The Return of the Master

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The New York Sun

Before there was Michael Connelly, before there was George Pelecanos, before there was John Sanford, before there was James Ellroy, before there was James Patterson, there was Joseph Wambaugh, the creator of the modern police novel.

There is a long and rich history of police officers in mystery fiction. Early literary milestones such as “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens, which featured Inspector Bucket, and “The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins, which featured Sergeant Cuff, helped create the very solid foundation on which the entire genre was built.

But Bucket and Cuff, as virtually all members of the official police force who followed for decades to come, tended to operate as pure detectives and on their own, without benefit of assistance from the rest of the department. They might just as well have been, in literary terms, private detectives or gifted amateurs.

This use of policemen in fiction changed in the early 1940s, when the literary police procedural was transformed by Lawrence Treat (who is largely unread today), and popularized in the 1950s by the great Ed McBain, whose 87th Precinct series set the standard by which all other procedurals are measured. These novels employed an entire force to solve crimes in a far more realistic manner than the oldfashioned mastermind criminologist who made observations and deductions. Forensic specialists, medical examiners, profilers, and others formed teams to analyze crime scenes and patterns to track down killers, as in real life.

The next important change in the cop novel came when Mr. Wambaugh, himself a member of the Los Angeles Police Department, wrote “The New Centurions” in 1970. This shocking novel brought an intense new level of verisimilitude to crime fiction. In it, and in the novels that followed it, cops were portrayed not only on the job, but off it. They were seen solving crimes, but they were also seen as human beings, each responding to the job in different ways.

Off-duty, it should have come as no surprise that they were not like everybody else. The endless experience of dealing with the lowest level of humanity, the violent, the drug and alcohol abusers, those devoted to criminality and those indifferent to it, inevitably took a toll on even the most dedicated cops. Mostly good, mostly strong, mostly honorable, some of Mr. Wambaugh’s police officers drink and womanize too much, become frustrated and violent, become depressed, go crazy, and kill themselves.

They are cop novels, yes, but they are novels about human beings in extremis, and no one has ever done it better.

A full decade has passed since Mr. Wambaugh’s previous novel,”Floaters,” and 23 years since he wrote about the LAPD in “The Delta Star,”but it is abundantly clear that he hasn’t lost a step.

“Hollywood Station” (Little, Brown, 352 pages, $24.99) is Mr. Wambaugh’s comeback novel, and it is more than impressive; it is memorable, a flawless ride through the streets of L.A. with a crew of cops as colorful as the bad guys they pursue.

Using a plot structure that is now frequently encountered but which he invented, Mr. Wambaugh introduces criminals, petty and major, and sends them into action. Tired old drunks reminisce about the days when they drank really good bourbon, and meth addicts tie strings to mousetraps and adhesive tape, dropping them into mailboxes to fish out whatever they can scrounge. Hookers and addicts dressed as Elvis, Darth Vader, and other unlikely characters cruise Hollywood’s streets, hoping to pose with tourists for a few bucks but with baser plans always lurking.

The various officers of Hollywood Station do not have criminal intent but are only slightly less off-center. They include the surfer dude partners, nicknamed “Flotsam” and “Jetsam” by their peers, young and good-looking, relentlessly drinking, smoking something they’re not supposed to, and stalking women; Nate “Hollywood” Weiss, who is convinced that his real future lies in an acting career; Fausto, with nearly four decades on the job, who still doesn’t think the LAPD should have females on the squad; and Budgie, a single mother who secretly attends to her breast pump on the job.

There are larger and larger crimes committed, and cops are placed in greater and greater danger, as this stunning narrative unfolds. In what can only be regarded as a minor miracle, all the disparate story lines, all the idiosyncratic personalities, intersect and play roles in the unbearably suspenseful climax, a virtuoso achievement that is rarely managed by even the masters of the genre.

In addition to being an exciting story, “Hollywood Station” is a powerful indictment of the bureaucratic forces that have hampered the LAPD since the Rodney King episode and the largely bogus charges of corruption in the Ramparts case. It is no startling revelation that the LAPD has been shackled by so many oversight committees that there are suspicions that armies of former Soviet apparatchiks have been hired to look over its shoulder; and that there so many Draconian codes of political correctness that cops working in minority neighborhoods write up phony citations of white citizens so that they won’t be accused of racial profiling.

Mr. Wambaugh created the successful television series “Police Story,” won a true crime Edgar for “The Onion Field” (a book so powerful I wish I had never read it, as it haunted my nights for months; it still chills me) and was named a Grand Master for lifetime achievement by the Mystery Writers of America in 2004.

If he hadn’t won that ultimate prize two years ago, “Hollywood Station” would have moved him to the front of the line for the next one.

If this dark, funny, poignant, and realistic stunner of a novel doesn’t get an Edgar nomination, we will be witnesses to the crime of the year.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.


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