Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Station (2006)
Reviewed by David J. Montgomery
Joseph Wambaugh forever changed the way novelists write about the police when his debut novel, The New Centurions, was published in 1971. Drawing upon his own career with the Los Angeles Police Department, Wambaugh wrote about cops and their lives with an authenticity that no one had ever brought to mystery fiction before.
Now, after a decade-long absence from published fiction, Wambaugh has returned in triumph with another of his signature stories of the LAPD. Hollywood Station is a gripping, gritty novel that gives readers a glimpse into what it's like to be a police officer in today's big city, and it's a fascinating story.
The streets of Hollywood are filled with meth addicts, panhandlers, prostitutes and drag queens, all to the delight of the throngs of tourists. It's the job of the LAPD's Hollywood Division to patrol those streets, bringing some semblance of order to the chaos.
More often than not, it's a futile task. The division is grossly understaffed and the officers operate with so many restrictions that, as one of them puts it, "you gotta be richer than Donald Trump ... to fire your piece in today's LAPD."
The LAPD has changed a lot in the years since Wambaugh last wrote about it. The Rodney King beating and the Rampart Division scandal have forced the department to work under a persistent cloud. So bad has their reputation gotten that they are now operating under federal oversight, with everything they do closely monitored.
One of the veteran cops, a dinosaur who's been on the job for 34 years, describes the changes thusly: "[I] came on when cops wore hats and you had to by god wear it when you were outta the car. And sap pockets were for saps, not cell phones."
The officers who patrol the streets of Hollywood are good cops, but it's a difficult job. When one of them reports to a scene and finds another cop brutally beaten, he steps over the line and strikes back. As Wambaugh describes the scene, the action is understandable -- not justified, not excused, but understandable.
By and large, though, the officers of Hollywood Division enjoy what they do. As the oldest cop in the station tells his younger colleagues, "You can get as mad and outraged as you want ... but don't get cynical. Doing good police work is ... the greatest fun you'll ever have in your lives. So go on out tonight and have some fun."
Reading Hollywood Station is just as much fun. Although it shouldn't be a surprise given the legendary fondness of police officers for black humor, Hollywood Station is a very funny book, filled with mordant, dark comedy and wry anecdotes.
One night, a man bent on "suicide by cop" charges a group of officers carrying what looks like a gun and is shot dead. Afterward, the watch officer picks up what turns out to be a water pistol and pulls the trigger. When no water shoots out, he remarks, "Shit, it ain't even loaded."
Hollywood Station is somewhat unusual for a mystery novel in that it doesn't have much of a plot. The story arc, to the extent that it has one, is slim at best, involving a drug addict in way over his head with a Russian crime boss who is only slightly less incompetent than the junkie.
Really, the plot is just a minimal framework on which to hang the characters and their stories. And when the characters are this real, and their lives this fascinating, it hardly seems to matter.
Although it's been a long time since Wambaugh wore a badge himself, he's clearly kept his ear to the ground in the intervening years. (He thanks numerous officers from different police departments, including the LAPD, in the acknowledgments section of the book.)
Wambaugh has his finger on the pulse of today's police force in a way that most other authors simply can't match, and that makes his work a delight to read. Hollywood Station is a very welcome return for one of the mystery genre's best writers.
Posted by David J. Montgomery in Book Reviews | Permalink
