One of my favorite books of 2006 – Joseph Wambaugh’s HOLLYWOOD STATION – gets a welcome sequel in HOLLYWOOD CROWS. The title’s only dumb until you know what it means.
CROWS revisits the men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Station, where the usual mix of thieves and junkies is supplemented by costumed superheroes on the Walk of Fame. And when their new, chicken-lipped sergeant muscles in on – and botches – talking down a suicidal jumper, a couple of the cops feel demoralized enough to go elsewhere.
That “elsewhere” is still part of the force, but as Community Relations Officers – “crows,” for short. There, officers Nate Weiss (an aspiring actor) and Ronnie Sinclair (a two-time divorcée) respond to “quality-of-life” calls like noise complaints and illegally parked cars, rather than being on the beat of the dangerous streets, filled as they are with gang members and “dragon trannies.”
Initially, CROWS is sketch-based, moving from one amusing incident to the next, with no story gelling. And it’s a blast. But, like STATION, an overall plot starts to form without you realizing it. Here, it happens when Nate gets involved with a pretty young thing who’s married – albeit not for much longer – to a no-good Arab who owns a couple of strip clubs and enlists a tweaker in a mission of vengeance against her.
That situation has grave consequences, while much of the rest – vignettes more than subplots, as short as they are – operate on a seriocomic level. It all works, because it rings true to the life of a cop: You have to learn to laugh amid the tragedy, because you can’t take it home.
Informing the entire novel is Wambaugh’s former 14-year life as an LAPD officer, but authenticity alone doesn’t make for great reading. His multicultural cast is colorful – including the two surfer cops known only as Flotsam and Jetsam – and they’re placed in such lively scenarios as a cockfight, the hijacking of an ice-cream truck and an eyeball in a bottle of Gatorade.
Wambaugh’s jet-black humor pervades the proceedings, with gotta-read-it-to-believe-it bits involving a dead baby and a Hispanic male dangling from a noose. It’s set pieces like these that made STATION perhaps the best straight-up police novel I’ve ever read, and CROWS every bit its equal. And if there will be a better last line in a book this year, I’ll be shocked. –Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• HOLLYWOOD STATION by Joseph Wambaugh
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Looking forward to this. I’m a long-time Wambaugh fan.