Hollywood Crows by Joseph Wambaugh

The Barnes & Noble Review

Joseph Wambaugh did not invent the police novel, but no one had seen anything like The New Centurions when it was published in 1971. Here was a working, living, breathing cop with a decade of experience on the beat. Here was a detective sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department telling stories from his own experience instead of from the usual remove of a novelist mixing make-believe with a little bit of research. Wambaugh's cops were neither heroes nor villains but men who gave as much to the job as the job gave back. The relationship he traced between humanity and authority could be symbiotic, but more often the wear and tear of pointless crime, binge drinking, and failing marriages coalesced into a Molotov cocktail's worth of potential conflict awaiting the match.

Wambaugh's naturalistic portrait of the cop world turned Centurions and The Blue Knight (1972) into bestsellers, but his next two books made him relevant to a larger audience and to the next generation of crime writers. The Onion Field (1973), a true-crime account of a routine traffic stop in 1963 that spiraled into the kidnapping and murder of LAPD officer James Campbell, gave Wambaugh a chance to expand his view beyond the tunnel vision of his own experiences. The book also won deserved raves for its sympathetic portrayal of Campbell's partner, Karl Hettinger, who escaped the kidnappers only to face ridicule and criticism from fellow officers mocking his traumatic ordeal as a traffic stop's worst-case scenario.

By the time The Choirboys was published two years later, Wambaugh had graduated from cop novelist to celebrity. Film rights were in the offing for The Onion Field, eventually made into a movie in 1979; The New Centurions became a 1972 film starring George C. Scott, while The Blue Knight starred William Holden in a 1973 miniseries version. And viewers could tune in to NBC every week to catch the latest installment of Police Story, the anthology series Wambaugh created. His fame was so pervasive that he was reported to remark, "I would have guys in handcuffs asking me for autographs." Much as he loved the job, Wambaugh could only move forward as a writer if he quit.

That move took form as a dramatic change of tone, a freer, funnier, and more ribald depiction of the world Wambaugh knew. Reading The Choirboys in 2008 is a giddy, somewhat horrifying experience. Night shift policemen, desperate for authenticity and connection, convene in McArthur Park to binge-drink and gang-bang under the euphemistic cloak of "choir practice." But those same cops -- especially the former war-hero pilot "Spermwhale" Whalen, his tragicomic partner, Baxter Slate, and the bullying Roscoe Rules -- are revealed as undoubtedly human, their flaws pushed to extremes as a means of coping with the cruel nature of police work. The Choirboys is very much a product of its mid-1970s time, especially in its two-dimensional portrayals of cop groupies Ora Lee and Carolina Moon, but the energy of Wambaugh's newfound, blackly comedic voice is a revelation, a trapdoor opening into all facets of a policeman's world. The mordant, often hilarious exploration of that complex universe would continue in The Blue Marble (1978), The Glitter Dome (1981), and subsequent tales.

After a long eclipse by the work of younger writers, Wambaugh's 2006 novel, Hollywood Station, was seen by many as a return to form. While the author's two-decade absence from the LAPD certainly showed (his ear for dialogue now seems tuned about a half tone flat), the off-key atmosphere of Hollywood Station seemed an apt reflection of the nervous, bureaucracy-laden L.A. of the post–Rodney King era. The follow-up, Hollywood Crows, moves from the station proper to the Community Relations Office (or CRO, pronounced "crow") which more hardened cops refer to as "the sissy beat" or "teddy bears in blue." That pejorative comes laced with envy: sure, the 18 cops and 4 civilians have to handle crank calls, but "they could pretty well set their own ten-hour duty tours in their four-day work week." Far from the grind of the beat, Nate Weiss, Ronnie Sinclair, and Bix Ramstead enjoy a sense of security that will ultimately turn out to be false.

The easy life of the CRO especially appeals to Nate, the main returning character from Hollywood Station. At 36, his 15 years of LAPD experience are building to an oft-repeated mantra: "He needed a break. He needed an agent. He didn't have time left in his acting life to waste on pieces of shit." Nate loves nothing more than to hang out in coffee shops and eavesdrop on salty conversations between frustrated screenwriters and shark-like agents, even if they offer a depressing glimpse into his own future:

He'd noticed that always around 9:30 A.M. they'd get up one by one and make excuses to leave, for important calls from directors, or for appointments with agents, or to get back to scripts they were polishing. Nate figured they all just went home to sit and stare at phones that never rang. It gave him a chill to think that he might be looking at Nathan Weiss a few decades from now.

From the Publisher

In Wambaugh's gripping new audiobook about life in the country's most sensational police force, the beloved Oracle has been replaced by thin-lipped Sgt. Treacle, but the setting is the same - Hollywood: "America's nut capital" - and some favorite personalities are still around.
When Nate and Bix Rumstead (a supposedly upstanding cop with serious sobriety issues) find themselves caught up with bombshell Margot Aziz, they think they're just having some fun. But in Hollywood, nothing is ever what it seems. To them, Margot is a harmless socialite, stuck in the middle of an ugly divorce from the nefarious bar-owner, Ali Aziz. What Nate and Bix don't know is that Margot's no helpless victim: she's setting them both up so that she can get away with the perfect murder - and still stand to inherit her ex-husbands's ill-won fortune. What SHE doesn't know is that Aziz has replaced her sleeping pills with a poison. And then there's Leonard Stillwater, a small time tweaker whose connection to Aziz is about to shoot him into the big leagues...
Complete with scams, cokeheads, petty (and some not so petty) crimes, HOLLYWOOD CROWS offers the very best of Wambaugh: impeccable plotting, acerbic humor, and plenty of flawed but lovable characters.

The Washington Post - Dennis Drabelle

Despite its moderate length, Hollywood Crows features a large cast of vivid characters…Amid all the local color and slapstick, the author also depicts cops in trouble because of alcoholism or depression brought on by constant exposure to humanity at its worst. Wambaugh has been named a grand master by the Mystery Writers of America. Hollywood Crows is Exhibit A for the case that the award was well deserved.

Publishers Weekly

Gallows humor and the grim realities of street police work coexist uneasily in this less than stellar follow-up to Hollywood Station(2006) from MWA Grand Master Wambaugh. Nathan Weiss, known as Hollywood Nate for his acting ambitions, and his friend Bix Ramstead are now assigned to the LAPD's Community Relations Office, which handles quality-of-life issues and whose members are referred to as Crows. Weiss and Ramstead both become ensnared by a stunning femme fatale, Margot Aziz, who's in the middle of a contentious divorce. Aziz is trying to gain the upper hand over her husband, who operates a seedy nightclub but stays on the good side of law enforcement with well-timed donations to police charities. Aziz's scheming follows a fairly predictable path, and there's not much suspense about the outcome. Through the eyes of an eccentric collection of beat cops, Wambaugh gives a compelling picture of what policing is like under the federal monitor appointed to oversee the real LAPD after the Rampart corruption scandal, but characterizations are on the thin side and some readers may find the callous cruelty off-putting. (Mar. 25)

Product Details

• ISBN: 0316025283
  
• ISBN-13: 9780316025287
• Format: Hardcover, 352pp
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
• Pub. Date: March 2008
• Sales Rank: 27,403

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

His shorter partner, also with a major tan, hair even more suspiciously blond and sun streaked, dubbed "Jetsam" for the same reason, said, sotto voce, "Bro, that ain't a knife. That's a bayonet, in case you can't see too good. And why didn't you check out a Taser and a beanbag gun from the kit room, is what I'd like to know. That's what the DA's office and FID are gonna ask if we have to light him up. Like, 'Why didn't you officers use nonlethal force?' Like, 'Why'd that Injun have to bite the dust when you coulda captured him alive?' That's what they'll say."

"I thought you checked them out and put them in the trunk. You walked toward the kit room."

"No, I went to the john. And you were too busy ogling Ronnie to know where I was at," Jetsam said. "Your head was somewheres else. You gotta keep your mind in the game, bro."

Everyone on the midwatch at Hollywood Station knew that Jetsam had a megacrush on Officer Veronica "Ronnie" Sinclair and got torqued when Flotsam or anybody else flirted with her. In any case, both surfer cops considered it sissified to carry a Taser on their belts.

Referring to section 5150 of the Welfare and Institutions Code, which all cops used to describe a mental case, Flotsam whispered, "Maybe this fifty-one-fifty's trashed on PCP, so we couldn't taze him anyways. He'd swat those darts outta him like King Kong swatted the airplanes. So just chill. He ain't even giving us the stink eye. He just maybe thinks he's a wooden Indian or something."

"Or maybe we're competing with a bunch of other voices he's hearing and they're scarier," Jetsam observed. "Maybe we're just echoes."

They'd gotten nowhere by yelling the normal commands to the motionless Indian, a stooped man in his early forties, only a decade older than they were but with a haggard face, beaten down by life. And while the cops waited for the backup they'd requested, they'd begun speaking to him in quiet voices, barely audible in the unlit alley over the traffic noise on Melrose Avenue. It was there that 6-X-46 had chased and cornered him, a few blocks from Paramount Studios, from where the code 2 call had come.

The Indian had smashed a window of a boutique to steal a plus-size gold dress with a handkerchief hemline and a red one with an empire waist. He'd squeezed into the red dress and walked to the Paramount main gate, where he'd started chanting gibberish and, perhaps prophetically, singing "Jailhouse Rock" before demanding admittance from a startled security officer who had dialed 9-1-1.

"These new mini-lights ain't worth a shit," Jetsam said, referring to the small flashlights that the LAPD bought and issued to all officers ever since a widely viewed videotaped arrest showed an officer striking a combative black suspect with his thirteen-inch aluminum flashlight, which caused panic in the media and in the police commission and resulted in the firing of the Latino officer.

After this event, new mini-flashlights that couldn't cause harm to combative suspects unless they ate them were ordered and issued to new recruits. Everything was fine with the police commission and the cop critics except that the high-intensity lights set the rubber sleeves on fire and almost incinerated a few rookies before the Department recalled all of those lights and ordered these new ten-ouncers.

Jetsam said, "Good thing that cop used flashlight therapy instead of smacking the vermin with a gun. We'd all be carrying two-shot derringers by now."

Flotsam's flashlight seemed to better illuminate the Indian, who stood staring up white-eyed at the starless smog-shrouded sky, his back to the graffiti-painted wall of a two-story commercial building owned by Iranians, leased by Vietnamese. The Indian may have chosen the red dress because it matched his flip-flops. The gold dress lay crumpled on the asphalt by his dirt-encrusted feet, along with the cut-offs he'd been wearing when he'd done the smash-and-grab.

So far, the Indian hadn't threatened them in any way. He just stood like a statue, his breathing shallow, the bayonet held down against his bare left thigh, which was fully exposed. He'd sliced the slit in the red dress clear up to his flank, either for more freedom of movement or to look more provocative.

"Dude," Flotsam said to the Indian, holding his Glock nine in the flashlight beam so the Indian could observe that it was pointed right at him, "I can see that you're spun out on something. My guess is you been doing crystal meth, right? And maybe you just wanted an audition at Paramount and didn't have any nice dresses to wear to it. I can sympathize with that too. I'm willing to blame it on Oscar de la Renta or whoever made the fucking things so alluring. But you're gonna have to drop that long knife now or pretty soon they're gonna be drawing you in chalk on this alley."

Jetsam, whose nine was also pointed at the ponytailed Indian, whispered to his partner, "Why do you keep saying long knife to this zombie instead of bayonet?"

"He's an Indian," Flotsam whispered back. "They always say long knife in the movies."

"That refers to us white men!" Jetsam said. "We're the fucking long knives!"

"Whatever," said Flotsam. "Where's our backup, anyhow? They coulda got here on skateboards by now."

When Flotsam reached tentatively for the pepper-spray canister on his belt, Jetsam said, "Uncool, bro. Liquid Jesus ain't gonna work on a meth-monster. It only works on cops. Which you proved the time you hit me with act-right spray instead of the '-roided-up primate I was doing a death dance with."

"You still aggro over that?" Flotsam said, remembering how Jetsam had writhed in pain after getting the blast of OC spray full in the face while they and four other cops swarmed the hallucinating bodybuilder who was paranoid from mixing recreational drugs with steroids. "Shit happens, dude. You can hold a grudge longer than my ex-wife."

In utter frustration, Jetsam finally said quietly to the Indian, "Bro, I'm starting to think you're running a game on us. So you either drop that bayonet right now or the medicine man's gonna be waving chicken claws over your fucking ashes."

Taking the cue, Flotsam stepped forward, his pistol aimed at the Indian's pustule-covered face, damp with sweat on this warm night, eyes rolled back, features strangely contorted in the flashlight beams. And the tall cop said just as quietly, "Dude, you're circling the drain. We're dunzo here."

Jetsam put his flashlight in his sap pocket, nowadays a cell-phone pocket, since saps had become LAPD artifacts, extended his pistol in both hands, and said to the Indian, "Happy trails, pard. Enjoy your dirt nap."

That did it. The Indian dropped the bayonet and Flotsam said, "Turn and face the wall and interlace your fingers behind your head!"

The Indian turned and faced the wall, but he obviously did not understand "interlace."

Jetsam said, "Cross your fingers behind your head!"

The Indian crossed his middle fingers over his index fingers and held them up behind his head.

"No, dude!" Flotsam said. "I didn't ask you to make a fucking wish, for chrissake!"

"Never mind!" Jetsam said, pulling the Indian's hands down and cuffing them behind his back.

Finally the Indian spoke. He said, "Do you guys have a candy bar I could buy from you? I'll give you five dollars for a candy bar."

When Jetsam was walking the Indian to their car, the prisoner said, "Ten. I'll give you ten bucks. I'll pay you when I get outta jail."

After stopping at a liquor store to buy their meth-addled, candy-craving arrestee a Nutter Butter, they drove him to Hollywood Station and put him in an interview room, cuffing one wrist to a chair so he could still eat his candy. The night-watch D2, a lazy sensitivity-challenged detective known as "Compassionate" Charlie Gilford, was annoyed at being pulled away from shows like American Idol, which he watched on a little TV he kept concealed in the warren of work cubicles the size of airline restrooms, where he sat for hours on a rubber donut. He loved to watch the panels brutalize the hapless contestants.

The detective was wearing a short-sleeved, wrinkled white shirt and one of his discount neckties, a dizzying checkerboard of blues and yellows. Everyone said his ties were louder than Mötley Crüe, and even older. Charlie got fatigued listening to the story of the window smash on Melrose, the serenade to the guard at Paramount Studios' main gate, the foot chase by the surfer cops, and the subsequent eerie confrontation, all of which Flotsam described as "weird."

He said to them, "Weird? This ain't weird." And then he uttered the phrase that one heard every night around the station when things seemed too surreal to be true: "Man, this is fucking Hollywood!" After that, there was usually no need for further comment.

But Charlie decided to elaborate: "Last year the midwatch busted a goony tweaker totally naked except for a pink tutu. He was waving a samurai sword on Sunset Boulevard when they took him down. That was weird. This ain't shit."

When he spotted the acronym for American Indian Movement tattooed on the prisoner's shoulder, he touched it with a pencil and said, "What's that mean, chief? Assholes in Moccasins?"

The Indian just sat munching on the Nutter Butter, eyes shut in utter bliss.

Then the cranky detective sucked his teeth and said to the arresting officers, "And by the way, you just had to feed him chocolate, huh? This tweaker don't have enough speed bumps?"

To the Indian he said, "Next time you feel like breaking into show business, take a look in the mirror. With that mug, you only got one option. Buy a hockey mask and try singing 'Music of the Night.'"

"I'll give you twenty bucks for another Nutter Butter," the Indian finally said to Compassionate Charlie Gilford. "And I'll confess to any crime you got."

Nathan Weiss, called Hollywood Nate by the other cops because of his obsession, recently waning, to break into the movie business, had left Watch 5, the midwatch, eight months earlier, shortly after the very senior sergeant known as the Oracle had died of a massive heart attack there on the police Walk of Fame in front of Hollywood Station. Nothing was the same on the midwatch after they lost the Oracle. Hollywood Nate had been pulled out of trouble, usually involving women, and spared from disciplinary action more than once by the grizzled forty-six-year veteran supervisor, who had died just short of his sixty-ninth birthday.

Everyone said it was fitting that the Oracle had died on that Walk, where stars honoring Hollywood Division officers killed on duty were embedded in marble and brass just as they were for movie stars on Hollywood Boulevard. The Oracle had been their star, an anachronism from another era of policing, from long before the Rodney King riots and Rampart Division evidence-planting scandal. Long before the LAPD had agreed to a Department of Justice "consent decree" and gotten invaded by federal judges and lawyers and politicians and auditors and overseers and media critics. Back when the cops could be guided by proactive leaders, not reactive bureaucrats more fearful of the federal overseers and local politicians than of the street criminals. The day after the Oracle died, Nathan Weiss had gone to temple, the first time in fifteen years, to say Kaddish for the old sergeant.

All of them, street cops and supervisors, were now smothered in paperwork designed to prove that they were "reforming" a police force of more than ninety-five hundred souls who ostensibly needed reforming because of the actions of half a dozen convicted cops from both incidents combined. Hundreds of sworn officers had been taken from street duties to manage the paper hurricane resulting from the massive "reformation." The consent decree hanging over the LAPD was to expire in two more years, but they'd heard that before and knew it could be extended. Like the war in Iraq, it seemed that it would never end.

The Oracle had been replaced by a university-educated twenty-eight-year-old with a degree in political science who'd rocketed almost to the top of the promotion list with little more than six years of experience, not to mention overcoming disadvantages of race and gender. Sergeant Jason Treakle was a white male, and that wasn't helpful in the diversity-obsessed city of Los Angeles, where fifty-five languages were spoken by students in the school district.

Hollywood Nate called Sergeant Treakle's roll call speeches a perfect meld of George Bush's garbled syntax and the tin ear of Al Gore. During those sessions Nate could hear cartilage crackling from all the chins bouncing off chests as the troops failed to stay awake and upright. He'd hated the rookie sergeant's guts the first time they'd met, when Sergeant Treakle criticized Nate in front of the entire assembly for referring to Officer Ronnie Sinclair as a "very cool chick." Ronnie took it as a compliment, but Sergeant Treakle found it demeaning and sexist.

Then, during an impromptu inspection, he'd frowned upon Hollywood Nate's scuffed shoes. He'd pointed at Nate's feet with an arm that didn't look long enough for his body, saying the shoes made Nate look "unkempt," and suggested that Nate try spit-shining them. Sergeant Treakle was big on spit shines, having spent six months in the ROTC at his university. Because of his knife-blade mouth, the cops soon referred to him as "Chickenlips."

Hollywood Nate, like his idol, the Oracle, had always worn ordinary black rubber-soled shoes with his uniform. He liked to needle the cops who wore expensive over-the-ankle boots to look more paramilitary but then experienced sweaty feet, foot fungus, and diminished running speed. Nate would ask them if their spit-shined boots made it easier to slog through all the snow and ice storms on Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards.

And Hollywood Nate had given up suggesting that field training officers stop making the new P1 probationers call them sir or ma'am, as most did. The more rigid and GI of the FTOs seemed to be those who'd never served in the military and they wouldn't think of letting their probies wear the gung-ho boots before finishing their eighteen-month probation. Nate would privately tell the rookies to forget about boots, that their feet would thank them for it. And Nate never forgot that the Oracle had never spit-shined his shoes.

Before the midwatch hit the streets, every cop would ritually touch the picture of the Oracle for luck, even new officers who'd never known him. It hung on the wall by the door of the roll call room. In the photo their late sergeant was in uniform, his retro gray crew cut freshly trimmed, smiling the way he'd always done, more with his smart blue eyes than with his mouth. The brass plate on the frame simply said:

THE ORACLE

APPOINTED: FEB 1960

END-OF-WATCH: AUG 2006

SEMPER COP

Hollywood Nate, like all the others, had tapped the picture frame before leaving roll call on the first evening he'd met his new sergeant. Then he'd gone straight downstairs to the watch commander's office and asked to be reassigned to the day watch, citing a multitude of personal and even health reasons, all of them lies. It had seemed to Nate that an era had truly ended. The Oracle-the kind of cop Nate told everyone he had wanted to be when he grew up-had been replaced by a politically correct, paper-shuffling little putz with dwarfish arms, no lips, and a shoe fetish.

At first, Hollywood Nate wasn't fond of Watch 2, the early day watch, certainly not the part where he had to get up before 5 A.M. and speed from his one-bedroom apartment in the San Fernando Valley to Hollywood Station, change into his uniform, and be ready for 0630 roll call. He didn't like that at all. But he did like the hours of the 3/12 work shift. On Watch 2, the patrol officers worked three twelve-hour days a week during their twenty-eight-day deployment periods, making up one day at the end. That gave Nate four days a week to attend cattle calls and harangue casting agents, now that he'd earned enough vouchers to get his Screen Actors Guild card, which he carried in his badge wallet right behind his police ID.

So far, he'd gotten only one speaking part, two lines of dialogue, in a TV movie that was co-produced by an over-the-hill writer/director he'd met during one of the red carpet events at the Kodak Center, where Nate was tasked with crowd control. Nate won over that director by body blocking an anti-fur protester in a sweaty tank top before she could shove one of those "I'd Rather Go Naked" signs at the director's wife, who was wearing a faux-mink stole.

Nate sealed the deal and got the job when he told the hairy protester he'd hate to see her naked and added, "If wearing fur is a major crime, why don't you scrape those pits?"

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Hollywood Crows by Joseph Wambaugh Copyright © 2008 by Joseph Wambaugh. Excerpted by permission.
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