy of Little Brown. This column first posted Jan. 15, 2007.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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