In 1971, an active-duty Los Angeles police sergeant named Joseph Wambaugh published “The New Centurions,” a profane and grim novel focusing on the cops who ruled the City of Angels.
Wambaugh’s book revolutionized the modern police novel, writing of the heroism of flawed men who drank too much, had marriages going into the toilet and dealt with the daily boredom and sudden horrors of one of the roughest police jobs in the United States.
Wambaugh’s other best-selling LAPD novels soon followed, including “The Choirboys” and “The Black Marble.” In 1983, he published “The Glitter Dome,” saying it was his last LAPD novel. He moved on to a successful career writing true crime books and other best-selling novels.
Tart humor, taut horrors
After 23 years, Wambaugh is back with “Hollywood Station” (Little Brown, 352 pages, $25), a viciously funny and angry novel bringing the LAPD into the 21st century. The police department has been battered by riots and scandals, and officers have their hands tied by a federal supervision program, a “federal consent decree,” that buries them in paperwork and stifles proactive police work. Women have entered the force in large numbers and have proved themselves to be as tough as the men. Wambaugh is back in rare form. The cops are still very flawed, divorce is still rampant, but the gallows humor that gets them through the night still is razor sharp.
Wambaugh was brought back to the LAPD at the urging of his friend, crime novelist James Ellroy. “Ellroy kept asking me when I was going to write about the LAPD again,” said Wambaugh in a telephone interview from his home in San Diego. “I thought the crazy man might be right, that I might be the man to write about the ‘consent decree’ in novel form.
“What sealed me for doing the book was a true anecdote I later used in the novel,” said Wambaugh. “Nowadays, they have to investigate every complaint thoroughly. A woman obsessed with an officer came in and said that he had stolen her ovaries. I assure you it was investigated to the max, and they never found the ovaries.”
The Hollywood Station is run by “The Oracle,” a humane sergeant with almost 50 years on the job. “The Oracle could well have been in my police academy class (in 1961),” said Wambaugh. “We would have been the same age, 69. He became for me an emblem of the end of an era in policing.”
For the cops in Wambaugh’s novel, Hollywood is a land of lowlifes and hustlers, preying on one another and the tourists who come to the area. Burned-out tweakers, slang for people addicted to methamphetamine, look for the latest scam.
“It’s the same criminals, but the extent of the methamphetamine scourge is huge,” said Wambaugh, who spent time patrolling Hollywood as a juvenile division cop before he retired from the LAPD in 1974. “When I was a cop, who would have thought of identity theft and putting glue traps into mailboxes to steal mail to consummate identity theft?”
City now a surreal landscape
Two hapless tweakers, Farley and Olive (as in Olive Oyl, for her skeletal physique) steal mail that leads to a jewelry store robbery involving a grenade and Russian gangsters. A bloody series of murders follows.
The surreal neighborhood of Hollywood, with its several Darth Vaders and Rhett Butler impersonators in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, is almost its own character.
“The streets of Hollywood have this incredible subculture – the tweakers and the guys around the subway ready to sell you anything you want,” said Wambaugh. “On the night of the Oscars, it is all glitz and glamour, but then they roll up the red carpet, and it’s seedy old Hollywood again.”
Wambaugh returns to his patented technique of mixing boredom and humor with sudden horror. Two surfer cops play polo, leaning out of their car with their nightsticks and pummeling a pack of gang members’ pit bulls, then they interrupt the second part of a murder-suicide, where they wrestle with a dying man in a bathtub full of blood.
In another incident, a hypochondriac cop is driving his partner crazy as they are on patrol. The two men then encounter every cop’s nightmare: two horribly abused children whose missing mother is most likely dead.
“I call it pulling the rug out,” said Wambaugh. “The reader is going along, having cop fun. Bang! Cop horror. Everyday cop horror is something they might find behind every door they open. That’s the kind of thing a cop takes home, even when they try not to.”
Female cops take center stage in this novel. There is Budgie, a tough cop who is still breast-feeding. There is Mag, a short but fearless officer who gets brutally beaten by a pimp when she is assigned to an undercover prostitution detail.
“Women cops make up about 20 percent of the force now,’ said Wambaugh. “In my day, it wasn’t like that. When I was interviewing cops for the new book, the women gave the best interviews. Firstly, they are more verbal than they guys. Secondly, they are not afraid to reveal their intimate feelings.”
All the cops in his book chafe under the federal oversight. “Nowadays, L.A. cops worry more about paperwork than doing police work,” said Wambaugh. “There were examples of cops falsifying reports of white suspects in black and Hispanic neighborhoods to avoid being accused of racial profiling.”
With the rave reviews the new book has been getting, Wambaugh is considering writing a sequel, which is something he’s never done. Producer David E. Kelley, of “Ally McBeal” and “Boston Legal” fame, is trying to sell “Station” as a TV series.
“Hollywood cops are very proud of their area,” said Wambaugh. “They see it as the heart of Los Angeles. But when there’s a full moon in Hollywood, the Wolf Man literally does come out in front of Grauman’s.”
Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
