Hollywood Station

Joseph Wambaugh has been writing about the Los Angeles police department for over thirty years. His novels The New Centurions, The Blue Knight and The Choirboys are classics of the genre. Hollywood Station, his first novel in ten years, perhaps isn't equivalent to those books but it is an entertaining and sympathetic account of the lives of cops.

As the title suggests, this is the story of the Hollywood division of the LAPD. Wambaugh follows about a dozen cops on the beat, their kind-hearted sergeant, and a handful of detectives in episodic fashion. It is apparent that Wambaugh has collected weird tales over the years and thrown them into a literary soup. His favorites seem to be about Hollywood crazies, especially those character who lurk outside Graumann's Chinese Theater. We get bizarre instances such as a guy in a Darth Vader costume pulled over on his bicycle, a fight between Batman and Spider-Man, and a homeless man who can defecate at will.

The cops are an odd assortment. There are surfing patrolmen who are known only as Flotsam and Jetsam, a female cop who has to use a breast pump on breaks, another who aspires to become an actor, and another who is a serious hypochondriac. They all feel besieged by the climate of the times, when they are under suspicion by authorities for racial profiling and corruption, and feel they can't do their jobs. It's tough to be too sympathetic of LA cops while the Rodney King video is still a memory, but Wambaugh does present cops as interesting characters with foibles just like anyone else.

The one plot threading through the book concerns a pair of Eastern European jewel thieves and a pair of "tweakers" (crystal meth addicts). Wambaugh is a little too fond of milking laughs out of the thieves' Boris-and-Natasha syntax, and the tweaker is one of the more foul characters I've read about in a while, with literally no redeeming qualities. Wambaugh edges into Carl Hiaasen territory with his villains, making them stupid and comically inept.

For the most part, though, this is a breezy read with some nice laughs and a satisfying conclusion. The all-knowing sergeant, nicknamed the Oracle, describes police work as the funnest job possible, and while I can't quite imagine that's true, Wambaugh does his best to convince me.