Wambaugh shines again
“Hollywood Crows: A Novel”
By Joseph Wambaugh (Little, Brown, 346 pages, $26.99)
Joseph Wambaugh is one of those authors whose popular success always has overshadowed his importance as a writer.
His fans will find “Hollywood Crows” – the second novel in two years set in that surreal neighborhood’s police station – as entertaining as ever, while readers who have followed Wambaugh’s fascinating 37-year career will savor a book whose flaws are not only engaging but also redolent with promise.
A former Los Angeles Police Department detective sergeant, Wambaugh, 71, started his literary career in 1971 while still on the force with “The New Centurions.”
A series of L.A.P.D.-based works followed, including “The Onion Field” and “The Choirboys,” before Wambaugh turned his attention elsewhere. Finally, in 2006, he returned with his first novel in more than a decade, “Hollywood Station.”
Fans of that book will find many of their favorite characters back in “Hollywood Crows,” including the two surfer cops dubbed “Flotsam” and “Jetsam” by their comrades as well as “Hollywood” Nate Weiss, who still is hoping to leave the force for an acting career.
This time, the action focuses on the station’s “community relations officers” – CROs, which inevitably becomes “crows.”
This is a new kind of police work for Wambaugh: time spent at meetings with angry landlords and street people, or picking up complaints from hillside residents worried that the homeless encampment upslope will ignite a brush fire.
Much of the plot centers on the ways in which various Hollywood station cops and a full cast of petty criminals intersect with a nightclub owner of Middle Eastern origin, Ali Aziz, and his soon-to-be ex-wife, the beautiful Margot.
It would spoil the plot to give too much away, but let’s just say there’s a story of loss and one of redemption.
There’s also a new enemy for Wambaugh’s cops: the “federal consent decree” under which the L.A.P.D. has been working since a recent real-life scandal. The author doesn’t like it and neither do his cops and their resentment is part of the story’s background noise, as it is in many real-life stations.
Still, Wambaugh is too honest and careful an observer not to represent the L.A.P.D. as a changed institution. Three of this novel’s best police officers are women, one of them Korean-American.
An ensemble of wonderfully drawn characters always has been a strength of Wambaugh’s novels. If “Hollywood Crows” has a shortcoming, it’s that the author seemed unwilling to assign any of this book’s characters the major role.
The lack of a single dramatic persona to serve as a focus is a flaw only in the sense that it slows the narrative propulsion, although hardly the enjoyment of a well-told and emotionally moving story.